Listen to this song. Kelmti Horra, ‘my word is free’, sung by Emel Mathlouthi at a mass sit-in.

What you hear is the sound of hope.

“I am those who are free and never fear,”¹ she sang, as the Tunisian people rose up to topple the dictator. Yes, that revolution may have been followed by an electoral victory for Islamists, but few revolutions ever attain total liberation. No, make that none.

That is the way of the world. Some regime grows abusive; eventually the people rise up and topple it; a new regime comes instead, and before long it abuses the very people who put it in power. Perhaps it is not as cruel as that which it replaced; all the better for the new rulers, as they know the people will consider them better than their predecessors, and be hesitant to rise up again.

But the way of human freedom – of free thought – is the way of the constant revolution. The old king is dead, long live the new king – for a while, until he grows cruel and we again grow weary and it is, again, time to replace him.

No regime that is abusive towards its people can last forever. Eventually, someone will stand up and say, “I am the free people of the world. I am like a bullet.”

And then, the cycle begins again.

Know hope.

Footnotes

1. I got the English translation of the lyrics from here.

I’ve never been much of a fan of nationalism, or the nation-state. The idea seems to me based on imagined communities, and to invite xenophobia, exclusion, and racism. Most of all, it seems particularist (concerns itself with a small group of people) and I’m a universalist by nature (concerned with all people everywhere.)

However, a recent piece by Yoni Eshpar [Hebrew] allowed me to understand a universalist version of the nation-state ideal.

If I get this right, the idea is this: every person in the world should belong to a group of people called a “nation”; every such “nation” should live in a state in which they are able to participate (ideally, via democratic process); the states should exist to serve the “nations” that participate in it. So in the end, since every person is part of a “nation”, and every “nation” is served by a state in which it can participate, every person in the world has a part of the world to call home, where there is a state that serves and protects them.

This is a nice ideal – but it is woefully unrealistic and will never be achieved.

Let’s set aside the issue of border disputes – which are a serious issue for nation-states almost everywhere in the world.

The critical problem, I think, is that not all states serve their people. Many states actively oppress their people, on political if not ethnic grounds, even if they see themselves as nation-states and even if all of the population is considered to belong to the state’s “nation”.

So long as some states oppress their people, people will have a reason to go out into the world to live amongst other “nations”.

Insisting on the well-being of your own “nation” and saying everyone else should go and get their own state to help becomes an excuse to perpetuate the oppression of others, under the guise of a universal liberation ideology.

So long as there are people who have to run away from the government in their home country, nationalism cannot be truly, honestly universalist. It must always collapse into siege-mentality, particularism, and the accompanying xenophobia. Oppression of minorities is then just a matter of time.

Perhaps in an ideal world, each state would have one “nation”, and each “nation” one state. But we do not live in an ideal world, and it’s long past time to abandon ideologies which can only liberate the people of some other world.

I got some odd looks today for using the local dialect’s way of phrasing the time.  But I don’t care for Standard German and don’t think I should be expected to use it.

I have to go back a few years first.  I started learning German in 2004.  Most of it I learned at the Goethe Institute in Jerusalem and on my visits to Germany.  I learned very quickly, and by the time I moved here in 2007, I spoke fluently, but with a bunch of mistakes.

Since then my accent has improved – Germans don’t immediately notice I’m a foreigner – and I’ve learned to make less obvious mistakes and to speak more naturally.  People often tell me how great my German is, but it’s my understanding that people are wrong in making language learning out to be some high intellectual achievement to be praised and awed at.

I’m pretty sure the reason I learned German so quickly is first, I grew up a bilingual (English+Hebrew,) giving me an unfair head-start on language-learning, and second, I managed to experience a lot of total immersion in a very short time by visiting Germany for weeks at a time and by hearing German-language music (yes, it was mainly Rammstein.  Excellent for learners, very clear singing!)

Anyway, I’ve tried to learn a few language since, and I’ve never been quite as successful as I was with German, although I’ve picked up useful learning habits.  (Pro-tip: just speak, even if you hardly know any words and grammar.  Speaking badly is the only way you will ever learn to speak well!)

High German, Upper Saxon

The situation with the standard language, in Germany as in most places in Europe, is this: there’s a more-or-less official standard language, and people are expected to use it in formal situations.  Every region – down to the town level – has its own variant of German, some dialects being close to Standard German (called Hochdeutsch, “high German”) and some very different from it.  There are also some new urban dialects created by contact with immigrant languages.

Schools teach Hochdeutsch as the One True German and penalize children for speaking German the way people actually speak it at home.  Adults are often judged, consciously or unconsciously, on their ability or inability to speak Standard German, with certain dialects having an especially bad reputation.

The basic reason people tend to use a standard language or language variety and consider it important is that it gives them access to a broader range of people to communicate with, because it’s not specific to one place.  This can be very important if you’re in politics, business, or academe – incidentally the areas where the standard language is most important.

The way I learned German is mainly by speaking and hearing it and trying to imitate what I heard.  I quickly forgot most of what I learned in German class and started operating on intuition.  After moving to Leipzig, I grew to really like the local dialect (a variety of Upper Saxon – the best variety, that is) and started consciously learning to speak it.

At some point, pretty early in my living here, I was already able to have complex discussions in Hochdeutsch, so long as they were about education, but for lack of practice, I was no good at casual conversation.  So I started applying myself to learning how people who live here talk in normal social situations, and this made my German even more Säcksch (that’s pronounced [zecksh] or [zeggsh], and it’s how we call Upper Saxon, which in Hochdeutsch they call Sächsisch, pronounced [zeck●sish]). ¹

Dry Furdl!

Now, Säcksch is, if not the least-liked German dialect, then one of them, and it has a very recognizable accent which anyone who lives here for a while learns to love.  What’s more, it’s strongly associated with the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), a.k.a “Communist East Germany”.

One noticable thing about Säcksch – together with many other variants of German – is the way we phrase the time.  8:15pm is fördl neun, pronounced approximately [fur●dl noyn], meaning ‘a quarter of nine’.  8:45 would be dreifördl neun, [dry●fur●dl noyn], ‘three-quarters nine’.

This is extremely confusing if you’re used to saying viertel nach acht and viertel vor neun, i.e.  ‘a quarter after eight’ and ‘a quarter before nine’, respectively, as in Hochdeutsch.  But it’s the way I’ve come to speak, without having to think about it, and I speak this way because it’s the most effective way for me to communicate with the people around me.  It signals my familiarity with the language and my control of its subtleties in a way that’s literally impossible in pure Standard German, simply because every native speaker has a bit of their own dialect.

But most of all, it’s the way I speak, and I’m not about to learn some sterile, artificial version of German on top of the one I already speak just to accommodate people who aren’t familiar with Säcksch.  Due to the dominance of Hochdeutsch, it’s not even really Säcksch anymore, just Hochdeutsch with bit of an accent and some occasional regional word.  Students who move to Leipzig for the low cost of living and nearly-free education should learn to speak the language here, and as for foreigners like me, learning to speak the way locals do is the most natural and reasonable thing we could do – even if native speakers think it’s funny.

Footnotes

1. The pronunciation keys in the [skwer bra●kits] are supposed to be read as though they were American English.  This gives roughly the right pronunciation.  The ● thing means “syllable boundary”, and the stressed syllable is bolded.  If that last sentence is “all Greek to you”, don’t worry, it doesn’t really matter.

Chris Hedges: Murder is not an Anomaly in War (TruthDig)

A Hebrew translation, along with some discussion, is available over at Idan Landau’s blog (his post alerted me to the existence of this piece. H/t.)

Meta comment: I haven’t been posting lately – these link posts don’t count – not for lack of ideas or words, but mainly because I’m spending a very big chunk of my waking hours in (academic) writing and having a hard time finding the time to properly formulate blog posts. I hope and assume that I’ll get posting again at some point soon, but no promises.

Today I had a small taste of confronting the Israeli occupation from the Palestinian side, and I confess that even my brief exposure was traumatic.

Heeding the invitation of my friend Gershon Baskin for Israelis to join him at the weekly non-violent protest in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, in the hope of mitigating the brutal force the Israeli army exerts against the protesters, I set out early Friday morning with most of the things on the list Gershon sent me – food, water, sunscreen, a towel against tear gas – in my backpack, and a sense of foreboding in my heart.

When I said I was afraid of being hurt, Gershon replied “you’re right. It can be dangerous.” He had no words of comfort, except for repeating that he was going to call the army command before the demonstration started and tell them that dozens of Israeli supporters were going to march with the Palestinians, and ask them to take that into consideration.

As planned, we arrived at 8 a.m. for the 1 p.m. event, hoping to get into the village before the army sealed it off. But it was too late: soldiers blocked the entrance and waved us off. They had also put up a sign declaring the village “Area A” – under control of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords, which Israeli law forbids Israelis to enter. The village is really Area C, which Israelis are allowed into. The sign was a lie. We parked a ways up the road and then the dozen or so activists who had arrived hiked into the village through the fields for twenty minutes. On the way, Gershon advised us to speak quietly and silence our phones. The village had been declared a “closed military area,” and we were violating the law.

We soon found out that two activists who tried to enter the main way were arrested and charged with “attempting to break through an army barricade.”

After gathering in the village square, we were invited to the home of one of the village leaders, a friend of Gershon’s, with whom he had coordinated our solidarity visit. Over coffee in his spacious salon our host briefed us about the village’s struggle to reclaim its land on which the settlement of Halamish was built. He said the Israeli High Court ruled in their favor but they never got their land back or were allowed access to their fields abetting it. Settlers took over Nabi Saleh’s spring and for the past two years the villagers had tried to march to it every Friday but had been held back by the army.

Gershon told us that at first a lot of Israelis had signed up for this action, but as the week went on they started cancelling out of fear. He said he didn’t blame them. I didn’t either: after being the first one to sign up, as Gershon told me, out of a sense of outrage at the army’s brutality and my wish to join the campaign to challenge it, my fear took over. As the day neared I slept worse every night, and the last night I hardly slept at all.

While we waited for the march, there was less talk of principles of non-violent resistance than of practicalities: what to do against tear gas and how to behave if arrested. My friends and I agreed we were here to make a point by our presence but our cowardice would keep us at the back of the crowd where we would be less exposed. I kept thinking of my family worrying about me at home and couldn’t wait for it to be over, even before it started. An Israeli journalist who was with us felt that we were insufficiently welcomed by the villagers, that they could have been more appreciative of the effort and gesture we made in coming out. An activist answered her that it wasn’t for us to tell the Palestinians how to behave. I admit I had also expected a little more visible appreciation for what in my society is an extraordinary show of solidarity with those most Israelis see as enemies. But when I considered how badly they had been treated by Israelis for so long – and where were we then? – I understood their complex feelings. Besides, they did welcome us into their homes and tell us they would do everything they could to protect us.

In one of the homes we visited, our host told us his 19-year-old daughter had been beaten up by Israeli border police last month and put in the hospital. In an unusual turn of events, the police were put on trial and she was summoned to testify against them. When the same young woman admired my new wide-brimmed straw hat, I gave it to her in exchange for her showing me how to wrap my scarf around my head Palestinian-style. An activist offered me jasmine perfume to spray on the front of my scarf as an antidote to the anticipated tear gas. Another advised us to buddy up and a third said the most important thing about tear gas was not to panic.

As the event drew near, Gershon made his phone calls to the army but was not successful: at the two offices he reached – the local and regional commands – he was unable to speak to the officers in charge and left messages with unreliable-sounding young soldiers. It looked like the central plank of his initiative – informing the army of our presence and asking them to be gentle – was falling apart.

At 1:15 people started streaming out of the mosque and amassed for the march. A young man with a megaphone said a few words and I translated for my fellow activists: “Today we are marching for the martyrs who died on Israel’s borders with Syria,” referring to a protest earlier in the week. We looked at each other in confusion. Weren’t we marching for an end to the occupation and allowing the villagers to access their spring?

We didn’t have long to ponder this because within 100 meters and 60 seconds the first tear gas canister was fired from far off at the entrance of the village into its center. Immediately everyone started running back, away from the soldiers, but, as it happened, towards the tear gas: it had landed behind the group, and the only way to get away from it was to run right through it. I found myself with two of my buddies, one particularly affected and, sure enough, panicky. Although I too was gagging and tearing, this put me in the position of being the abler one and my attention was on helping my friend. The three of us found our way to the home we had been invited to use for shelter, and there we were cared for until we felt better. Our hosts had much experience with gas, as it was used in the village in large quantities every week and often fired at or into homes. When this happened, the effect lingered for days. Sometimes, furniture caught fire.

As we left to rejoin our comrades, our host said “please remember us and come back not only in situations like this, but to visit us.” I promised to remember but doubt I will visit.

Outside we could hear the repeated pounding of canisters being fired at a distance, but we stayed in the village center while the confrontation was elsewhere. I informed my friends that I had had enough, I really couldn’t take it anymore, and was ready to go home. They were too, but it was not at all clear there was a safe way out of the village: the army was likely to spread gas everywhere, even in the fields. I felt trapped and hunted. There was nowhere safe to go. It was also clear that there was nothing I could do or say, and it didn’t matter who I was: the military machine was proceeding apace, and its orders were to act relentlessly to contain and especially deter the Palestinian resistance. Activists observed that not only did the presence of Israelis not make things better, it had apparently made things worse. Huge amounts of tear gas were fired for hours and several activists and villagers were evacuated by ambulance.

We were told the village was sealed and there was indeed no safe way to leave. But my friend and I got lucky and got a lift out with a BBC van that had managed to enter the village with its press privileges.

The terror of being exposed to physical harm did not leave me for hours. I know I am not brave in that way. Besides a relatively mild whiff of tear gas I was not even hurt. But worse was the feeling of being trapped and threatened. The activists who have been experiencing this regularly for years can laugh, and the Palestinians who have no choice can scoff at my delicacy. After all, I can decide that I did my bit for the struggle, this is not for me, and go on to entertain my friends with stories of my little adventure. But if I multiply my brush with fear a million times over, I think I got a glimpse of what it feels like to be under military occupation, having no voice and living under the constant threat of violence day in and day out.

In the comfort of my home in Jerusalem, I wonder if the jasmine is blooming outside, or if that scent rising up from my neck is just lingering in my imagination.

Many people my age are uninterested in politics. They don’t vote, they don’t take part in social and political movements, they just don’t care. I wouldn’t call it selfishness; sometimes it’s jadedness. And the reasons are probably not simple. But I think one reason is the way we relate to authority.

Like any social structure in which a small group holds all authority, traditional state schools create a dynamic by which students learn to see authority figures as distant, unreasonable, and often malignant. As a result, students disengage. The individuals involved are not to blame, it’s the system that is broken. But that broken system teaches the students the wrong lessons, and twists the way they see authority. I think this might have far-reaching consequences for society and for democracy.

The vicious cycle of secrecy and injustice

In traditional state schools — even the really nice ones I attended before Sudbury Jerusalem — adults and students are groups that play two very different roles. I’d like to sketch how this seems to work.

The adults are usually there to practice the profession they chose, and they can arbitrarily tell any student to do almost anything any time — answer a question (whether or not you find it interesting), clean up a mess (whether or not you made it), etc. Students are usually there because they are forced to or expected to, and most students can’t tell anyone at all what to do, with the notable exception of bullies.

The students are wary of the adults, who will often punish them, which, if nothing else, is almost always humiliating; what’s worse, punishment is unpredictable and often unfair — usually no system is in place for the due process of justice, and the norm is that teachers make executive decisions quickly and decisively. The good news for the students is that they will never get in trouble for something the adults don’t know about. As a result, students learn to keep their distance, and act with secrecy. It’s just the best strategy against sanctions and humiliation.

Teachers are usually wonderful people with nothing but the best intentions. But faced with a mass of children who are constantly sneaking around, they don’t always show their wonderful, good-intentioned side. They are always on the lookout for bad behavior, which is usually a more transparent concept to them than to their students (in the very nice elementary school I attended, I don’t recall ever having a clear set of rules laid out before me).

So the teachers have to be on the lookout, because the students are accustomed to secrecy. New students quickly learn to be secretive, because the teachers are clearly on the lookout. It’s a vicious cycle. Nobody’s really to blame. Injustice abounds.

Relating to authority

In the traditional school system, children rarely have the opportunity to relate to an adult as a real human being with emotions, preferences, aspirations, mistakes and subsequent humility. They learn to see authority figures as distant, isolated, and somewhat malignant forces in their lives. They learn to distrust and disengage.

Good authority, bad authority

There’s nothing wrong with authority when it’s mandated and part of a social order in which responsibility and authority are bestowed by the community. It is arbitrarily imposed authority that is problematic; the situation I described above plays out similarly in totalitarian states, albeit with more violence.

But modern democratic states are something of a mix, and can be seen either way: authority stems from the will of the people; but with a community so large, that authority is often indeed arbitrary, and even more often feels arbitary. Behavior one generation has accepted as normal may still be criminal or stigmatized due to previous generations’ norms — to take a current example, homosexual activity was still criminal in some US states as recently as 2003, and to this day the US military still will not allow gays to serve openly.

Young people today…

It seems to me that our childhood encounters with authority shape how we understand it and relate to it as adults. Children who mainly experience it as arbitrary, forceful and unpleasant may well continue to perceive all authority this way. Even in entirely democratic schools, you see this attitude with teenagers who arrive after a few years in a traditional school. The strategy of distrust and disengagement, a habit of both thought and behavior, seems very hard to drop.

We in the developed world live in modern democracies. Half of democracy is accepting that it takes time and discussion to make things happen. But change does happen, at least when a mass of individuals dares to try. I think people who have had the opportunity to experience fair and mandated authority can more easily relate to the structures of authority in adult life. And people who can do that are more likely to try.

The point

This brings me back to the point from Sunday’s post: democratic education is a sensible choice for democratic states. We don’t need schools that just tell students about democracy while allowing them to experience the opposite. We need schools where students have a real say and learn that as democratic citizens, they are empowered to make a difference. We need citizens who know their voice matters, even when those in power seem deaf.

Students at democratic schools are given control and responsibility over how they use their own time.This is simply respect for their autonomy. But one could also think of it as training for one of the biggest challenges of our age. More than ever, we are bombarded with choices from all directions. This is no secret. However, of all approaches to education, only radically democratic schools (like Sudbury schools) seriously address the issue.

Traditional non-solutions

Traditional schools control students’ time almost completely. Their intention is to make sure a well-designed curriculum is delivered fully to all students within the time available — an admirable goal, if we make believe a curriculum could possibly be relevant to an unknown future, when it so often seems more appropriate to some point about ten years in the past.

In alternative education, two very big, old names are Waldorf and Montessori. Waldorf schools have a different kind of curriculum to that found in traditional schools; otherwise they follow the same basic principle: manage students’ time for them to make sure you get your content across to all of them within the allotted time. Montessori schools take a somewhat different approach: they allow the students to manage their own time, but the environment in which they are placed is filled with covert curriculum in the form of specially prepared materials which give lessons in different areas. Of course, the adults exert effort to make sure all children can easily access the materials. The Montessori approach still stems from the basic formula behind traditional schools and Waldorf schools alike: the adults are responsible for certain (adult-created or -selected) content getting to the students; the difference is the way the adults achieve this.

But what are we preparing students for? As soon as the school years are over, things are very different. You set your own priorities. You decide what content you want or need in your life. Difficulties arise on the way to what you want, and it’s up to you to find out how it can be done or find your own way of doing it. Traditional schools and traditional alternative schools like the Montessori and Waldorf types remove these challenges by solving them for the student: prioritizing ideals (“work” before play), choosing content (curriculum, “materials”), overcoming difficulties (“removing obstacles”) or flat-out providing solutions. They protect students from true challenges rather than allowing them to deal with them, get comfortable with them, and get good at overcoming them.

A democratic solution

Sudbury schools — exemplifying democratic education in a particularly strong form — follow an entirely different formula: students are responsible for their own education. As a result, adults do not make efforts to introduce certain content for the students’ benefit — it’s not their responsibility. Generally they also won’t try to motivate students towards particular educational content — also not their responsibility. They even don’t secretly work to make sure the path is clear for a student to get what they want — again, not the adults’ responsibility.

As a result, it’s up to the student. As a student, you have to decide what to do with your time. This means setting your own priorities. This means setting your own criteria for success, so you know when you can stop and move on to the next thing. This means learning how to get help when you need it. Ultimately, it means getting practice at having a huge variety of choices in front of you and being the one who has to choose. Ultimately, that is what many adults today have a hard time with. Ultimately, no school but a democratic school can prepare you for it.

I

The term “democratic school” has always seemed problematic to me. It’s problematic because democracy isn’t really the point. Democracy is a tool for creating something else: a community where free learning is possible, as much as such a community is possible. All democratic schools should be run by a democracy, but not every school that is run democratically is automatically a democratic school.

A democratic school is a place where students are responsible for how they use their own time. It is a school which does not try to encourage students, explicitly or implicitly, to take classes and tests. It is a place where people are treated with respect, and know they can expect justice to be served when someone disrespects the community or an individual.

II

It just so happens that certain styles of democracy serve as excellent tools for upholding freedom and respect. However, it’s very easy to get it wrong, which is why Sudbury schools are very insistent on getting it right. These schools set up very well-defined democracies, because democracy is only good so long as it does not overreach — it has to be there to protect students’ freedom in the present, without presuming to know what choices are better for their future, or infringing on the privacy of their feelings.

III

Incidentally, the word “republic” comes from the Latin res publica, meaning “public matter”. This hints at a very important idea: the polity (the state, the city, the school) is a public institution, and is something you keep separate from private things.

Sudbury schools use a Judicial Committee which focusses on whether school laws were broken (not on why, or what the individual is going through personally). Some in the free school movement express uneasiness about this seemingly severe approach to justice. However, anyone who has spent some time in such a school knows it is a good thing. Judicial Committee deals with the public aspect of disputes — disrespect of community decisions in such a way that bothered someone enough that they fill out a complaint. This process ignores the personal aspects completely and intentionally.

However, it leaves plenty of room for individuals to address these aspects on a truly personal level. And these are things that come across better when they’re truly and sincerely personal (like talking about problems at home, or about issues one is having with the school or with people there). The judicial process may not directly address the problems that lead people to break community decisions, but it does help others see the problem, which allows them to deal with it. And on the upside, it respects people’s privacy — sometimes you don’t feel like telling just anyone about how you feel.

IV

There are other benefits to separation of the public and the personal. When the community has accustomed itself to this habit, democratic meetings work better — being warned by the Chair is a technical issue, not a personal thing you have to get annoyed about; you can argue strongly against a friend’s motion without them taking it as an insult; every member of the community can apply their thinking to the process as much as they’d like without constantly worrying about the conclusions being taken the wrong way.

V

When a democracy protects the community’s interests and the individuals’ interests while keeping them separate, that democracy can create a democratic school. It can create a place where students develop freely and learn to direct their own learning and gauge their own success. It empowers students to determine their own direction and participate vigorously in community life.

None of these things are automatic, and protecting them is half the secret of success for those democratic schools that have succeeded.

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Summer break has just begun. I managed to get away without any exams this semester, for the first time. In the past weeks, like every end of semester, I find myself thinking what an awful, ridiculous system these exams really are, especially in university. I’d like to try and articulate why.

I can imagine a university where exams are hardly even relevant because people only study things they find interesting, and only so long as they are interested. Such places exist (take Tokyo Shure for example).

However, most officially-recognized undegrad programs are still based on instructors providing students with pre-packaged chunks of information, and then judging whether each student has properly digested the information. This post will be about exams in that context; my point of reference will the linguistics BA program at the University of Leipzig. As far as I know, it’s as good an example as any of a normal undergrad program in science.

Exams are bad experiments

So why are exams a bad idea when you want to check whether a bunch of science undergrads understood what you taught them? Well, one part of the problem should be obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of science: exams are not very good experiments. There is no way to control for interference of irrelevant, extraneous factors. When scientists conduct a study, in any field and with any methodology, they seek to control for irrelevant interferences. For example, when psychologists test hand-eye coordination, they’ll do something like only taking right-handed people with healthy hands and eyes, in order to make sure that the results aren’t skewed by irrelevant differences between individuals.

You can’t do anything like that in exams. For example, one of my exams once took place at a time when I was infatuated with someone. I spent about a quarter of the exam staring into blank space and thinking about things quite unrelated to linguistics. As you might expect, my grades for that semester were not spectacular. This was not a reflection of how well I understood the material in question, but rather a reflection of how capable I was of concentration at the time of the exam.

Exam stress: an antidote for learning

Not only can’t exams control for interference, they create a strongly interfering, totally irrelevant factor: stress.

Exams cause those who take them to get stressed out, usually for weeks in advance.

Google the words “stress” and “learning” together. The first result I got (of some 25 million) was this site, which says “Stress can disrupt learning and memory development”. Huh. That sounds like a great way to lower people’s performance on a test.

One obvious remedy is to train people so they’re used to taking tests and don’t get so stressed out. This is what traditional schools do, and perhaps why they do it.

For some reason, that really doesn’t work for most people. I’m guessing that the way schools make a big deal out of exams rather trains people to think exams are a big deal and worry about whether they’ll pass. What also doesn’t help much is that the resulting grades are relevant to one’s progress in a degree program as well as one’s chances of getting accepted for further studies or a job.

Exams are bad science

But even if we accept that it’s schools’ job to prepare students for the stress of university exams, what are those exams preparing them for? Surely, it can’t be their future work as scientists. Exams are good preparation for bad science.

A scientist’s job is essentially the opposite of exam-taking.

Exam-taking is swallowing a more experienced person’s presentation of information (course material), then regurgitating small bits of it as closely as possible to the original (“the right answers”). Science is carefully considering information (raw data) and other people’s presentations of information (prior work), carefully deciding whether or not to swallow it, then, optionally, producing a novel presentation of the information (research), which is considered useless if it’s in small bits that are exactly like they were when you got them.

The whole idea of one person telling the beginners how it is and expecting them to accept it is bad science. Obviously, my instructors are far more experienced and knowledgeable than me in their respective fields. Still, it would not be very good if I accepted everything they taught me unquestioningly.

If I take my role as a budding scientist seriously, I should critically examine everything I am taught and decide for myself whether I agree or disagree (and why). Exams tell me the opposite, and it takes real effort to continue thinking critically while I am expected to soon be able to reproduce the instructor’s view.

Worse still, in some introductory courses, the theory being taught is not perfect: instructors use simplified or “toy” versions of the theories being taught, or perhaps just a rather recent theory which is more a work in progress than the final word about anything. Either way, attentive students might notice inconsistencies or incoherences. This is good for undergrads; they can be inspired and take the theories further. That value is diminished by needing to swallow theories whole for a test.

Some suggestions

I could probably think of another point or two against exams, but instead I will dedicate the end of this post to pointing out a few things that might make the situation better:

Abolish the importance of exam grades.

This is the most important thing, but also likely the most difficult. Exam grades should not be available to anyone but the student and instructor. It might make sense to indicate on a degree whether the holder’s grades were consistently above average — this might potentially be an indication of extraordinary ability. But knowing that even the best exams are inaccurate and susceptible to extraneous variables, it does not make sense to prefer B students to C students.

Make feedback the goal of all exams.

Finding out I got a C on an exam doesn’t help me improve. Telling me what the weak and strong points of my exam were, could. I learned a lot on the few occasions where I’ve asked an instructor to go over the exam and tell me what my mistakes were. This value as a learning tool is wasted by not presenting all exam takers with feedback. (Some instructors do this, but all should.)

Make some or all exams optional.

If the goal of exams is to give feedback, then save it for those who want it. Mandatory exams create unnecessary stress. There are plenty of other ways to run a system like the modular European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, in which it is essential to judge whether a student really took part in their courses.

Replace some exams with real work.

Writing a term paper takes more effort than writing an exam, but you learn new things from it and experience something akin to actual academic work. Some disciplines have other “simulations” of real work which could be graded as tests. Sure, this requires more effort per test from the staff, but grading something other than an exam may be a welcome change. And perhaps a system could be created where more advanced students grade beginners’ work and get graded for their grading work (being real academic work practice itself).

Filter students in conversation, not testing.

I get the impression that one of the main reasons I had to take so many exams in the first year of my studies was to filter out students who are not really interested in the program they chose. (I’ve mentioned before that some people choose their major at random here, and if that’s as common as I think, filtering is a good idea.)

I imagine a ten-minute conversation with each student after their first semester could replace some or all of that testing. If the courses didn’t do the trick, simply asking the students if they want to continue with this major, and if yes then why, will get them thinking about those questions themselves. With all of the second chances people are given after failing, it’s their choice anyway; a short conversation could save a lot of exam creation, administration and grading. And of course, this could be done by advanced students as well as by faculty.

Clearly, all change in the university system is slow. Certainly, there are many different changes that can be made. I hope I have provided a few good points of critique and a few good ideas on how to improve the system. Further ideas, comments, and criticism are most welcome in comments.

I’d like to share some thoughts about why democratic schools should not have even a little bit of curriculum or mandatory guidance. Imposing even a single mandatory class, even just a mentorship or a morning meeting, is disrespectful towards students, and signals that the school does not take self-directed learning seriously. Sometimes, motivated by fear, parents attack this notion, demanding more guidance and railroading to make sure their children get where they want them to go. Every school responds in a different way. Only a clear “no” — the typical Sudbury response — makes sense, especially considering what democratic schools are for.

People, especially parents, always ask why the school can’t guide its students a little more actively. It is not that the guidance itself is a bad idea — in fact, I would say it’s vital that guidance be available in the school to those who feel they need it. But forcing guidance on students, even “just a little”, even just implicitly, by making some form of educational activity mandatory, is a signal of distrust. It’s saying, “we trust you to decide what to do with your time, so long as we have some influence on it”, or in other words, “we trust you entirely, except that we actually don’t”. It’s not only a mixed signal, it’s implicitly disrespectful, patronizing and demeaning — even if the guidance itself is presented by people who are respectful towards the students, and even if it’s done in a respectful way.

Schools should strive to produce graduates who are independent, creative, know how to manage their own time, and know how to plan out their own path towards their own goals. For this, the message must be crystal clear: we trust you to make your own choices. This is not part of what a Sudbury School does — it’s what the entire project is about. The opposite message, that there’s a standard “right” way to do things, is already on offer at every traditional school and from almost every person who ever went to one. Any student today is exposed to that message more than enough, even if they attend a school that is different. We do not need to do anything to integrate it in democratic schools, because the students’ families and hometown(s) already do that for us, whether we like it or not. Our mission is different. As person-centered schools, our job is to trust the students entirely.

Having a curriculum is bad, and not only when it’s mandatory. It is not better to “merely” encourage students to pursue some course of activity. When it is mandatory, at least everyone knows what’s going on, at least it is transparent. When you don’t force it but only make it clear that it is better, or that it is expected, or that it is the right thing to do, it’s no less distrustful, but you’re also endangering the relationship of trust between staff and students, giving students every reason to be cautious about the staff. Why trust someone with some external agenda, with some plans for what you’re supposed to do? Is that the kind of person you will want to turn to when you have questions? Is that the kind of person you will turn to when you need help? When you need someone trustworthy to talk about difficult issues with? The staff at Sudbury Jerusalem are the kind of person you would turn to, and I think a big part of this is that when they think you should do something, they just say so, and you know that’s just their own personal opinion. They’re not there to guide you, but they do offer advice when you need it (or when they feel like it), and they can kind of be guides when that’s what you need. To this day I still trust them like family. It’s not that staff should be forbidden from offering guidance, it’s that it should never be their job to offer unsolicited guidance in order to educate people. When that’s your job, you’re not someone to trust — just look at traditional schools.

But let’s look at another aspect, one of the goals I proposed above: creative problem-solving. It seems to me that any kind of focus, on behalf of the school, on state standards, goes against that goal. Many democratic schools today still make it clear to students that they should take state exams at the end of their secondary school years. Some schools quietly encourage it, in some it’s just the thing that everyone does, the goal you are there to work towards. This shows students, for better or for worse, that like most of society, the school endorses the standard path through life. However, unless you specifically really want to become a medical doctor, the standard way is not the only way. There are alternative ways, funner and less arbitrary, if you look for them. But unless a person already knows they have a goal that makes the standard way necessary, the school should be equally supportive of following alternative routes. The problem is that when everyone expects you to just take the standard route, you probably won’t even look for alternatives — why bother? If a school supports the standard way, its students will usually take that standard way.

If we are truly committed to producing the kind of graduates we should, there is no place for arbitrarily supporting any particular curriculum, any guidance not asked for, or any kind of standardized testing. These are anathema to our goals, poison against our success.

But I may be too radical about this. I’d love to hear some dissent. Feel free to leave a comment.