In his book "How Children Fail," John Holt captures the devastating effect that testing has on children:
Our "Tell'em-and-test'em" way of teaching leaves most students increasingly confused, aware that their academic success rests on shaky foundations, and convinced that school is mainly a place where you follow meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless questions....
We destroy the disinterested (I do not mean uninterested) love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards -- gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards... in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.... We kill, not only their curiosity, but their feeling that it is a good and admirable thing to be curious, so that by the age of ten most of them will not ask questions, and will show a good deal of scorn for the few who do.
John Holt, How Children Fail
Problems with Standardized Tests
Where am I in the content of the book?
