A frightening response to that question was put to several Miss U.S.A. contestants, where most of the responses clearly betrayed the reality that beauty queen contestants are, more or less, idiots:
I discovered this video in a curious context.
Oddly enough, I came across this when I was reading a Twitter by former teacher and current Alberta PC leadership Candidate Doug Griffiths, who commented:
This is a great column and worth reading. As a teacher I valued its challenge to our current system.Seth's Blog: http://bit.ly/qiV4TGNow.
Seeing as Doug was the only candidate to respond to my twitter question about why no one seems to be asking Gary Mar about his doling out of tax dollars to his friends, I don't want to poke too much into how this reflects on Doug Griffith as a leader (though he appears to support the suggestion that we shouldn't test our students, at least using standardized testing).
What I find curious is the tortured logic of Seth Godin in his blog - suggesting that because the suggested purpose of the British school system was taking children out of the labour force, and creating further "useful idiots" for the industrial labor force in England - nothing has really changed in our school system and the use of standardized testing is a tool to create further useful idiots, which is a job market that we are doomed to lose to export anyway.
Really Seth?
I thought the attraction to your books and blogs was new thinking and new ideas.
But, really, what Seth is supporting is the same sort of stunted ignorance that he makes fun of by attaching the link to beauty queens giving their two cents on "Should we teach math"?
Now.
Do you really think that ANY of these beauty queens' intellect is a product of a standardized testing mechanism?
Pretty funny stuff.
And it should be. It's a parody - of the actual clip released to the question, "Should evolution be taught in schools." Seth seems to have missed that.
But the point is made.
Removing standardized testing will not improve our ability to compete globally, it will do just the opposite. It will create not just useful idiots, but, in fact, useless idiots, liket he famous Miss South Carolina.
Who can forget:
Yes.
Let's do away with asking teachers to be accountable for assuring that basic knowledge is acquired in school.
Let's create a whole society of Miss South Carolina's.
THEN we'll show those Chinese a thing or two.