Teaching to the test is under fire from left and right — and both sides have a point. Dr. Lon Jones argues that high-stakes testing trains technocrats rather than innovators, and that the biology of fear explains why.
We have enough information now to know that testing does not work for its intended purpose. It should be eliminated in its current form. Testing became enshrined after A Nation at Risk; every administration since has treated international scores as the measure of educational success. They are not the only — or best — measure of how children learn.
What Top Test Scores Really Buy
Diane Ravitch, discussing Yong Zhao's critique of Chinese education, notes that centuries of rote tradition can produce excellent test-takers and technocrats — and few Nobel-level innovators. That kind of learning is useful for control; it is not the learning a free, innovative society needs.
Fear vs. Play in the Brain
Testing is an evaluation from outside; it is threatening. We adapt to threats with fight, flight, or freeze. Some children master the tests, others drop out, others numb out. Creativity and innovative thinking arise not from the primitive fear circuitry but from cortical play in safe environments — which can look disorderly, and which is where real learning happens.
In The Boids and the Bees, Dr. Jones argues children should not be treated like lab rats trained by reward and repetition. They learn through intrinsic drive to explore and control their environments — not through age-graded, fear-based testing regimes.
Read the full unedited education essay in the PDF archive, and explore related complex-adaptive-systems pieces in the research library.