Instead of disproving the demeaning negative regard school holds for most of us, it gets proven over and over again in the very process of rewards and punishments that school uses as its central form of communication with students. Testing is based on the judgmental, and the judgmental, as we have discussed, functions in an inherently conditional fashion.[53] In fact, it remains conditional even for those who appear to succeed because the dread of failure never leaves the majority of students even those with perfect grades. The testing system keeps most if not all students and teachers in another way, running scared and a great number of students feeling they cannot run at all. One of the first things such students learn early, definitively, and painfully is that they are not equipped to run in this contest at all. They cannot compete. They are slow. They are special. They are dumb. [54]
When I talked to students about previous experiences with school, many admitted to or confessed to some degree of special education identification in all or in part of their educational lives. They often told me, with apparent or expressed sadness, "I am slow," as if that defined the entire of their school life and, more importantly, denied their entire ability to learn at all. In many cases they went beyond looking apologetic to actually apologizing before we even formally started our learning exchange. They felt like a very weak link in a very short chain. The idea or the reality of their slowness haunted them, and it interfered with all of their learning in school and, for many, in their lives because they felt permanently damaged and beyond acceptance as a full person. Their previous experience in school taught them they had precious little place in learning in any context at all.
The level of nearly violent injustice of this learning loomed as a very real meaning perspective that would make current learning endlessly insecure and incomplete. No matter how well such people learn in reality, their learned meaning perspective about learning kept judging them as slow and inadequate. It prevented them from becoming the active agent and the essential subject of their own learning. It just plain got in the way.
We talked about it. What made "slow" such a terrible thing? I had a friend who earned a PhD, using her slowness as a strength not as a weakness. She considered "slow" a sign of the desire for a thorough understanding of some subject or task. As a teacher, she saw that pattern in her own students as I saw it in mine. Many students were facile and fast in getting some subject in a way very suitable to testing, especially multiple choice testing. When students thought about my friend and her students, they sensed that this description of two kinds of learning fit them, but it still meant they were slow, and that slowness got them into special education classes. Everybody knew what that meant. Almost every student I ever met believed it meant inadequate and stupid. Almost all of them hated the fact that they were placed in special education classes. A few wound up in special education because they lived with a disability that slowed down their responses physically, but they learned quickly in spite of appearances. Almost everyone felt abused, demeaned, and cheated by the whole process of the education they experienced. They felt they learned every day how inadequate they were then and continued to be in the present. In their search for our working definition of self, we found that the self learned and acted on learning. If people couldn't learn in some very real way, they would find themselves hampered in their search for that self. In some terrifying ways, through judgment, failure, and rejection, school teaches students that they cannot learn. Education can teach that lie and make it a demeaning and distorting meaning perspective. In truth, everybody learns.
My students and I talked about this meaning perspective and process and came to this story to describe how learning through testing really worked against them. When they could see that the fault lay in the testing and not in themselves, they might start critically reflecting on the meaning perspective that got in the way of so much of their learning. We posited the following learning and testing situation. Student A needs to learn thoroughly to satisfy her form of learning. If she has a specific task to learn and then perform, she can do that in two hours. If she can work the full two hours she will not only learn and perform, she will do so with brilliance and originality. Is she a smart person? A very smart person, we agree. Student B can learn a specific task very quickly if somewhat superficially and feel satisfied to learn something in a short time and can perform a task based on that learning in an adequate way in an hour. He will achieve adequacy but not excellence or creativity. Each shows a kind of intelligence, but if they both take a timed test on the same task, who appears smarter? Student A will get brilliant given two hours, and Student B will get competent in one hour and stay at that level no matter how much more time he can take. The test is only an hour. Student B will appear smarter, and will become officially smarter while student A will get marked slow and stupid not slow and steady. The question of competition aside for now, one student gets accepted and the other rejected for no other reason than time. It seems that in school, however else intelligence is judged, it gets subdivided by time. Testing works best in punishing everybody with the ticking clock as its most salient feature. In doing so, it diverts from our becoming self into an identity formed around how dumb we are.