Whatever else timed tests do, especially multiple choice tests, they deny any individuality in students, and they deny any original or creative form of learning, intelligence, or understanding. Testing still does what the original "how smart are you" question does. It makes a judgment of student intelligence based on an assumption of some degree of just, plain dumb. In classrooms based on endlessly cramming for standardized tests, knowledge simply get distributed to the students, in Paulo Freire's words teachers "deposit" in the empty student container. When a class ends, nothing qualitative has been gained, just a quantitative dispersal of data if anything. In a classroom that celebrates and works with the individuality and existing knowledge of students, the class creates knowledge. Everyone sees and learns in new ways, teacher and student. In that way, students feel their own power to create knowledge, create and recreate the world. This innate ability of critically examining the world works perfectly with students and their progress as a becoming self. It also allows these students to critically and maturely reflect on any meaning perspectives which have remained unquestioned until that point. School, learning, education can serve as a wonderful vehicle in the search for self. It brings with it the qualities of transformative learning.
The dominator form of thinking makes school stand as an impediment to such progress for the individual. The search for the becoming self has no place in the dominator's economy. Indeed, in an educational model that enhances our sense of self, transformative learning offers students the idea and experiential reality of the intrinsic value of learning generally and of the value their individuality in such a process specifically. When people learn the nature of the intrinsic, they can feel liberated in their pursuit of knowledge about the world and about the self.
The dominator form of education disallows the idea of the intrinsic in learning and in life. Everything must have a payoff, a price, or it has no value. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, when everything has a price, nothing has any value. When the dominator form of extrinsically driven learning becomes the only form of learning, the intrinsic value of learning in students disappears. Their value becomes invested purely in their extrinsic economic value. All education becomes driven by the workplace. That form of education denies any place for the individual lives of students and the values students can find within themselves and their lives.
Ask any student why school is important. Ask anyone for that matter. They will tell you in the overwhelming majority of cases that the importance of school comes in getting a good job. I have done so with students as young as the first grade and students in graduate programs, and I receive the same answer. It's all about a job. It's all about extrinsic gain just like the tests they take. Standardized tests offer no learning opportunity whatever. A well constructed examination can and does.[55] Standardized tests only offer a payoff if the student has recorded the information wanted and can deliver that information in a form the test recognizes. In such a binary system the intelligence required is one easily mimicked by a computer. Such testing requires no understanding, no critical thinking, and no ability to make something new and exciting out of the old. It asks for nothing like human intelligence at all. Frankly, dominator education denies life itself and in that denial, it denies the value or even the existence of the becoming self. If we strip education and life of its intrinsic value, we have nothing left but programmable, disposable, economic units. No self need apply.