“I don’t know. I’ve never kippled.”

by David Benjamin

“Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.”
―Diane Ravitch

MADISON, Wis.—When I was in fifth grade, a kid named Terry had the desk next to mine. We weren’t friends. We barely spoke to each other. So, I was a little surprised one day when he turned and asked me to help him out.

Terry was tall, blond, handsome and popular. On the playground, he was always one of the first kids picked, or he was the kid doing the picking. He belonged to a boy majority in my class at St, Mary’s School that had deemed me an outcast. By contrast to Terry, I was noodly, hard-up and ill-favored. I soldiered through my daily routine with the sense that some vague measure of economic status and institutional favor had assigned me a low rung on the social ladder.

So, picture my surprise when Terry leaned over and sought my succor. Favored though he was as an athlete and paragon, Terry was not bright. At that moment, he was struggling with a standardized exam that was, for every kid in every school, an annual ordeal. When results came in from the testing organization, a month or so hence, we were all informed of our “grade level” in reading.

For me, an avid and voluminous reader, tests like this were my briar patch. My reading level was always somewhere in high school. Terry’s level, on the other hand, was typically a grade and a half in arrears. So, while he normally breezed through life as the toast of his peer group, Terry faced his test booklet and chewed his No. 2 pencil in a state of unaccustomed angst.

By and by, Terry noticed that, halfway through the allotted hour, I was already finished. Surreptitiously, he drew near and whispered.
Addressed politely by one of the princes of my realm, I was momentarily nonplussed. “Huh?” I said.

Careful not to draw the attention of Sister Drusilla, Terry presented a daring proposition, imploring me to, please, fill out his test for him.

I retreated briefly into an ethical quandary. In my entire exemplary educational career, I had never cheated on a test, quiz or any assignment. Nor had I ever helped any other kid to cheat. So. okay, despite the temptation to gain favor with Terry and all his alpha comrades, this illicit notion was beyond my pale.

Or was it?

I considered the matter of jurisdiction. If the test wasn’t Sister Drusilla’s test on anything we were studying in fifth grade, if it wasn’t a St. Mary’s School test or even—most significantly—a test mandated by the Catholic Church and the Holy see in Rome, did it count? Was this a test to take seriously? I never had. Nor had my teachers ever given this annual exercise much credence, especially when applied to me. Although I’d aced this exam every year, I’d never heard a teacher, perusing my score, perk up and say, “Whoa! Lookit this!?” In dazzling test after dazzling test, I had earned nary a gold star nor even a pat on the head.

I lived with the suspicion that the St. Mary’s faculty looked at me—the child of a broken home destined to juvenile delinquency—with an air of piteous pessimism. Good grades and high test scores were wasted on me. Years later, I learned rather circuitously that St. Mary’s had measured my IQ. It was apparently fairly high. But no one ever bothered to tell me. Why bother? I was a cracked vessel from which my brain would drain to no avail.

After all these considerations, I concluded that helping Terry carried no moral stain. Plus, he gave me fifty cents. I’ve wondered how St. Mary’s interpreted Terry’s sudden spectacular spike in reading level, followed a year later—when I wasn’t sitting next to him—by a nosedive equally breathtaking.

The Terry Incident, unnoticed, unpunished and harmless, reinforced my intuition that school wasn’t entirely—or even primarily—about learning. After all, from second through seventh grade, I attended a parochial school that expurgated the Spanish Inquisition from its history books. lied about the Reformation and, in my geography text, ranked the worthiness—or iniquity—of each country by its percentage of Catholics. Italy was Heaven. Everyone in Sweden was going to Hell. We weren’t allowed to sing “Away in a Manger” at Christmas time because Martin Luther wrote the lyrics.

I wasn’t supposed to notice this sort of deviation from the available evidence. I was in school to receive, recall and regurgitate. I understood this and carried out these obligations well. I was a good do-bee. But I wasn’t quite as good as I should’ve been. Anomalies bothered me and got me thinking about, for instance, why I couldn’t I sing “Away in a Manger”.

(Well, I couldn’t, actually. I was tone-deaf. But if I felt like it, why not?)

In eighth grade, I went back to public school, where Protestants and Jews were restored to history and I didn’t have to learn the Baltimore Catechism by heart. There were still, of course, standardized exams, most as superfluous as the test I took for Terry. A few affected my entire future. My SAT score queered my chances for college, but the National Merit Test got me there on the rebound.

Luckily, I was long out of school when a president decided that No Child should be Left Behind, and the way to make sure kids weren’t Left Behind was to bombard them with standardized tests, numerical measurement, statistical analysis and militant remediation.

Inevitably, like Terry’s sixth-grade reading score, No Child Left Behind sank to its level of incompetence and entered the vast annals of dumbass educational experiments. Before that, however, thousands of earnest academics and sly politicians took this testing barrage seriously. Most kids did, too, because they had no choice. Some kids—and lots of teachers—didn’t. I’d been with them ever since I’d turned Terry’s four bits into DC Comics, baseball cards and Milky Ways.

Recently, in the Times, an ed expert, Ross Wiener, recalled the No Child Left Behind fiasco, explaining why the idea had floundered. Somehow, though, he linked the demise of overtesting to a seemingly newfound skepticism, among the current generation, about traditional methods of pedagogy. Today’s kids, he suggests, are mad as hell and they aren’t gonna take it anymore.

Wiener wrote, “Earlier generations may have endured school that felt boring or disconnected because they trusted that adults and institutions knew better. Many young people today do not share that trust, and they are not going to push aside their own questions of meaning and purpose on the assurance that compliance will eventually be rewarded.”

Okay, first of all, back at St. Mary’s, Ross would have had to live with the nickname, “Weenie” from kindergarten to the day he died.

More significantly, it’s been too long since Ross read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Mark Twain establishes a timeless archetype for kids who hate school, drop out and begin adventures beyond the reach and imagination of the stuffed shirts who stand in front of a restive classroom scrawling on blackboards and droning the rhymes of Longfellow and Kipling.

Apparently beneath Ross’ radar, kids—well, boys, at least and at least as far back as Huck Finn—have hated school. At best, they’ve taken it with a grain of salt. Kids know that the real purpose of going to school is not so much to learn stuff they will always remember (they won’t, I didn’t), but to light somewhere, use their wits and become civilized.

For instance, when I shrugged off the rules, ducked Sister Drusilla and helped Terry pass that stupid test, I became a little more civilized than I’d ever been.