Chapter 18: Educational values

In discussing educational values, Dewey makes a couple of points applicable to standardized testing. First, he points out that our capacity to evaluate--to articulate and apply evaluative standards to what we encounter in experience (music, art, sports, etc.)--must be acquired, over time, in a combination of experience and education. Parents and teachers make a mistake in tending to teach values directly, which is to say out of the context of meaningful (preferably lived) example. "They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal" (p. 191). As such, they are difficult if not impossible to apply in standardized testing which is out of context.

Secondly, any subject is said to offer many values--math, to use Dewey's example, has disciplinary value in learning to reason, utilitarian value in learning to calculate for business, religious value in conceiving of the infinite. However, these values are realized in using the subject. Again, the mistaken tendency is to treat the subject as if the value is inherent in the subject itself. Then, if the values do not operate, "the blame is put not on the subject as taught, but on the indifference and recalcitrancy of the pupils" (p. 192). And again, standardized testing by isolating the subject from a useful context serves to perpetuate this misunderstanding of the nature of value in education.