In 2009, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie gave a rousing TED talk titled ‘The Dangers of a Single Story’. She posited that there’s a great risk in reducing complex human beings to a single narrative. While she spoke of narratives in a cultural context, I believe her central idea, has broader application. Around the world, education systems are clinging to the single story of academic capability assessed on test scores. It’s a story as old as time, but with a very high stakes ending. If children score well in tests, they will succeed in college and careers and live happily ever after. If not, the entire voyage of their lives will be spent in shallows and misery. This story is the reason why the testing culture has become overwhelmingly predominant in schools worldwide. Rather than using testing as a diagnostic tool for instructional support, test scores are used to rank children’s academic capability on a very narrow spectrum. Through their school years, children shuffle from one test to the other, driven by the singular goal of increasing their scores rather than improving the quality of learning. In the US, children who attend public (i.e, government) schools take an average of 112 state-mandated tests between pre-kindergarten and grade 12, excluding other school-developed, teacher-designed or diagnostic tests. The number of tests is so high that teachers, quite literally “teach to the test” and spend over a month preparing students for each state-mandated exam. In China, the test culture is so stressful that students who write the gaokao matriculation examination, resort to extreme measures such as attaching themselves to intravenous drips for energy boosts. And recently in India, scores of anxious parents in the state of Bihar scaled school walls during an examination to provide their children with answers to test papers, resulting in a mass expulsion of aided students. When teachers reduce students’ diverse intellectual capabilities to a single number or grade, we overlook the diversity of talents, strengths and intelligences they inherently possess. This is mostly because most education systems assess only one intelligence, excluding others. Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the originator of the theory of multiple intelligences warned: “We must proceed cautiously before we place students’ minds and hearts at risk with tests whose meaning can be over-interpreted and whose consequences can be devastating.” Regrettably contemporary education systems make a very narrow definition of what constitutes intelligence and ability. The great scientist Albert Einstein said, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it’s stupid.” Modern education systems worldwide are designed to suit a small minority of students who conform to narrow definitions of intelligence and capability, while the vast majority are disenfranchised by testing metrics. According to a recent Unesco report, 47 million children are dropping out of public schools across India before reaching class X. This huge number dropping out of the school system demonstrates that the…
