We're into SAT season at our house. After weeks of doing our daily sample questions, my son and I, the first round is over. Now we wait, see the scores, and decide if we're going to do what everyone else that can afford to seems to do — tutor and inflate the scores. Colleges and universities are not unaware of this phenomenon, and the word on the street is that for this reason, admissions staffers are putting less and less weight on these standardized tests. The tests have come to reflect whose parents have a larger bank account rather than, what...innate intelligence? Ability to study? Retention of information? Ability to reason? What are they supposed to reflect anyhow? I was always an honors student, graduated magna cum laude in two degrees, BA in English and a BS in Horticulture, have been a professional writer and teacher of writing for decades, and I don't get all the English questions right (much to the delight of my son).

Very technical learning starts even in preschool these days, and continues on a very regular basis, thanks to the standardized test schedule No Child Left Behind brought to our country.  What are we gaining from this? Are these standardized tests what we want future generations to view as intelligence? Doesn't this continually teach that one must see, explain and reproduce something in order to believe and rely on in it? And if so, what does this infer about the life of the spirit? The existence of a higher energy, a positive energy, a God source, if you will? As a parent, I've made a huge effort to support the existence of things we can't see, but I find our western academic culture does not make this easy.

I think children need to believe in "magic," they need to believe there is a creative impulse that can come from somewhere they can't predict or plot out.  They need to have dreams, and believe, so many steps back from that reality, that they can make them come true.  Without this kind of magic, how can they believe in the message of the popular DVD The Secret, that reality begins in the heart and the mind, and that believing so, and acting on that belief, can make it so?  I believe in this.  I know it's true. 

So a child may be able to perform, and conform, to the current cookie-cutter version of success - a certain score on his or her state's test, for instance—but what happens to his or her creative abilities in this miasma of standardization? Without an educational environment that supports the unmeasurable, it's hard for kids to feel their creative abilities are worthwhile.  The danger is that this part of most children may whither and even die, or become suppressed and foster discontent and rebellion, as they become indoctrinated to this current accountable version of achievement.  This is everyone's loss, the child who's lost "the creator" within, and the society that's lost everything this creativity could have contributed.