Destroying Cognition

The dumbing down of the SAT proceeds apace:

They shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage.

This resulted in the elimination of significant portions of SAT’s previously used reading material, including “passages in the U.S. founding documents/Great Global Conversation subject area,” because of their “extended length.” Nevertheless, the College Board takes the view that the rigor of the Reading and Writing segment is unchanged. They claim in the assessment framework that the eliminated reading passages are “not an essential prerequisite for college” and that the new, shorter content helps “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”

The SAT’s Trust Fall

Please look at the preceding post and tell me what other consequences of what we saw in that video there could be. The children of the people in that video won’t have a native language. They will not be able to read texts of any complexity. They will not be able to understand figurative language and read fiction.

Remember the student who couldn’t understand a short story title? The story began with the words “Carlitos loved the United States and had a huge American flag in his room.” The story was titled “Stars and Stripes.” The student kept insisting that the story title was about nature because she sincerely couldn’t connect the title and the first sentence. Even after prompts such as, “what does the American flag look like? How can you connect this to the story title?” she couldn’t answer.

Many people look at the watermelon video and see convenient devices that efficiently move the watermelons and can be shelved until next time when all watermelons are moved. But these are human beings with all the human complexities and needs. You tear them out of their cultural, familial, linguistic, and geographic context at a great and terrible cost.

And please, please don’t adduce arguments about mass migration a hundred years ago. It’s embarrassing to say such things. Human subjectivity changed dramatically since then. We now live in a world that demands enormously more from us cognitively than at any previous time. And we respond to this challenge by destroying the capacity of millions of people to develop the cognition that can grapple with this growing complexity.

We are crippling these people and their children because it’s convenient to have them cheaply move watermelons. How can this possibly be a good thing?