I actually found this quite witty. But it is more than that. It playfully raises some of those issues about education, assessment, and certification. I would love to say medical education has got this right, but I do not believe that. It is easy to list the problems, but hard to solve them. Numbers and formal systems will always be used by those who understand them least, to exile judgement.
- Foundational knowledge does exist, it is just not as common as many believe. Teachers, accreditors and other institutions always want to exaggerate the importance of foundational learning because they rent seek on it: the more there is, the more money they make. They will create a world which suits them. It is not just the world some of use live in.
- Assessment may drive learning, but assessment frequently wrecks the learning that is education. I post this on the day that the ‘O’ level results come out: education as a proxy war for politicians seeking reelection.
- Demands for better ‘metrics’ will often come at the cost of what many consider most important. Defending exam procedures, may lead to a quasi- legalistic obsession with reliability at the expense of education. This is not a new problem, and is far broader than psychometrics and indeed permeates much science (see Cornfield, J., & Tukey, J. W. (1956). Average values of mean squares in factorials. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 27, 907–949). The danger is people think that metrics are ‘theory free’ and forget that in education (and many other domains) metrics causally alter subject behaviour.
- Education is about the future. Any designer or educator has to live in the future. And since most of have enough difficulty understanding the present, we can only see it using metaphor. Blake said it well: every honest man is a prophet. Universities increasingly like to spell that sound with different letters.