But pointillism enters our schools in another more insidious way. As we become more and more concerned with the trouble that students are having, we focus ever more tightly on the points alone. Education cannot be reduced to a bin of facts. Education means equipping students to deal with ambiguity. Education means learning how to cope with open-ended questions.
Education means understanding that each dot connects up with all the other dots.
The single worst outcome of this attempt to rescue education from change, too rapid to contain, is what politicians call accountability. Let's ask what that means. Now, I do not refer to accountability in the sense that Dr. Winnick carefully defined it when he spoke here. I refer to the way the concept of accountability has been degraded in practice. To make teaching accountable, we try to create standardized tests.