This new retreat will do the same. Instead of retreating to packaged goods we need to do the difficult work of providing intellectual resources, sustaining mental flexibility, and exemplifying moral grace. We need to teach in ways that broaden our own and our children's sympathies and tolerance and which make courage possible. Children need to take pleasure in complete and competent work, pride in public accomplishment, and joy in risk taking when it serves good and worthy ends. Testing is the fashionable measure of a person's skills in order to predict probable outcomes of academic efforts.
Tests can be useful providers of quantitative data that is the bases for comparisons and tracking.
Unfortunately, the tasks being measured are those we cur rently expect to be valuable, our criteria look backwards. The lesson from Chardin Chardin's paintings move us after 250 years because they celebrate accomplishment, and pleasure in completion, and inspire poise, balance, and reflective calm. They allow us to consider the gifts we wish for ourselves and those we wish to pass on to our children. Learning should be profound and generative, respectful of the past and interested in the future, not as predictably standardized as a soup can.