Synopsis

That brings us to the focus of this thesis, the suppression of error. There is a field of educational scholarship devoted to educational evaluation and measurement. Thousands of books. Hundreds of Journals. Most of the literature in the field is about errors in measurement. And of course, errors in measurement imply errors in the measurement of standards. Yet in classrooms and universities and public examining boards, on school reports and graduation and proficiency certificates, there is a great silence. It is as though this literature did not exist. Even prestigious testing agencies skim the surface of the error issue. The question is why? Why this suppression of the obvious empirical fact that educational standards as a thin accurate line have no empirical existence? It is to this question that the remainder of the chapter is addressed.

I examine the crucial part that the standard plays in the whole mechanism of defining cut-offs for abnormality and non-acceptance, and how important it is that these standards be seen as accurate if current societal structures are to be maintained.
 

Restrictions, penalties, productions

There are restrictions on appearance and dress; on what may be worn, and how long or short it is; whether this be skirt, shirt, pants, hair, necklace, ear rings - whatever differentiates from the norm; whatever distinguishes an idiosyncratic persona; whatever, by whatever means, makes a public statement about personal autonomy. The restrictions will not be specified in detail, for fashions change too fast for that, and student creativity is limitless. However, the judgment of the school is, in retrospect and by definition, impeccable in these matters, and their verdict will rarely be contradicted, and never successfully challenged, by students. (or parents, for that matter). Significantly, school spirit, cooperation, health and safety, economy, equality, fraternity, are all likely to be part of the supporting ideology. But never conformity, for this would contradict the school ideological aims of developing individuality and autonomy. Yet surely conformity is what is being produced here; conformity, and the acceptance of the social sanctions that non-conformity bring.

Body, movement, speech and relations must be decorous: body and clothes must be not only clean, but tidy. Movement is both restricted and restrained: students should remain seated and never run in the corridors. Speech should be proper: slow, well-articulated, free of slang, swearing and salacity, respectful in address and tone, and preferably in the dialect of the upper middle class. And social relations should be moderate, free of all excesses; of love or hate, of enthusiasm or alienation, of spontaneity or cliquishness, of autonomy or dependency.

As well as physical and emotional containment, there is temporal curtailment. Work is restricted to what the timetable dictates. Maths must not be done in the history lesson, history must begin at 10 am., and no one may visit the toilet until 12.50 pm, unless they shame themselves by asking permission, and then only maybe.

There are a whole range of penalties utilised to reassert the power structure should any of the multitudinous restrictions of the school be breached: further physical containment during recesses, deprivations of various sorts, petty humiliations such as standing in corridors or outside offices, threats and harassments of various kinds, and finally physical punishment, suspension or expulsion. In 1997 in Australia the most popular fashionable sanction is called "time out", a broad notion that contains various shades of physical isolation, and which schools insist is not a punishment. The penalties are really of no significance. It is the acceptance of the penalty, which reinstates the integrity of the power structure, that is important. It is important that some students rebel, so that the power relations might be demonstrated (Wilson, 1990).

So what is produced through these restrictions and penalties? What is learnt? First, temporal regularity. There is a time to start and a time to finish, a time to sit and a time to stand. And these times are planned and arranged and policed by others. What is learnt is that time is determined not by the imperatives of life as they manifest themselves, nor by any plan that might make for some personal production, but by the dictates of people in authority, by the demands of an institution.

Second, physical containment. There is a space to be and a space to sit, and sit, and sit. What is learnt is that the demands of the body are not important, and it is preferable to forget that you have one.

Third, emotional contraction. What is learnt is that the exuberant emotional and psychic field must be reduced to the physical limits of the body, so that feelings and emotions are pacified, and the self reduced to placidity.

And finally, what is learnt is that all this has nothing to do with the maintenance of power relations, or the production of a social being, but is an unfortunate addendum to another far more important purpose; a necessary prerequisite for effective learning of the knowledge specified in the school curriculum. What is learnt is to misrecognise the social function of schooling.

Illich (1971) summarises the situation, calls it for what it is, and sees only one solution:

The examination

First we look more closely at the examination, and at the particulars of its function. Foucault (1992) certainly affords it pride of place among the mechanisms of disciplinary power which he elucidates:

Of course the examination is also a crucial element in the construction of human cognition. It defines what are true and false facts, what is right and wrong thinking, and what are the acceptable limits of intuition and feeling. But we are more concerned here with social categorisation.

The report is the place where such individuality is made official; here is the permanent record, uncorrupted by any possibility of error, of one's place in the order of things; of a person's history, present, and future distilled into a single mark; of a sign that evokes possibilities and defines exclusions; in the world of higher education and the world of work, here is the official indicator of who you are, what you are.

Foucault (1992) indicates that this individualisation through comparison is intensified as power disperses and abnormality increases:

Standards and swords

Even so, he pays almost no attention to the major weapon which ensures success, to the one notion without which the whole structure is unstable; he downplays the construction that turns a house of straw into a house of bricks, and allows that momentous separation between the good little three little pigs, and the big bad independent wolf. Could it be that his academic self wished to retain this last bastion of its own identity?

Regardless, without the steel edged standard to cut off the tail with a carving knife, and without the standard chippy chippy chopper on the big black block to lop off the heads that are too way out, disciplinary power is reduced to a shadow. The notion of the norm is dependent for its existence on the notion of the not-norm, on the notion of the abnormal. And the abnormal owes its existence to the act of separation.

Regardless of how disciplinary power is deployed, whether through the micro-penalties of day to day detail, or the graduation rituals of national examinations, or definitions of insanity, the thin line between the acceptable and unacceptable must be drawn. And it can only be drawn by evoking the idea of a standard, of an cut-off point that can be accurately determined and applied. All this regardless of whether we want to evoke democratic values, or scientific values, or aesthetic values, or other "expert" values in determining the standard, and then measuring it.

For without the notion of the standard there can be no classifications, no qualifications, no exclusions. There can be no norm, because there is no abnorm. There can be order, but without the standard there can be no disorder; Without the standard, we can still construct an order of merit, but cannot differentiate excellence, or determine exclusion; we can still individuate by placing on a line, but we cannot delineate winners because we cannot define losers. A race where everyone gets a prize is like a race where no one gets a prize; it loses its purpose as a race, and soon becomes a game that no one wants to play. Gilbert was right: "When everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody."

The blade must be sharp. There is no room for error. There is some aesthetic beauty, some notion of swift justice, black and violent as it might be, in a blade that cleanly and swiftly decapitates. Yet a mangled hatchet job will inevitably evoke horror. And so it is with any application of the standard. The acceptance of classifications and exclusions, both by those who apply them and those who are their recipients, are dependent on the precision and truth of the standard. Without these qualities the whole examination exercise becomes exposed as a political ploy to order and control, to reward and exclude, to hold in place vast structures of inequity. In short, it becomes exposed as a hatchet job.
 

A place to hide

The human mind is remarkably efficient. Socially inclined as it is, it realises the only way to keep a secret is to hide it away. So the secret becomes a secret from one's own consciousness, locked away down there where angels fear to tread. The unconscious is nothing more than this; the space where we hide what we know from our conscious selves because the knowledge contains a truth that is too hot to handle, an awareness too destructive to life as we know it.

Would the social world we know really collapse if the notion of the standard had to go? Would we dissolve in chaos, or move gently onward to build a better world? Or would we simply find another subtly socially reconstructed lie to replace the one we'd lost?
 

Summing up

There are affect components involved here; the bearer of the standard is clothed in fancy emotional underwear, wears a colourful mythical costume, and carries a sceptre that denotes moral high ground. In the next chapter we examine some of these other dimensions of the assessment fairy tale.