"Indirectness" or "obliqueness" in education

In earlier articles (the article on the problem of "other minds" in education, the post here on the problem of the teaching ego Teaching ego, and the more detailed discussion at the beginning of the larger paper from which this current one is a revision ) I drew attention to two aspects of mind - the mind as it is externally available to others through being "bodied forth" on the outside, on the one hand, and the "inner" aspects of mind that are not so publicly available. It is the former that makes public knowledge possible, through the coordination of behaviour - in language and mutual activity. The latter, however, is vital to any genuinely educational project

It is the "agreement in judgment" that can be achieved in this public space between and among bodies that makes rules, and the sharing of rules, a possibility - and hence all of our collective achievements in the "public" sciences, arts, technologies, conventions and customs. It is this that the cultural practices of teaching - and ultimately the institutions of schooling-and-teaching are uniquely (if often far from perfectly) designed to attend.

This can be seen, both in the ways in which the agendas of schooling-and-teaching are designed ("knowledge" is to be "done to" learners), and also in its various practices of evaluating success. These are all designed to measure or judge external performances, demonstrations or displays.

The second aspect of mind - the "inner" that is publicly inaccessible, is the seat of experience. Here, and on the inside, each of us "makes" what we do of our lives and experiences. It is here, "in our minds", that all knowing, believing, valuing, and deciding occurs. These things only enter into the public domain, only insofar as they are effectively expressed there, and on the terms limited by those possibilities of expression.

Though it is futile to attempt to balance the relative importance of these two aspects of mind - the internal powers of the mind being crucially dependent on the external and public - It is crucial that everything that is important to our humanity rests on the inside. Our agency is finally determined here. Our identity is finally assembled here, and by us. Our values, beliefs, commitments, our understanding and knowing rests here. Our creativity, or innovativeness, our confidence, timidity and fearfulness are made and live here. Our self-respect is to be found here, and decided here. What we make of our lives, the purpose, the meaning the fulfillment and satisfaction in them lies here. Even what to die for.

Here too, is everything that is made of those public rules, conventions, customs and agreements. What is made of experience; the making of the mind itself, including the extent to which it becomes our own. Indeed, even whatever it is that is made of all that teaching.

Conventional teaching, designed only for the outside, cannot address this world of experience - not effectively. Mostly, the internal is merely a frustration, an obstacle to the attempt to achieve external agendas. By design, in education systems where the external agendas override the internal altogether (as most do), the institutional structure is indifferent to the internal, regardless of the doubts teachers sometimes experience, and their efforts to be "learner-centred".

Because the internal is largely inaccessible to teaching does not mean that it is inaccessible to education however, and never has meant that. It will only seem that way to the extent that we continue to be obsessed with schooling-and-teaching as "education". The damage that we do when we indulge in this obsessiveness and succumb to its technical seductiveness should be so obvious and serious as to motivate us highly to get past it, to get over ourselves, for if "education" is just schooling and teaching, and we neglect that other half of mind, we are left with something that does not reach so far as our humanity at all. It is inhumane, stopping short of respecting that intrinsic worth of the human that lies at the core of our ethics. To the extent that our educational understanding remains arrested and so largely dominated by the desire to teach, we cannot even start to educate.

Addressing the inner of mind requires a quite different understanding and approach, however. We must let go of our obsessive desire to control what others believe and do on the inside. We must allow for the fact - and it is a fact - that what each of us constructs on the inside will be different - because our life trajectories and experiential histories are always different. We must make our minds out of experiences differently conceived, because all of our pasts have been different, and conceived differently out of those different ways and times, and with those different understandings and feelings, that we have brought to our many different situations.

These radical differences do not defeat education however. They only defeat our expectations of some sort of absolute conformity. People can, and do, make better things of their experiences, refine their abilities to think and feel, and improve their abilities to make decisions, better craft their way to find meaning in life, without our needing to fall back on some fixed template of how they should think, or what they should believe or value. They can also learn, in various ways, to leverage the powers and possibilities of their sociability.

We can do this, not by attempting to engineer them, turning them on the lathe of schooling, in the light of some blueprint that we have for them, but through encouraging them to engage in social processes that have particular qualities. Instead of trusting the design, and measuring conformity to it, we need to construct social processes that we can trust, and trust them to do their work.

In contrast to the conventional model of schooling-and-teaching, we need to abandon our illusions about tight control, and directness, in favour of a loose control, where the processes, at crucial points, satisfy and display a relatively small number of key conditions. These conditions must be of two kinds. Firstly, they must be conditions that reflect the requirements of respect. And secondly, they must reflect those conditions upon which the authority of knowledge depend. If these conditions rule social interactions that become frequent and natural enough, sustained and tended by learners themselves, then learners will grow in educationally effective ways.

The processes, however, will only very loosely be employed to address various areas of belief, and value and commitment, or any other aspect of mind on the "inside". Because of the great variability in the management of experience among learners, and because the nature of that experience is largely inaccessible from the outside, our approach to this core educational development must be largely "oblique" and "indirect". We must accept that the only person who can "make up" a person's mind is, in the end, themselves.

The core activity here is a particular kind of discussion among moral equals. The discussion must meet standards of intellectual and ethical discipline that are maintained by the group. It must be frequent - a commonplace expectation - readily available and without coercion. It must commonly fall within a broad framework of areas that can encourage a very open consideration of the possibilities of knowledge and human value. It is in such discussions that minds can build themselves, each on their own way, through each doubting differently, challenging and responding to challenge differently, with each developmentally seeking its own resolutions to problems that matter.

it might not be too bold to say that, until we are able to bring learners together, enabling them to talk reasonably and respectfully with each other, making decisions that are real, and from their own free will and not through us, we cannot achieve anything of educational value at all.

The "learning community" or "community of inquiry" (COI)

The power of group discussion is significantly underappreciated on our standard, schooling conception of "education" for a number of reasons. The first, of course, is that we over-appreciate the teacher-learning transaction. We do this because the standard belief about what matters in educational learning is that education involves a "transmission of knowledge" from teacher to learner, which of course goes back to the priority that we have given to the interests and agendas of people and groups other than the learner.

Even when the teacher "gets them to find out", or to "look it up", the arbiter of the value of what is done is the teacher. There must, after all, be standards. "Education" is something that we "do to" people, and many of the devices that we use to enrol them in activities that serve our purposes are simply the art of concealing our hand. At the end of the day, "what did I achieve" means "what did I teach?" Or at the very least - "what did they learn that I can approve of?"

Coupled with this is the over-estimation of the importance of training learners in agreement in judgment in the application of linguistic rules, as well as in agreement with the opinions of those who know better. Teaching is dominated by processes of transmission, instruction, and training because it is about rules, procedures and conventions rather than experience. These distortions in our educational perception - the idea of formal and official teaching, and the priority of training for agreement in judgment - make it very difficult for the teacher to let go of control, handing it over to learners, and taking much less responsibility for the learning that is to occur.

They are teachers. They are responsible for what is learned, and when this responsibility is combined with the requirements of curricula that are established externally, and the external demands of assessment and evaluation, there are strong incentives for them to feel that they must micro-manage all learning; discussion included.

Equally importantly, the under-estimation of the importance of experience, and of learner agency in the management of experience - and hence of personal knowledge - leads them to underestimate the processes that are most effective in its development and facilitation. There are numerous ways in which discussion is much more important and potent in cultivating the minds of learners, but teachers find great difficulty in allowing it to happen in effective ways. They find it difficult to let go of the discussion, because of what they understand their role to be in the authority of knowledge, since it is vital, on the conventional view, that they know better. When they stand back, they aren't going to feel that they are doing their job.

In the devaluation of discussion, they are not sensitive to building the discipline of good discussion in ways that enable that discipline to be achieved by the group, which would, as it developed, put them out of their traditional role. They would feel that they were becoming by-standers, or observers. They ought to do something. Perhaps ask the profound or important, or leading questions.

Discussion is, of course, a widely used "tool" in the classroom, but too often it is a tool simply used to manipulate the outcome for which the teacher feels responsible. When the teacher does "let go" of this manipulation, the discussion degenerates into something more like an idle conversation that doesn't appear to make much progress, and it is difficult, under the traditional model of schooling-and-teaching, to see if anyone is learning what they should. The fear that emerges here is of a discussion that "just goes in circles". The teacher (very often along with the learners) is likely to feel that an effective discussion is one that "gets somewhere" - perhaps reaches some agreement, or shared conclusion. What, after all, is the "lesson" from this? Since having the right answers is so important in schooling, this is, perhaps an inevitable anxiety.

The reason that the real contribution of disciplined discussion is not well understood is a problem that comes back, once again, to the poverty of our own educational experience. Teachers, like everyone else, have no doubt participated in conversation throughout their lives, but have had little personal experience of knowledge-seeking, disciplined, peer conversation. Dinner table conversation is better than most things that happen in schools, but the rules of hospitality tend to curtail serious inquiry, or challenge. Dinner table conversation is, in the first instance, to be entertaining. Keep it light. No religion or politics.

My own experience of dinner table conversation as I grew up may have made all the difference to me. No barriers to serious issues there. My father rarely read, and my mother was no intellectual reader. Both of them barely brushed high school. But they submitted themselves to our reasons and did not exercise any particular control over the direction of the discussions. I didn't ever experience an authority that I felt a need to rebel against. Family religious and political conventions were ultimately dismantled.

Only those relatively few students who have been lucky enough to experience "philosophy for children" conducted along the lines developed by Mathew Lipman and his "Communities of Inquiry" are likely to have known genuine discussion in conventional schools that had a chance of developing knowledge in its own right - knowledge that comes from a proper and free management of experience. But Philosophy for Children, though a significant movement worldwide, barely penetrates conventional schooling.

The other two possibilities are, on the one hand, those now probably atypical graduate school discussions where the teachers finally sense that their students are holding their own with them, or passing them in understanding and skill. The other possibility probably lies with the even more rare and ephemeral existence of philo cafes, or philo pubs, though they may well have attracted participants from that small segment of the population with a taste for philosophy already developed. Disciplined, epistemological conversations probably occur in some research workplaces, but even in these rarified contexts, equivalent discussions of the issues of everyday life are not likely to be common.

The sociology of the cultivation of mind

I recall a moment in a primary school classroom when I was perhaps ten or eleven years old. A boy, at his desk, was speaking to the class, explaining his thought. For a few brief moments, others responded with thoughts or considerations of their own. I don't remember the teacher's presence, but I do recall that the exchange was brief, so I presume that whoever the teacher was, they soon shut it down. What I vividly recall was the lift of excitement and attention within me, and I remember how short the exchange was, and how very, very rare.

All of my schooling contained discussion, of course, but with this difference, that it was always mediated through the teacher. Even at university, though there might have been comments back and forth among students for a while, the teacher or tutor was prominent, as judge and guide of the value and direction of thought. They sat at the centre of the intellectual solar system. It was only at graduate school that this began to change, and only at the more advanced levels, and with the faculty who I now understand to be the most relaxed and confident, prepared to listen and learn from their students.

As "discussion" became a more popular teaching technique, I have often suffered through those practices of "group discussion", where the teacher divides up the class to discuss in separate small clusters, thereby losing contact altogether with all of them with the exception of the particular group they now favour with their attention. This technique is very popular on the workshop circuit. I have learned a lot about weekends and extracurricular activities, and the friends of friends in such groups before the ultimate test of initiative (and potential embarrassment) when one of our members is designated to report back on the "conclusions" that we hadn't made any real effort to reach.

Something quite different is happening when peers, under circumstances of equality, discuss an issue they have developed for themselves and that really does matter to them, particularly when they do so in disciplined ways for which they all take responsibility. Sometimes, at advanced levels, the issues that matter to the participants can be a theory or point of view, or a text that is very much located in the public discourse, but this is not a counter example.

The theory or point of view is taken up by the participants, not because it is a part of some externally determined teaching process, but because the inquiry matters to the participants, and is taken over by them. Conventional schooling then concedes its authority. At graduate school, some of my classes were like this. But then we, as students, would also occasionally coopt an empty room, and run much the same inquiries for ourselves.

 The difference between discussions of these sorts, and the kinds of discussion that are usual in conventional schooling may seem subtle, but the sense of the subtlety can be explained in terms of the way in which the practice conflicts with our more ordinary "educational" expectations - particularly those teacher expectations concerning the things they are supposed to control and direct.

In addition, and equally importantly, the value of the process is not at all transparent, because what really matters is what is going on inside the participants, which no doubt differs from participant to participant. We can't see into that, and so our gauging of what is going on, and its value, is likely to be indirect and oblique. Our sense of what is happening will be dynamic, and perceived in terms of tides and flows of ideas and feelings, sometimes in clusters, or across the whole group, sometimes highly individual; sometimes both, but in different ways. It is not that a good sense of what is happening in terms of educational success isn't possible. It is that it will defy our conventional assumptions about measurability and assessment. For many, who can't come to grips with it, it will never be "hard" enough.

The key here is that the real work is being done to participant experience itself, and by each of them. The importance of the process is not to be shown by a demonstration of conformity with some publicly agreed understanding; that a collectively agreed point of view has been grasped according to some public measure, or that a public procedure, or a language-game can now be performed or played to a certain external, agreed standard.

There is, indeed, an element of this in the intellectual discipline that is displayed in the group; that its members do perform certain intellectual moves, and acknowledge them, responding appropriately when others make their own moves. The discussions can, moreover shape up agreement in judgment within the group - their shared language becoming more effective as they get to know each other, and make adjustments. They may even perform their own conceptual analyses.

But the educational point of these public activities and performances is not the displaying of them, or the demonstrating of them, and their refined public agreements may not extend to any other communities outside. The point is their effect on the inner experience of those who participate, and the internalisation of refined and disciplined processes that are modelled on the dialectic of the discussion itself.

What is the real work that is going on?

When people come together to discuss something that matters to them, with a view to understanding it better - not to master some external or public piece of knowledge or doctrine, but something that matters because it is personally serious, perplexing or important to them - they are bringing the complexity of their own minds and experience to the discussion. They want to test their understanding against the understanding and experience of others, learning for their own sake what others make of these shared personal issues, and why and how they make what they do. Our perplexity might resolve itself if we can see it in different ways, using tools that we all understand, but each with our unique impulses and initiatives in applying them, as richly different members of a team. Doing this with good will, humility, courage and respect is like participating in an enlarged mind.

In these groups of equals we may respect and even admire the abilities of some of our peers. We may ask them to explain things to us - consenting to some informal teaching. There is an important difference here that contrasts with what we do when we bring ourselves before authority, however. Among our equals we reserve the authority over what we take from the interaction. We are not there to please them with the appearance of our belief, or to show them an intellectual performance that they desire to see.

In the case of formal authority, there is always a degree of submission - a surrender of some of our own authority - and will - to another. Even when, among peers, we may temporarily confer an informal teaching authority on one of them, it is much more provisional. We "allow them" the authority of their experience or what they have made of it, because we respect their perception, and are willing to have ours challenged. They may be right, and we may be wrong, but it is we who are to decide that. The real testing is to be done by us, and not them. It is our testing of our experience that matters. We do not compromise our integrity, or divide it, as we may when the ambiguities of conventional schooling authority, and our ambivalence towards it, are involved.

"Indirectness" or "obliqueness"

I make a presentation to a class. The first purpose is to challenge them, so that, even though I may present some theoretical content, that content is secondary. The first purpose is to challenge, and the content is part of that purpose. We know, after all, that relatively little is retained from a lecture, but the content, as well as helping to give force to the challenge, may also make their own reading, study and discussion easier to do.

In the spirit of the challenge, I warn them of that spirit; that I am not responsible for the "truth" of what I offer. They are. I am not there to deceive them, but nor is my purpose to win them to my point of view, or my take on "the facts", or what the facts suggest. Authority for what they take away from all this is in their hands. I may change my mind in a year or so. The authority and responsibility for changing their minds is theirs.

Perhaps, as I finish, I open up a few preliminary questions arising from the challenging; perhaps encouraging them to submit theirs. Then as a discussion warms, I pull back, having set, as the rule, that they do not talk through me, or look to me for approval for what they say. I do, at times, ask for reasons, explanations, justifications. I ask for examples, and counter-examples. I ask for the identification of assumptions, and the implications of them, just as I ask for potential consequences. I encourage the pursuit of disagreement, even the invention of plausible disagreement.

I do this only to the extent that these things are obviously lacking, and I limit myself. It is vital that the discussion be about their agendas, and not mine. In this way I do some coaching of group skill, but keep it limited. If I do praise, it is simply in acknowledgement of one of these moves of skill, or as an acknowledgement of their mutual support, regardless of the content.

Sometimes I have the sense of something very important that is being missed. It preys on my mind. How will they ever come to terms with this issue if they don't notice this important point? As the discussion progresses, and this point is still being missed, I begin to feel a sense of responsibility for it. Surely, given my position as convener for this whole affair, I owe it to them, to my role as an educator, to the issue itself, to place it before them.

Foolishly I do so. If, on another occasion, I hold off and keep it to myself, the result is a revelation. Someone in the class eventually raises it, and the impact on the class is so obvious to me - if one of them says it to her or his peers, the effect is many times greater and more influential than if I offer it myself. The whole atmosphere changes when I intervene. The dynamics change, and have to be recovered. This difference - between their saying it and me saying it - is very visible to me, and I vow never to do that again.

If the point doesn't come up, and it matters so much, it is better to schedule another session and see if it comes up this second time. It is better to do this than corrupt the point by introducing it myself. If it doesn't come up at all, and it still matters, I may separate it out as a challenge, or part of a challenge, in a presentation at another time. To reschedule like this, though, there must be enough flexibility within the schedule - within the sequencing of classes - to enable such responsiveness.

The reason for this profound difference in effectiveness and power when a fellow learner makes a point, as compared with when I, as teacher, make it lies, I think, in the differences in the nature of the authority, and the distortions it can contain.

In the earlier stages of life, when the dependency of children is high, the authority of parents is not chosen by children, but imposed. And that imposed authority is conflicted, or we may say compromised; an authority divided, on the one hand, between being justified in the best interests of the child in terms of education and safety, but on the other as a protection of the rights of the parents. Boundaries are set, both for the sake of the best flourishing of the child, but also because of the other demands that are placed on parental lives - such as work and outside obligations, peace, mental health, their interests and pursuits and other aspects of their own flourishing; things that the child cannot be expected to fully understand or respect. The difference, however, isn't always clear. The authority itself is contaminated by the ambiguity.

Children are aware in some way, and from very early on, that these mixed motives exist. They are frequently made aware. Indeed, the ambiguity permeates much that parents want children to believe and understand about their behaviour and their worth. Much of our first learning (and misunderstanding) of conditional self-esteeem comes out of these interactions.

In very many instances, it is not to be supposed that it is "up to" the child, to make up their own mind about these things, and we must remember that how all this is understood is a matter of the interpretation and understanding of a very young child in the early stages of learning about power, authority, will and responsibility. Even when parents give reasons, there is often power and mixed agendas behind them, and the reasons can come to an end. "Just get in the car now!"

As the child grows, these relationships can evolve - and the parent-child relationships may become more like friendship and equality, but teaching in conventional schooling is not like this. It is like an early, paternalistic relationship, developmentally frozen. The teacher comes surrounded in a cloud of the agendas of others, and this compromised paternalism partially corrupts, in turn, the force and effectiveness of the reasons that teachers give. All of them have a context of compliance of one sort or another, and the degree to which that compliance is justified by the best interests of the learner is ambiguous at best.

In respectful discussions among peers, where all have begun to trust each other, as equals, and begun to appreciate the worth of their own minds through mutual appreciation within the group, it is therefore not surprising that the same contribution from one of them will have more power than if it is made by their teacher. They are in this together. They have begun to trust that, and themselves. The comments of their peers come to them more freely, and less encumbered. Less is at stake behind it. It is not surprising, either, that they can so often explain each other to each other better than we can.

What is my real role then, for I am not there to teach? "Facilitator" seems rather vague. "Leader" is inappropriate, for I am not there to lead, and neither are any of them. Their equality, and equal humility, their free initiative - to step up - and their responsibilities to each other to play their part are essential to the quality of the knowledge that they can create.

"Coach"? But my coaching is always of the whole group. It is kept minimal, and is never carried out in a "practice session" or a training or coaching session, except, perhaps, for a few preliminary remarks. "Coaching" might be an aspect of my one-on-one role, but not about behaviour in discussions, unless there is a major problem with someone undermining the whole process.

The conductor of an orchestra comes to mind - but conductors have far too large a hand in the performance, and I am certainly not at all the conductor of the discussion - more like its tuning fork. But there is an aspect of the conductor that does offer us something. The conductor is concerned with the experience of the whole, and of all - the musicians and the audience - and at a very refined level, while being unable to access the uniqueness of every experience.

We are looking to the sociology of the group to do its own training and cultivation here. Groups socialise their members; bring about conformity to group norms. We want to turn this basic characteristic of group behaviour to advantage, socialising the conditions of group inquiry and good reasoning.

My concern is with all of their experience - their experience of a process that is, above all, a collective, critical inquiry in which they are all engaged. I don't need to worry about what they uniquely experience, as individuals. I want them to be internalising the key characteristics of a quality discussion that is exemplary in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding; a discussion that is about something that matters educationally. I want this quality process to be at work on the unique geography of their own experience, and what they are making of it, and I can be content that this will work in educational ways, because of the warrant I have for trusting the process.

If it is a good model, they will tune themselves to it automatically, just because of what it models, and because they engage in it with respect. What they internalise will enhance their powers of thought - each no doubt differently, and in terms of their own experience - which works upon it, and is in turn, worked upon. It will do this because the process itself is sound, worthy of trust, and we must let it do its work.

I listen. Perhaps I write a note on the board representing every point or shift that is made. But as I watch and listen, I am feeling for the whole group. The eyes that meet mine, and what they seem to express, or when they catch each other's. The stiffening of attention, the breathing. The leaning forward, or the relaxing back in the chairs. The twisting to hear. The smile, the frown, the puzzlement. The patience. Who and what springs off who and what. The one who now speaks who rarely does. The one who puts themselves aside in support of others.

Was everyone engaged? That isn't at all the same as "did everyone speak?" It is a poor session - poorly developed by them as much as by me - if any of them aren't engaged, but their silence has little to tell us about their engagement or their activity. If any of them aren't engaged, then we haven't yet identified issues that matter to them all, or they aren't yet a team.

We debrief at the end. This isn't a "teaching appraisal", it is a brief time when we step back and look at the whole course of the discussion. We might wonder what we missed, what parallel topics might be worth considering, or the larger context, how we might have reframed our questions, what challenges we failed to make or that didn't arise. Was there any empirical knowledge that might have helped? Where might we go next?

Personally, were there any discoveries, changes of mind, ways or occasions on which any of us were challenged? Anything surprising about our experiences - such as discoveries about what others had experienced, or that other people had had similar questions or doubts - or feelings? Any special moves that were appreciated, or worth acknowledging, such as different kinds of support when we had difficulty? Anything that we would have liked to spend more time on - and why?

Looking back, were there any shifts in our discussions that just weren't blind wanderings? Were there blind alleys? Were there fruitful, expansive or illuminating shifts? How did they come about?

And when they get up to go, moving out of the room, down the corridor, out down the pathways . . . are they still talking about it?

Assessing the individual

An unschooler was asked how she could tell if her children were growing without measuring them. Her reply was that she could tell that they were growing in the same way that she could tell if a plant or tree was growing. At first glance this might appear to be just a loose kind of measurement. The tree looks taller. Might as well measure that. But there are so many dimensions, even to the growth of a tree. It might also have to do with width, density, limb weight. Well, measure them all, and see if a number of them are getting - well - bigger. But she is concerned with the whole, not just additively, while also being sensitive to the detail.

A human being is very different from a tree, of course. Given the priority of mind, we should be concerned to evaluate that largely opaque "inside", and not merely what is displayed on the surface. The "inside" is not measurable in any very useful way, and we should be keenly aware of the dangers of judging the inside from the outside. This is not to dismiss a concern for the agreements learners have reached with public judgment, either, but what matters in the end, even here, is the role of these public judgments, rules, procedures and understandings in the management of the growth of experience; what is made of it, and with it, by the learner, on the inside.

We can draw some conclusions from what they do, apart from their talk, but probably the only way we can ever get close to the experience and understanding of another person, and what they make of their experience, is by talking with them and, above all, by listening to their reflections and attempts to express themselves, and watching their natural and spontaneous reactions - not in response to our "testing", but in a trusting dialogue. This is the only way we ever can get close to those we would be close to, or they to us. It is the only way in which we could get close to understanding and appreciating what they believe, think, feel, value or are committed to; or to their doubts and uncertainties.

It is hard to know what to say to someone who thinks that measuring dimensions, and then comparing these measurements to measurements taken from others, is any serious effort at educational evaluation at all. To give any significant weight to this is simply to fail in human understanding, and to display a lack of educational awareness. It is to miss everything that is important.

Educational practice requires good educational understanding and judgment. Measurement is never a substitute. To the extent that we feel obliged to convert educational evaluation based on the quality of discourse into various kinds of measurement, this should be a flag to us of our educational failure - probably of educational purpose. Where measurement comes to be seen as an acceptable form of evaluation, it is our purpose that we should look to again - because the idea that such means of appraisal or evaluation could be adequate to our purposes suggests a drift away from purposes that are educationally justified.

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