A few weeks back, I took my daughter to one of the clinics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for extensive testing to build a picture of her learning abilities and disabilities. Yesterday, her mother met with a psychologist to go over the test results, and last night we sat at the kitchen table, Karen and I, and talked about them. It was a disorienting experience, grappling with those test results. Because the child described by the tests has both less ability than our child and more ability. Her weaknesses didn’t look as weak and her strengths didn’t appear at all. In some areas she scored better than the way we ever see her work; but also, the things in which she most excels are not measured by the tests.
For example:
A couple nights ago, Karen and Grace got into an eating contest. Karen timed Grace eating a cup of applesauce in 53 seconds. Then Grace timed Karen eating a cup of applesauce in 42 seconds. And Grace got all excited. “I won!” she said, “I won!” She was baffled that Karen’s 42 seconds was faster than her 53 seconds.
On another night, I told her that I could no longer trade her one square of a Mr. Goodbar candy bar for three correct spelling words because she was getting good at spelling and she’d wind up with too much candy bar before bedtime. I told her that I would give her one square of Mr. Goodbar for every four correct words. But Grace didn’t like that bargain. She wanted more of the candy bar. So she bargained with me. “No,“ she said, “what if you give me one square for every ten words I get right?”
I said I would, and she was delighted at the bargain she had made. The math scores she got on the standardized tests show that she has some ability to add and subtract, but they don’t show you how she still cannot understand the way in which numbers represent quantities.
At the same time, she is one of the three most acute observers I’ve ever known. She notices extremely small details; she notices changes in a room when she goes away and comes back. She notices the way people interact with one another, and she understands what those things mean–a touch on the arm here, a raised eyebrow there, an angry word or a tender one–she notices and understands these things far more attentively than I did when I was her age. But there is no test for powers of observation, and there is no test for how well you can put observation into context.
The long and the short of it is that the child Karen and I spoke about last night as we read the test results was not really our child. What she did on the test was not what she does every day after school. Some large part of her wasn’t described at all. And there isn’t even any way to measure by testing the things about Grace that are most Grace-like: no way to describe the Grace who responded—when asked how she might change an experiment about the rate at which a sugar cube dissolves in various solutions—that she would like to try the experiment again, but this time, she and her classmates get to eat the sugar cubes. There’s no test that quantifies the Grace who wears her red felt hat with the bow over her jacket hood. There’s no test to understand why Grace is so crazy about anything and everything that glows in the dark.
I have not yet met a teacher who believes that the standardized testing imposed by No Child Left Behind is a good thing for children. It’s not because teachers are lazy and don’t want to be measured. It’s because they understand that teaching to the test is not the same thing as teaching, and is not the same thing as teaching how to learn. But even more, it’s because, as teachers, they understand that there is no such thing as a standardized child.
I understand the impulse for standardized testing. I think, at least in the beginning, it comes from a generous concern for human community. We set standards because we want to be fair, we want to treat each other equally, without favoring one or another over anyone else in the classroom, or the hospital, or the job application process. So all the students must pass the same test, and all the patients eat dinner at the same time, and all the applicants respond to the same questions about education and past work experience. It’s only fair, after all, that everyone should meet the same requirements.
The problem is that sometimes what may be fair is far less than grace-filled. Sometimes maliciously, sometimes from shortness of vision, what may be fair is less than gracious. If we lived in a world where grace, rather than fairness, were the standard, each student would be helped to strengthen the parts of their mind that worked best, and assisted in finding the place where those strengths are the standard. Hospital patients might be able to choose, from among several options, the dinner time closest to their schedule at home. And job applicants would be allowed space and time to tell about work experience that won’t fit into the standard form.
Is this realistic? Maybe not. It’s probably absolutely subversive—but I’m convinced it is exactly as subversive as Jesus would be.
There is, after all, the way he nuanced the laws about the Sabbath. He insisted that the Sabbath was made for men and women, not men and women for the Sabbath. So Jesus is in a synagogue and he sees a woman so bent with her affliction that she can’t lift her head. [Luke 13] The rules say that no work can be done on the Sabbath. But here is this woman, who is suffering. She’s suffered for 18 years; why must she suffer any longer? Jesus heals her right then and there, because the Sabbath was made in service to women and men; women and men were not made to serve the Sabbath. Jesus doesn’t look at the rules and the standards—he looks at the individual woman, and he responds to her in love.
Many years ago, I read an essay by the theologian Howard Thurman entitled “Mysticism and the Experience of Love.” I’ve always remembered one particular sentence from that essay, word for word. Thurman wrote:“To be to another human being what is needed at the time that the need is most urgent and most acutely felt, this is to participate in the precise act of redemption.”
“To be to another human being what is needed at the time that the need is most urgent and most acutely felt, this is to participate in the precise act of redemption.”
I am clear in my mind that Thurman is writing about God’s redeeming power, and of our human capacity to be the agents of God’s grace. But this is also a perfect description of Jesus’ response to the crippled and bent woman who came to the synagogue on the sabbath. His redemptive act was to be present with her in the very moment that the two were together, and to meet her need in that same present tense. Not on Sunday, when the Sabbath would be over, or in some back alley where the leader of the synagogue couldn’t pass judgment. In the synagogue, on the Sabbath, because that’s where she was and what she needed. The healing was an individual solution, not a general rule.
I am always more and more convinced that Christianity is deeply subversive of the world as we know it, deeply subversive of our social order, of our institutions, of all our regulations and protocols. And the emphasis on responding with love to the needs of individuals, regardless of their category or class—this seems to me as profoundly subversive as anything else Jesus did.
That same emphasis is what I love about this place, about our college. It’s one place where we do absolutely live our Quaker character, even though we mostly don’t notice or acknowledge that we are doing so. It’s part of our institutional DNA to understand that the equality of our students demands that we accept them in all their differences; demands that we acknowledge that there are no standard-issue students and that our work with each student is to help them along from where they are to where they could be. And we do this reflexively, automatically, because there is no question that this is our mission, that this is one of the characteristics that distinguishes us, and distinguishes a Wilmington College education. We understand how to treat students equally in all their differences, rather than treating them equally by forcing them to be all the same. We treat them equally in their differences by loving each one individually.
I don’t know what else to say about that. Except it makes me glad to be here. And it allows me to believe that there are times when I, too, manage to be as radically subversive as Jesus was.
