If You Don't Measure It, Does It Exist?

The mantra of education mavens is metrics: whatever can't be quantified might as well not exist.  Teaching by the numbers, so to speak.  Such "thinking" has left Virginia public school students with SOLs  (that's "standards of learning" for the scatologically minded) that mechanize teaching and stifle learning.  (Which is not to say that state-run education before the No Child Left Behind consistently amounted to much.)

Check out this map of the distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins: http://flowingdata.com/2009/05/12/maps-of-the-seven-deadly-sins/.  Its creators measured certain behaviors and think they measured sin.  What a joke.  Looking at this suggests that places like Sioux Center, Iowa are especially virtuous, and we know that's not the case!

Sin, as a rabbi (or guru, if you prefer) named Jesus, once said, comes from the heart.  Metrics of the heart?  No test for that -- at least not on earth.  So let's quit pretending that education can be reduced to rubrics and metrics and get on to encouraging real learning.