Best-Student-Fetish

De film History Boys handelt over 'the best students". Gerald Graff hield een lezing waarin hij bedenkingen formuleert over 'The Best-Student-Fetish'. Interessante bedenikingen bij het verhaal van de film:

Gerald Graff, ‘Assessment Changes Everything’.

Uit de inleiding:

“When I served on college admissions committees in the 1990s, a phrase that kept coming up was "the best students," in comments like "We've got to get the best students" or "Rival College X down the road is beating us out for the best students." I came to think of the mentality behind these comments as the Best-Student Fetish, a symptom of the increasingly obsessive competition among colleges for the cream of the high school senior crop. The more I thought about the Best-Student Fetish, the more perverse its logic seemed: it is as if the ultimate dream of college admissions is to recruit a student body that is already so well educated that it hardly needs any instruction! Sitting in admissions committee meetings, it was all I could do not to ask, "Hey, why don't we recruit bad students and see if we can actually teach them something?"”

Uit het slot:
“As David Bartholomae observes, "We make a huge mistake if we don't try to articulate more publicly what it is we value in intellectual work. We do this routinely for our students--so it should not be difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and legislators." If we do not try to find that public language but argue instead that we are not accountable to those parents and legislators, we will only confirm what our cynical detractors say about us, that our real aim is to keep the secrets of our intellectual club to ourselves. By asking us to spell out those secrets and measuring our success in opening them to all, outcomes assessment helps make democratic education a reality.