Repost: Stop Sacrificing Children to Moloch

Below is a repost of 2018’s most read entry in the blog.  A highly revised version of it should appear soon in Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry.

 

As someone who has been publicly critical of learning outcomes assessment for a long time, one of the questions I am often asked is: “If you are so opposed to assessment, what would you replace it with?” By way of an answer I have started resorting to this fable:

 

Imagine that you live in a Bronze Age village. You and everyone else in the village depend for your livelihood on subsistence farming, so you have a keen interest in the success of your crops. Because of that, you have developed a good sense of when to plant what crop, what types of soil work best with specific crops, when to weed, when to harvest and so on. It’s not scientific knowledge but it works pretty well. Still, you are always on the look out for ways of improving your yields.

 

One day a group of priests show up. They hold an information session at which they advise you that in the imperial capital (which, of course, taxes your crops), the authorities are concerned that the crop yields in the villages (and thus the tax revenues) are not what they could be. They would like to see that change.

 

The priests point out that most of the other villages have begun sacrificing children to Moloch in order to improve their yields. Reluctantly, your village agrees to start sacrificing children to Moloch in the hope that he will reward you with better harvests.

 

At first, it seems to be working. Soon the village has a new temple to Moloch and a clutch of recently hired associate and assistant priests. But after a couple of harvests your yields have reverted to the mean.

 

A delegation goes to the priests and asks what the problem is.

 

Moloch, you are told, does not bestow his favors on those who just go through the motions of sacrificing children. You need to buy in to the process, to commit, to really have faith, or it won’t work.

 

So you stop making the most junior farmers do all the sacrificing, you start spending more time going to tedious ceremonies devoted to Moloch, and really try to commit.

 

Still, the crop yields don’t change. You go back to talk to the priests. You note that that there is now a new wing on the building and the temple complex is starting take up good arable land that you once used to produce food.

 

You tell them that your crop yields seem about the same, but the relentless expansion of the temple complex is cutting into the total production of food.

 

They respond that Moloch worship was never really about crop yields. It’s more about the conversations it sparks about how much we care about our crops and how it lets us reflect on what we and Moloch value about our children. And don’t forget, the imperial tax collector, and the Solaria Foundation that advises him, feel very strongly about the importance of Moloch worship. And anyway, what would you replace Moloch worship with if we did stop? Don’t you care about the crops?

 

So how would we replace Moloch worship? Golden Calves to Ba’al? Cats to Isis? Bulls to Mithras?

 

Or, might it be a positive step just to stop sacrificing children to Moloch? There would be fewer resources squandered on the temple and the priests. The land the temple sits on could be put back in cultivation and even if your yields remained the same, at least you would have a little more land in production.

 

This is pretty much where we are now with assessment. Assessment is just as effective as and no more grounded in evidence than the cult of Moloch. No one can show that 30 years of assessment has caused improvements in student learning. The arguments for assessment are more faith-based than scientific. That it has not yielded results is attributed to the faculty’s lack of faith (aka “buy in”). Conveniently this is an unfalsifiable argument in that faith is hard to measure, so assessors can always fall back on the “not enough buy in” argument any time someone points out that assessment can’t be shown to improve student learning. And just making that observation is seen as an example of people like me not buying in to assessment.

 

So, as with Moloch worship, just stopping would bring benefits: fewer wasted resources, many fewer meetings, and less administrative intrusion into the curriculum.

 

We can probably all agree that Moloch does not affect agricultural yields. But it’s worth thinking briefly about what has actually caused changes in agricultural yields over the centuries. What might our Bronze Age villagers have done to increase the productivity of their crops?

 

The increase in crop yields just since World War Two has been staggering and the contrast would be even more dramatic if you compared Bronze Age yields to modern food crop productivity. These increases are largely attributable to scientific agriculture. Careful, well-designed, controlled, scientific experiments conducted by experts have produced improved, higher yielding crops and determined the best practices for growing them. If there is an unsung hero of the 20^th century it is Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist whose work is partly responsible for making it possible for the planet to support over 7 billion people.

 

Borlaug did not ask farmers to change their practices continually based on their own amateur assessments of the year’s crop. Meaningful study of crop yields and performance involves controlling for myriad external variables. There is rainfall, sunlight, temperature, and soil chemistry, all of which have to be systematically taken into account to determine whether a cultivar or practice is in fact producing the increased yields you are seeking.

 

Student learning takes place in an equally complex and variable social, physical, and financial environment. Assessment takes none of this into account and asks instructors to continually change their practices based on bogus data. The Green Revolution worked; assessment has not delivered on its promises.

 

For whatever reason, the study of higher education does not attract the resources and talent that, say, the study of genetics, biochemistry or economics does, so we have yet to find our Norman Borlaug.

 

Maybe the 21^st century will see an educational revolution that equals the Green Revolution of the 20^th century. But while we wait, let’s stop sacrificing children to Moloch.