The psychologist, Bill Livant, has remarked, "When a liberal sees a beggar, he says the system isn't working. When a Marxist does, he says it is". The same insight could be applied today to the entire area of education. The learned journals as well as the popular media are full of studies documenting how little most students know and how fragile are their basic skills. The cry heard almost everywhere is "The system isn't working". Responding to this common complaint, conservatives—starting (but not ending) with the Bush Adminstration—have offered a package of reforms in which increased testing occupies the central place. The typical liberal and even radical response to this has been to demonstrate that such measures are not likely to have the "desired" effect. The assumption, of course, is that we all want more or less the same thing from a system of education, and that conservatives have simply made an error in the means they have chosen to attain our common end. But what if students are already receiving—more or less—the kind of education that conservatives favor? This would cast their proposals for "reform" in another light. What if, as Livant points out in the case of beggars, the system is working?

The l7th century French philosopher, Pascal, noted that if you make children get on their knees every day to pray, whatever their initial beliefs, they will end up believing in God. It seems that a practice repeated often enough, especially if it includes particular movements and emotions, can exercise an extraordinary effect on how and what we think. Didn't Marshall McLuhan warn us in the early years of T.V. that "The medium is the message"? What applies to praying and to watching T.V. applies as well to taking exams. If you make students at any rung of the educational ladder take lots of exams, this will have at least as much influence on what they become as the