Testing in the schools: A help or a hindrance?

In an article in our regular feature ‘Viewpoints and Controversies’ entitled ‘Ability Tests? A Shot in the Dark’,¹ the Soviet Academician Arthur V. Petrovsky defined the limits of a certain conception of mental development which he, for his part, saw as being directly governed by children's social and cultural environment and the education they receive and not as a spontaneous process of revelation of intelligence. Based on unscientific presuppositions, tests, in his view, cannot measure the mysterious quantity labelled intelligence. Although thus expressing the strongest reservations concerning this scientifically unfounded method, he said at the end of his article that the argument, though it had gone on for a long time, was still unsettled. The American educator whose outspoken views we publish below returns to the charge from a different angle; far from invalidating Petrovsky's arguments, he too denounces the obstacles to the renewal of educational methods, democratization and the universalization of genuinely scientific thought which tests multiply and institutionalize. And so the debate on tests continues. Our readers are invited to join in.