Society Cannot Filter for Capability using Written Exams
Language Flexibility and the Preordained Determination of Proficiency
One does not understand a thing by reading a statement about that thing until it makes sense. Learning cannot materialize out of an unchanged piece of text. Learning requires dynamism to work.
That dynamism comes in the form of consistent questioning by the student, done until the original statement’s wording can be transformed into new wording; the words a student subjectively uses in their own life.
Language is extremely flexible. Virtually infinitely so. People arrive at a statement with countless contexts, and it is *only* context that endows words with meaning. A static statement with no dynamism (questioning) to probe its meaning, and thus no transformation into subjectively meaningful wording, will mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people.
Word problems, like those used in textbooks and written examinations, can *only* be considered as a way for selecting a random subset from the population and calling them “learned” or “smart.”
This subset is random relative to the near infinite possible ways one might choose to word a question, such that it makes sense.
The notion that a textbook word problem can asses proficiency in problem solving is logically incoherent and provably obtuse.
Schooling matches a preselected culture to the notion of “capable”, by using a subset of life’s flexibility and selling it as an objective assessment of competence.
Society cannot test for proficiency through written examination because such a test is administered statically and thus, by definition, can only preordain its notion of aptitude among a population.
No amount of dynamic learning done *prior* to the static examination can improve a static assessment. As long as the assessment is done statically, it resets all genuine learning done prior to examination back to the narrow, preordained determination of proficiency.
Society cannot filter for capability using written exams, it can only select for a random cluster of individuals who tend to speak the same way.