I often have used the Department of Motor Vehicles (the DMV) as

10 Teaching Minds I often have used the Department of Motor Vehicles (the DMV) as an example of the best there is in testing. They have two tests. Dumb multiple choice questions that make no sense and a real test that tests to see whether you can drive. Schools typically don’t have the real test at all, one that tests to see whether you actually can do something, so the DMV at least is smarter than the school system. But the real issue is something else entirely. Driving is an instance of a piece of very complex behavior that exemplifies one of the ways in which we learn. Perhaps more important, driving entails a great deal of other things, which could be learned and should be learned. A simple example of this is car mechanics. Once upon a time schools taught kids to fix cars as well as to drive them. Perhaps they still do. But vocational subjects like that have been relegated to the back burner of education so that more testable subjects can be taught. Also, cars have gotten more difficult to fix. This is too bad, because if car mechanics were required instead of physics, students actually might learn science. What do I mean by this? When we hear an outcry about the nation’s need to make children learn science, no one ever asks why. The standard answer, if this is ever asked, is that science is important in tomorrow’s world or some such nonsense. Push harder and you might get some remarks along the lines that soon all the scientists will be Indian and Chinese, which may be the real fear of those who push science in the United States. To address this question properly, one has to ask what exactly is meant by “science.” Imagine that you are a student working on fixing a car in a car mechanics class. As I write this Iam imagining a scene from the musi- cal Grease, which was set in the 1950s when there actually were cars to work on in school. I never got to work on a car because I went to a science high school where such a thing would be looked down upon. So when I graduated from high school and drove to college and my car broke down, I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do. I wish I could tell you that at least I understood the physics of the engine but I didn’t. I just knew F = MA and other stuff that wasn’t going to help me fix my engine. Now let me ask you, how is fixing one’s car engine like fixing one’s air conditioning or plumbing? The answer to this question has HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023756