Some of the students in Card’s Battle School in the novel come to the conclusion, via reading and dull memories of life before enrollment, that they are being denied the benefit of their childhoods—even students who were candidates for Battle School but washed out early seem to realize that their ability to be children is hindered heavily by the unbearably high expectation that have been thrust upon them by their callously imposing adult counterparts. This realization is painful for the fictional children, who are self aware enough to understand that they are being robbed, but is equally painful for their corporeal counterparts in my students, who are unaware that their childhood educational experiences should not be defined by lofty and perennially changing standards and tests—tests which either provide no data to steer reflective and conscientious instruction, or expectations which require no opportunity or time to assimilate that data into teaching; which is the granted rationale for burdening the students with the weight of the exams in the first place.
In the novel, Ender’s older brother Peter is a washout who finds himself in a murderous rage, and a calculating misanthropy as a result of being rejected and regarded as a failure from a very early age, and furthermore despises his brother for being, not only acceptable, but exceptional. Peter lashes out against his brother when he is young and weak, and later on takes out his frustrations against woodland creatures and ensnares their sister, Valentine, into a world of political intrigue via “the nets” which is a surprisingly predictive version of a government censored internet. I find that my own students are feeling fairly defeated at the end of these tests, because the tests themselves and the practice materials are reasonably unaligned, and since the norms of the test require that they sit for hours without moving, talking, or sleeping (once they’ve completed the test) one can understand they are also restless. What I have found, and any testing grade teacher can attest to, is that the students are cooked and irate after the test. They are emotionally and intellectually brow-beaten and fit to be tied. Fights happen after these tests, without variation as the winter follows the fall. So these tests are set to make the students exceptional and instead have had no measurable benefit to the school system and also force the students to violence and emotional breakdown.
In a faculty meeting at my school just before the first round of testing was to begin it occurred to me, while they were outlining the protocols for dealing with students who refuse to test, students who break down emotionally during the test, and students who have bodily emergencies during the test that if these are the issues that have to be anticipated to the degree of protocol institution, they probably aren’t a very good idea. If you have to prepare for students to start trembling with stress and start oozing tears of frustration and fear, a reasonably person would assume that giving high stakes tests to eight year olds is not optimal—especially when the students know that these tests will make or break their ability to pass the next grade which has an impact on their entire lives. It’s not like in a fictional world where the students who ice out of Battle School are invariably jerks and adversaries to the main character, these students are real people struggling against circumstances that seem to be continually stacked against their progress to an unknown end.
While in the novel Ender’s Game, the protagonist ends up overcoming all of his obstacles and meeting his potential, and realizing why his life had to be so difficult, children in the real world have little recourse and few resources to overcome the system we have set up to guarantee their failure. Ender is able to beat the odds because he is the most intelligent person in a fictional world set around him…but our students, bright as they may be, are pawns in a larger political game set at breaking the teacher’s unions, privatizing the schools systems, dividing the middle class into working class and upper class with no intermediary step, and ensuring the students that do excel are shoveled into so much student loan debt that they won’t be able to afford their own coffins. They aren’t in a fictional world where they have to grow up to fight extra-terrestrial creatures out to exterminate man, they are in world all-too-real that seems set up to enslave men in debt and frustration.
The entire scenario leaves only this question: who stands to gain from these examinations? It isn’t the teachers, it isn’t the students, and it certainly isn’t the integrity of the education system. When you can answer that question you’ll find the buggers that we should be training our students to oust from positions of authority and take back the future that they are being denied, and hope that they can regain the present that they haven’t been offered.
