An understanding of history is essential to understand both why and how politics works in the modern day. To toss it all aside as 'dates, names, and places' is just... uneducated. From the rest of your comment, it sounds like you're a hard science person doing the usual thoughtless dismissal of the soft sciences.
False. Tests don't serve education, they hinder it. That's my entire point.
It doesn't really matter if it "works" or not, the decision making behind it is not logical, and it never will be.
I'm not saying to center the teaching on the test, but to teach around them. The tests are here to stay. You have to do well on them. This is not something there is a choice about. But that doesn't mean you can't do well on the test and at the same time teach around it. Not for it, around it.
Also, that's a strange idea that history is about rote memorization and not about understanding. Maybe I got lucky with my history teachers, but for me it was all about understanding how it all fit together, not raw facts.
That isn't an argument. That's a status quo fallacy. It doesn't matter if people want it or not, it's nonsense and should be abolished. Also, I highly doubt that people actually want this. The ones who want this broken system are businesses and corporations, because it saves them time and effort, and society as a whole has to shoulder the cost for their laziness. The education system must not bow to the demands of businesses and corporations; it has be the other way round.
>The tests are here to stay. You have to do well on them. This is not something there is a choice about.
Sorry, if everyone thought and acted like this, we'd never have any progress. This way of thinking is exactly the reason why this broken system is still around. Stop telling people that you can't change it and that they should shut up and accept it. That's cancerous and harmful. Speak out. Voice your discontent about this nonsense. Tell other people to do the same. People who just accept anything are everything that's wrong with the world, and the ones who propagate this attitude are even worse.
Sure, the businesses that directly provide the testing services, I guess. Beyond that, which businesses?
This is not some sin of the corporate world here. This is an artifact of the educational system. Of administrators and politicians and parents. It's a way to look like they're making some sort of progress. Businesses couldn't care less.
Except what they are evaluating holds no meaning. Standardized tests are nonsense. Tests in general are. What you're measuring isn't knowledge, or understanding, what you're measuring is compliance to artificial and highly contrived environments. Which is a pretty useless skill, especially when compared to a deep understanding of the subject matter.
>Teach better around the tests.
By the FSM, NO. Teach around understanding, around critical thinking, logic and reason. But not around tests. This is exactly the kind of teaching that destroyed any interest I had in subjects that where taught back in school. There's nothing more frustrating to learn things not because they might be interesting, or because the deep understanding of the subject might be useful, but because they are on the next test.
Granted, there are subjects where you can't teach "understanding" per se. History is such a subject. It's based on a lot of numbers, names and places, most of which are simple facts (WWII happened from 1933-1945 etc). However, I would argue that this means it's completely useless to do tests on history. What are you testing? Essentially memorization. Which is a useful skill, but not one on which a lot of your grades should depend. Especially because a lot of students spend hours memorizing facts which they will have forgotten a week after the test, and that time time could have been better spend on sensible things.
>But implying that the very idea of standardized testing is constricting is a waste of time. They aren't going anywhere.
You're essentially saying that because we can't do much about them makes them any less useless and constricting. Arguing that the problem can't be solved doesn't make the problem go away.