So lets start with a definition of education so we know what we want to measure.
Merriam-Webster said, "the knowledge and development resulting from an educational process."
The Free Dictionary said, "An instructive or enlightening experience"
Wikipedia may have had what I think is the most thorough definition when it said, "Education in the general sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another."
So when someone receives an education from the public K-12 system it is a series of formative effects covering a number of topics some of which are formal and some which are informal.
So I ask the question again, how can we effectively measure education? What is the mark of an educated individual?
Lets start by describing the current way "education" is measured. We measure a persons "education" through tests. we provide information in such a manner as to have a formative effect on the mind, character...passing along the accumulated knowledge of society. In order to judge whether this information has been transmitted, we test. Testing is left in the hand of the teacher to create and then judge/ grade. Whether it be essay, multiple choice/ true or false, our current method of testing only looks at short term retention. I can retain information needed for testing with relative ease and then loose this information just as quickly. This is easy to do int he social sciences (History, English...for me anyway). but not so much for the math and sciences where information builds and can only be progressed though accumulation of knowledge. After writing that, I understand how biased that sounds, because it is. That is the way I accrue knowledge. And testing is much more straight forward. the answer is write or wrong. Standardized test have been created to provide a look at how all children fair on the exact same set of questions, under the exact same set of circumstances. But he circumstances are never equal. No matter how exact the proctor is while administering the test, the circumstances for each child is different, whether it be on the home front or just he child's general capacity for learning. The measurement of education in its current form of Standardized test is a crude yard stick. It forces teachers to limit creativity in the classroom in order to ensure her students know the information that is going to be on the test, not readying our children to be the future leaders or scientist, just the next average joe, only as good as everyone else. Just my opinion. I don't think I answered the question...
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