AS GRADUATION approaches, those fourth-year students who are not drowned in their theses can take a moment to wonder what their diplomas will mean. Huge, grand frames for these papers are on sale, and presumably the meaning behind the diplomas will live up to the dark wood and gold seals. We will wave them at employers and put them on display in our homes or offices, thinking that they testify to - what? To a good liberal education? To readiness for graduate school or the "real world?" To our capacity to pay tuition and stay just sober enough to make a "C?"
Students four years younger than ourselves have the same questions, although hopefully fewer have had to battle hangovers while taking an exam. But the question underlying much of the debate over education for elementary and secondary students is the same as that which soon-to-be college graduates ought to be able to answer. We undervalue education by reducing it to a status symbol. We need to decide whether diplomas mean that we are "educated people," that we are prepared people or just that we need a job, dammit.
At the collegiate level, there are no across-the-board exams to ensure that our diplomas signify any particular collection of knowledge. Some of us have gained expertise in designing bridges and are unable to read Middle English; others have memorized every significant First Amendment case without learning the difference between mitosis and meosis. We are guaranteed to have some basic understanding of our majors, but that's about it.
Increasingly, American students treat college as an expensive and prestigious sort of vocational or technical school, except that we are less expert at translating our knowledge into practically useful forms than graduates of such schools.
Universities' requirements that students learn a foreign language or take a certain amount of math and science are met with protests. Because we spend thousands of dollars on our educations, we often consider them to be a luxury good, rather like a Mercedes, and we think we should be able to choose the options. We want to look good to graduate schools and future employers, and the "liberal education" just slows us down.
This has not always been true. When a college education was less common, it was treated with more awe. Students who were required to learn dead languages generally accepted their lot, because this body of knowledge was considered a prerequisite to being an educated person.
Of course, this concept of education contained a great deal of elitism, so that people who could translate Virgil would be able to think of themselves as superior to people who could not.
Modern college curriculums have replaced the uniform form of knowledge with a more expansive and flexible body of possibilities. Our grandparents probably never dreamed of learning Urdu, even if such a class existed at their schools, but now universities consider competence in any foreign language - not just European ones - to be a sign of a student's deserving a diploma. Those setting the requirements for college graduation struggle to make education mean more than a signal to employers that this person should be paid more than a high school graduate.
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Even a high school diploma appears to be out of reach for some of the students in American schools. As politicians argue for standardized testing and against "social promotion," Americans should note that when students are held back repeatedly, or not allowed to graduate because of failure to pass a test, they are more likely to drop out ("The Test Mess," New York Times, April 7). A high school diploma begins to seem unattainable, and without that diploma, young people have little chance of getting out of poverty - just as a college diploma is increasingly the key to entering the middle class.
Parents and teachers also complain that test-taking removes the joy from learning. Imagine that history majors have to be tested in integral calculus to graduate. They might have to skip taking a fascinating Civil War seminar to prepare for the exit exam, mandated by state officials who think all college graduates should understand calculus.
Those who support tests such as Virginia's appropriately named SOLs, or Standards of Learning, think that, for a school to be accredited, 70 percent of its graduates need to be able to recognize imagery. If diplomas are handed out regardless of how much the recipients actually have learned, the diplomas will lose their meaning.
Moreover, those who favor testing say that graduating students without ensuring that they have some basic skills means schools have failed to fulfill their obligations to children. Certainly, the possibility of consumers and voters who cannot distinguish between fact and opinion - Objective 6 in the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills - is alarming.
Almost as disturbing, however, is the finding that some New York University students didn't know who Adam Smith was ("Beware the Yikes of March," New York Times, Jan. 29). These are the people who will make up our intelligentsia.
If an Ivy League graduate can become president without knowing the name of India's prime minister, perhaps Americans already have decided what education is: not something that widens minds, or fills them with particular bits of information, but merely the most important status symbol separating classes.
(Pallavi Guniganti's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at pguniganti@cavalierdaily.com.)
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