I agree, the issue as it's argued tends to become a false dichotomy. I've always found testing to be one of the most effective techniques for learning. That's not to say standardized tests are most effective types of tests for learning, but they certainly have their place in a public educational system.
But hell, what do I know? I also think rote memorization gets a bad rap.
In one sense, of course, you are right. But I was using the term as a shorthand for the state standardized tests used to measure academic progress grade by grade (e.g., CAT, TAKS). These state standardized tests tend to measure the minimum requirements for a grade level.
But for a test to be a learning technique, it must challenging enough to make the students study new material. Otherwise, it's just an excercise in "monkey see, monkey do."
Personally, I think the future of standardized tests will be like ACT's Compass college placement test, which progressively adapts to the level of the student as he/she is taking it, yet still results in a comparative standardized score.
You should really put those two lines in quotations. I know the second line is word for word from Seth Godin's blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/the_differen...), and quick check had your first line pretty close to word for word from Wikipedia.
Out of curiosity, did you actually read the article, or did you just comment on the title?
The article used facebook, which already has about $800m in revenue, as a starting point to discuss a major factor of success for social media. He had a good point.
edit/ In fact, his point could be applied very well to the recent Digg fiasco. If they had ranked "relevance to users" as high as "revenue maximization" then they may not have lost so many users.
Do you know how much of that $800 million is recurring income? They have >$100 million deals with both Google and Microsoft separately. From what I've heard their popularity with advertisers, their actual paying customer, is in the tank. They are also one of the costliest websites in the world to run.
I see the difference between creativity and insanity as a function of society. If a given society sees the connections as useful, it's creative. If instead, society cannot make sense of the connections, it's insanity.
As an analogy, mentally challenged children were seen as cursed in ancient Sparta and were routinely put to death. On the other hand, Mayan culture viewed mentally challenged children as "divine gifts," and the children could easily rise to positions of religious prominence and status in adulthood.
It's less a matter of the individual than how that individual can fit into society.
>I once suffered a mental illness that made it difficult for me to feel certain emotions. One of the most fascinating results of the experience was the degree to which my ability to reason degraded.
This helps reinforce a thought I've been playing around with since my 20's. It seems quite ridiculous to me that reason is set in conflict with emotion (a remnant, I believe, of the historical conflict of science contra religion in the west). It is much more likely that the ability to reason is a subset of emotion, i.e., reasoning is nothing more than the development of particular emotions working in concert. This conception is more aligned with how evolution actually operates (building upon the processes of before) rather than having to explain a "magical" reason which just appears out of nowhere in the human mind and dominates the animal nature.
Just a thought...I hope you were able to deal with your illness well.
But hell, what do I know? I also think rote memorization gets a bad rap.