Will this be on the test?

“Sir – will this be on the test?” is the most dispiriting thing you can hear as a young teacher. It’s a question asked when you are mid-flow, bursting with enthusiasm, sharing your love of a subject.

It’s a question that tells you that a person already understands the difference between learning and education - a passive aggressive reminder that the person is here to pass a test, not to learn. That if something is not on the test, you have no business talking about it. You are wasting their time. Learning is not part of the educational process, after all.

If someone wants to pass a test, the most efficient process is to give them the answers so that they can copy them into the paper. This is called cheating. Students generally understand that this is the net process though, so cheating has enduring appeal.

How about if we gave people the answers one day before the test, and gave them 24 hours to memorise them. Would this be cheating? Yes, probably.

What if we gave students a ‘study guide’ 24 hours before the test, one which contained all the answers, plus some other things that wouldn’t be on the test (but the student didn’t know which).

This is now entirely legit: this is education, stripped of all the silly ritual.

This is the knowledge-transfer paradigm at its worst, the assumption that separates education from learning: the notion that learning is about storing information like a book, or a computer. 

When I set things out in this way, I know how you react: ‘That’s not learning!’ you feel ‘Learning is so much more than that!’. So what is it then – if it’s not storing facts in your head? (This question will not be on the test).