I was reminded of the wisdom of Mark Twain when running across the following quote. It's simple truth seems all to relevant in today's circumstance. "There are three kinds of lies... Lies, damn lies and statistics." The oligarchy of our society has unfortunately used this truth to their advantage and to the detriment of majority. Not only have I experienced this first hand in the school system I taught in for 13 years but the scope of these "Statistics" has been brilliantly exposed through the HBO series the Wire. Below is and excerpt from an interview of the creator of the Wire David Simon by Bill Moyers on the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS earlier this year that is an all to familiar occurrence throughout our society. "DAVID SIMON: Well, and facts-- one of the themes of THE WIRE really was that statistics will always lie. That I mean statistics can be made to say anything.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats." Take a look.

[...]

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.

ROLAND "PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?

TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.

PREZ: Juking the stats.

TEACHER: Excuse me?

PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.

TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are."

Greed and power are the catalysts that create these "Statistics" created by professionals eager to improve their position and status in their profession. The above example focuses on the law enforcement and education but "Statistics" can and are used for any number of "Improvements" needed to provide proof of job well done to the voting public.

Statistics are often used as smoke and mirrors to hide the real truth. For instance. Educators have known for as long as there have been teachers that the most affective way to improve education is to lower the student teacher ratio. Educators know that the optimum size for most elementary school classes would be 1 teacher for every 15 students or less. But with the creative use of "Statistics" those educators can readily prove through "proper" testing that we are indeed educating our youth. But are we?

Teaching students how to take and pass tests does have some merit to a point but it does fall short in the long term. It just teaches students how to retain the facts that we choose long enough to regurgitate them back. Good education is teaching students not tests.

It seems that we have in all our sophistication forgotten the real purpose of education. The most fundamental purpose of education is to teach children how to learn. Even one of the greatest teachers of all time was a proponent of this philosophy if I am not mistaken. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life". Learning how to learn is the foremost purpose of education. As a bonus it would be nice to instill a passion for learning as well.

All a teacher can hope for is to send the student out the door with those two virtues. A passion for learning and the skills how to. Teaching for tests is really only for the teachers and administrators to give them an opportunity to pat themselves on the back and give them a false sense of security that they have educated our children.