How To Take An Exam... And Remake The World
By Bertell Ollman
Black Rose Books, 2001
191 pp, US$19.99 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
How's this for the dream exam! There is one paper consisting of just 10 true/false questions. You know the correct answer is true for all questions. If you forget, the answer is on the back of the exam paper. If you still manage to fail, you can take the exam as many times as necessary until you pass. Everybody wins a prize from this exam — if you are applying for a handgun in Michigan (capital city, Detroit, the "murder capital" of the USA).
On the other hand, says Bertell Ollman in his splendid little book on exams and society, if the reward is graduation and a decent job and quality of life, then the prizes are strictly rationed and graded.
Ollman's book is a clever self-help book for students on how to pass exams whilst holding up to critical scrutiny the exam and the capitalist system it thrives in. The ideology and practice of exams reinforce capitalism, argues Ollman, professor of political science at New York University and a Marxist, by promoting the idea that if you're an "A" student or have a successful career, it's because you have superior ability. If you fail, in life as in exams, it's your fault, not the fault of a capitalist system of structural privilege and inequality.
Exams have very little to do with testing knowledge, let alone critical thinking, and they are thoroughly alien to cooperative learning and working practices. They are intensely competitive and highly subjective. Exam grades reflect more about the biases, moods and inconsistencies of the exam-marker than they measure the ability of the exam-taker.
Most teaching is exam-driven, and education is driven by the needs of the corporate economy. Narrow courses, safe professors and passionless curricula are aimed at producing docile workers for future employers whilst exams provide the discipline to force students to stay within this system.
Exam-obsessive Japan illustrates the paradigm with scary clarity. To aid the training of students in rote learning and to condition them to the competitive struggle for grades and jobs, an industry of private "cram schools" has flourished in Japan solely to prepare students to pass exams. Because some cram schools are more effective at this than others, there are now cram schools which prepare students to pass exams to gain entrance to the better cram schools!
The exam-infested Japanese "education" system produces small armies of compliant, unimaginative, suicide-prone whiz kids used to doing as they are told and kept in a constant state of anxiety-ridden obedience over performance and fear of failure. Ideal material for the Japanese capitalist class to extract profits from.
Worker insecurity and employer power are enhanced by the employment future facing many exam survivors under capitalism — "welcome to the world of part-time, temporary, 'flexible', low-paying, no-benefit jobs" and "disposable, throw-away workers", in which the ability to please an employer, as one pleases an examiner, is dominant. This capitalist world to which the prospective wage-slave graduates is one of economic growth driven by increased exploitation of workers.
In the USA from 1983 to 1997, productivity rose by 17% yet the share of society's wealth going to workers decreased by 3%. Of the new wealth created over this period, 86% went to 1% of the population. As Ollman quotes from the Observer magazine, "the market is not rising on a bubble of fictions but on the rock-hard foundations of the spoils of class war".
Ollman warns, however, that it is rarely wise to attempt this sort of radical class critique in exams. Exams are the weapons of the enemy for fighting on their terrain. Contrary to the alarms rung by conservatives, few teacher-academics are Marxists. Most collude with the capitalist order by taking the capitalist framework of their academic discipline for granted. They rarely welcome, and may actively punish, a challenge to their fundamental, if hidden, assumptions.
Radical students, in particular, need strategies to survive exams while remaining true to their convictions. Ollman's exam tips are practical and his book is a valuable form guide for student-punters gambling in an educational system that runs on large doses of exam luck. Ollman, an exam-atheist, knows how the exam-believers think and he passes on the exam secrets and mysteries of the academic priesthood.
Also invaluable are Ollman's potted cheat sheets on the core principles of the capitalist system — surplus value, alienation, patriotism, corporate welfare (US$125 billion a year in the USA), the "paradox" of growth in GDP and declining living standards.
Also instructional are Ollman's tips on how to spot the capitalist wolf in euphemistical sheep's clothing. Rarely are capitalists called by their real name — they are always entrepreneurs, the "business community", employers ("never 'un-employers' though they also unemploy workers"), even, as in Holland, "work-givers" or "social partners".
The bright ideas spun by capitalist logic are entertainingly mocked by Ollman. "Pollution credits", for example, "allow the companies that pollute more than the law allows to buy the 'rights' or credits of companies that pollute very little if at all. This way the big polluter is happy, because it can now pollute to its heart's content. The other companies are happy, because they've just made money for not doing what they didn't do anyway".
Capitalists — and establishment politicians — who deviate from the capitalist commandment of investment for profit-maximisation are soon capitalists and politicians no more.
So who ya gonna call if you want a real paradigm-buster? Only revolutionary socialists. Liberals won't do. They don't understand that the class game is rigged, that a "have-not" majority is essential to the minority of "haves". As Ollman notes, "a liberal sees a beggar on the street and says the system is not working. A Marxist sees a beggar on the street and says it is". The socialist answer to the dictatorship of money is democracy — economic and political.
Ollman's book, served up with lashings of humour including classic socialist cartoons, is a wonderful course in how to take exams and how to examine capitalist society and its education institutions. The latter will thoroughly deserve their fail grade.