>Hundreds of years old, because if you want a standardized school system you have to at least seem to judge pupils by their merits in vaguely similar ways acros

>Hundreds of years old, because if you want a standardized school system you have to at least seem to judge pupils by their merits in vaguely similar ways across a very diverse set of schools and educators. We can't know beforehand what is the right way to teach (or what one should learn). Only time can show. Imposing control over education makes everyone live by the same mediocre standards; you reduce dimensionality to just one scale from number A to number B and you cut out the randomness. At the end you get the same situation as in every field where you impose any sort of metrics: teachers and students just try to game them. >Being someone who decides what to measure is a position of great power and responsibility Humanity had whole 20th century to see how central planning works. One man or thousand can't do the job better for a multimillion society that each individual or groups of individuals can do themselves. Indeed it's a position of great power and it attracts corresponding type of people whom one should keep away from decisions that would affect millions. Whether they want to use with good will or malicious. >and I sincerely hope we get better at measuring the right thing, not measuring at all when it would do more harm than good, and knowing which to choose. That's sort of a fallacy. Using a broken or completely irrelevant instrument is not a good alternative to not having an instrument at all. Again, by imposing metrics on extremely complex things you reduce the number of dimensions (from infinite to calculable). It makes it look like it's under control, but that's just a self-delusion. At best it does not help at all, at worst it eventually produces a crisis.