by Freddie Paredes

Created on: February 28, 2008

Albert Einstein said it best, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." In a nation where our greatest creations came from people who had imagination and creative ways of thinking we have created a system of tests that we allow to define our students. There are tests for everything now, tests that define intelligence, tests that define college success, and tests that allow or deny students to graduate from secondary schools. These tests that are fabricated by educational instructors who have to look up the answers to their own questions, it is these very same tests that misconstrue intelligence and put restrictions on imagination.

Education is the foundation of a child's learning environment, many skills cannot however be taught in schools, they are learned through typical life experiences. Some of the most intelligent people I have met in my lifetime were not proficient in test taking, nor could they recite the exact history of our country. Intelligence in school systems today are measured by a simple logical number, a number that is computed not by a teacher but by a scan-tron reader. Our teachers and administrators and school board members want to hand out tests that they themselves could not possibly now all the answers too. Many students are not test takers, their abilities lay elsewhere. For instance maybe they are musicians, and can create a heavenly sound just by playing a clarinet. I might have a high IQ but I cannot play an instrument, to hard to learn I suppose. A composer can create art from nothing, create music from nothing, make entire populations weep, but if they were to fail a standardized test than they would be deemed unintelligent. The questions that reigns supreme are what is intelligence and how does one measure it?

You're sitting there in a very cold or very hot classroom, your best friend is telling you about his date with a really attractive girl the night before, and you don't have a pencil. The settings for this standardized test isn't so standard, as a matter of fact the setting for the test is so atrocious that it hinders the very confidence and intelligence that you have come to expect from yourself. Your uncertified instructor tells you to begin and you hear police sirens out the window, another distraction. In another part of your town a gentleman just like yourself sits down in a nice desk with a

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