Some common places populate the imagination of students and teachers when it comes to classification processes such as the entrance exam. Teachers, for example, have a certain expectation of who will guess topics and, consequently, give their students an advantage over other competitors. The vocation of a Pythoness corroborates the view that an entrance exam is something random, disconnected and depends on luck.
The reasons for success in a test go beyond the expectations of those who “get” what will be required in an exam. Education experts have long pointed to broad variables such as access to schooling, the social group to which they belong, the cultural experiences lived by students and other themes that explain, despite efforts to homogenize school culture, the heterogeneity of results in approximate educational experiences.
Education is a field in dispute in which aspects such as dominant culture and the emergence of other knowledge and protagonisms stimulate continuous clashes and reconfigurations. These disputes are reflected in the composition of the curriculum, in the interpretative keys of what we want to teach, promote and exclude from the scenario. The recent discussions on the reform of Secondary Education are a preview of what fits or not in school training and what type of training is intended to be offered in schools. And, similarly, the issue permeates entrance exams and university entrance exams.
The problem of contentism
A frequent criticism of exams is their content. This is a recurring, necessary observation, but it reproduces the most simplistic and observable perspective in a test. Every test involves content and subjects of different natures, but these should not have a value in themselves. Those who can identify only the contents, which in school and scientific practice tend to infinity, probably rely on the premonitory gift and place little emphasis on procedures and the perspective of broad training. It is not difficult to guess that there are questions requiring mastery over percentage calculations, geometric figures, genetics, military dictatorship, globalization, figures of speech or literary schools.
In History, for example, many encourage students to pay attention to ephemeris as clear topics. And, following this recipe, students will focus their energy on the 500 years of the Protestant Reformation or the centenary of the Russian Revolution, to focus on this year's themes. Neither of the two topics was covered in the Unicamp Entrance Exam or in the ENEM. If the topics had been covered in the test, what difference would it make? Would it be the demand for a specific aspect or its aspects of curiosity, such as Luther's Augustinian formation, or its relevance in the division of modern Christianity? Would Lenin's theses be charged for their order or for their impact as a reading of the situation and application to the Russian context?
The question, therefore, should not be what “fell” or will “fall” in the entrance exam as a premonitory gift. But "how" fell into any subject in this broad spectrum of school culture that involves languages, sciences and arts. The “how” is more significant than what we intend as an educational institution and what signals we send to young people on their school journey. If there is something that the entrance exams could offer as a lesson, it is not the list of contents, but the approaches, correlations and inferences that encompass multiple views and encourage questioning the legitimacy of certain scientific and social discourses.
Looking for broad training
What cannot be ignored and, in this sense, increases the responsibility of the act of educating, of training a young person, is that school content is part of a broader logic. The formation of multiple reasoning, mastery of several languages, contextualization and the ability to abstract are some of the requirements that must be behind a test. Otherwise, there is a risk of merely reproducing information that, with a touch from this generation that surfs all the time, would be unnecessary and quickly supplanted.
Teachers would greatly contribute to the success of their students in university entrance exams if they observed the question procedures more than the attempts to guess a topic. And, whoever formulates questions and is responsible for their execution should be more attentive to these configurations and improve in elaborations that take into account the diversity of knowledge and experiences of basic education students. And, at the same time, they must consider expectations and requirements for academic life, such as an investigative and critical spirit.
In addition to the selection processes, it is never exaggerated to restate the obvious: schools should not train students for the entrance exam. The experiences of children and young people are broader and more complex than a selection system, however balanced, sophisticated and well-intentioned it may be. There is knowledge that is continually reiterated and others that are forgotten. School is essential in the social imagination and a life without this institution is practically unthinkable. However, if in the past, the school agenda was the accumulation of knowledge legitimized by the curriculum, nowadays, it points to something broader than the succession of themes and information: coexistence and learning with the multiplicity of subjects, lives and knowledge.
The entrance exam, as a complex passing system, should always signal the expectation of being able to read the world, articulate scientific, social and cultural information and, furthermore, not be held hostage by pythons. The muses, valued in Antiquity, never ceased to make mistakes in their prophecies or ambiguous answers. To avoid this pernicious aspect of predicting “what will happen on the entrance exam”, the way forward is to think and build education in a broad and coherent way.
Escaping from the Pythonesses or not giving in to the charms of the oracles is the way to reaffirm the role of education, safeguarding the understanding that the entrance exam is a moment in life, but it is not the purpose of a human being's life. This is an alert to reaffirm our commitment to young people, to knowledge and to the future and, more directly, to follow Albert Einstein's recommendations in the essays gathered in how i see the world (1953): “The excesses of the system of competition and premature specialization, under the fallacious pretext of efficiency, murder the spirit, make any cultural life impossible and even suppress progress in the sciences of the future."
