Outcomes, Testing, Learning: What’s at Stake?

The perception of a crisis in American higher education--proclaimed by numerous books--has led to a call for "outcomes testing," testing of the "value added" by a student's college education. After discussing some examples of such testing (as recommended originally by the 2006 Spellings Commission Report), I ask whether we really want to take such an exclusively instrumental view of knowledge and its uses. The humanities, I believe, do and should promote another kind of knowing that I refer to under the rubric, "the ethics of reading."