On Ticking Boxes
Patricia Hewitt ‘Rather than discuss the emotional and the individual we speak of what we can measure’
(on New Labour government and the arts,
Radio 4 Today September 2005)
Robert F. Kennedy ‘…yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages…it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile….’
(Address to the University of Kansas March 18th 1968)
Dusk and we were just leaving the late summer gardens. The wasps were at their slow circling worst and the Galloway midges were massing for business. The play we had watched had been provocative and we wanted to talk about it in the shelter of the car, but just at the gate a young man approached us with a pile of forms. ‘Do you mind ?’ he asked. ‘It’s an evaluation. It won’t take a minute.’ He held out a piece of paper, A6 size, with three printed questions and nine boxes. Had we found the play very interesting, interesting or not at all interesting ? Tick box. Had we found the venue very satisfactory, satisfactory or not at all satisfactory ? Tick box. Did we think the ticket price good value, reasonable value or poor value ? Tick box. I took the young man’s pencil and wrote across the form If you want to know what I think, ask me, a form of words I had chosen as a response to the evaluation forms distributed like so much waste paper at the end of each of my university courses.
I had been so much angrier then. Whatever had they meant – did I find my lecturer very satisfactory, satisfactory or not satisfactory? – was it not their duty of care to ensure that my lecturers were satisfactory? More than satisfactory, stimulating, inspiring, informed and communicative but there were no boxes to record these often encountered qualities. We had spent so many hours in understanding the hierarchies of sources of evidence for research purposes it was surprising to encounter this poverty of vocabulary in a university evaluation form.
‘It won’t take a minute’ the young man had said, inferring that the play and my response to it could be expressed and analysed from three ticked boxes with no further effort on anyone’s part. I would argue that it should take much longer than a minute for people who have shared a quality of experience to express their wonder, their praise and their questions, and that we should make time to encourage this exchange. Above all, we could use an expressive vocabulary to capture the complexity of experience, we might move far beyond mere measurement which is fine for counting bums on seats, ice creams sold and the number of cars in the car-park. Numbers are a flat dimension when assessing quality.
Is it then a matter of the zeitgeist when so many qualitative experiences are explained or excused by recourse to measurement ? We have grown used to news broadcasts in which groups of people gather to protest at some closure of a vital local service, stressing the qualitative value of an organisation under threat. They are often followed onto the screen by a spokesman, a measurer who can state categorically that more money has gone into the service, more people are happy with it, more employees are on higher salaries and so on. He will be stating the facts but he is hardly telling the whole truth.
A recent phone-in programme on Radio 4 (You and Yours. March 07) contained a contribution from an ambulance driver who had worked in rural Ayrshire and Argyllshire, expressing deep concern that the depletion of local accident and emergency services in these areas was putting life at risk. Ambulance crews were having to take emergency cases to Glasgow
There may be a connection between this attachment to evaluation, however shallow, and statistical proof that everything is getting better in spite of what ‘the emotional’ and ‘the individual’ have to relate. It may be that this great urge to quantify expresses a loss of trust in empirical testimony, a fear that where we cannot measure human experience, we cannot allow it to shape our judgements. Common sense (another immeasurable quality) tells us that there were numerous excellent teachers and doctors – the most measured of current professions – before measuring became a profession in itself, a profession dedicated to raising standards. Logically, constant improvement should lead to perfection.
However there are those who celebrate the asymptotic nature of such a process. These are the people who maintain trust in human instinct and the immeasurable nature of creative acts. Renowned classical pianist, Artur Schnabel, on being asked to do another take on a recording, demurred, commenting, ‘I might play it better but it won’t be as good.’ This elusiveness and illusionary nature of perfection was noted by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, ‘There is hope in honest error but none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.’
Our children may come to look back upon this time with curiosity, wondering why our educated and sophisticated society created a stratum of professionals detached from the making and doing that is the health of any society, whose only work was in examining sheets of paper covered with ticked boxes, summarising and analysing the contents and publishing their findings. With good luck and wisdom we might find that they would be examining a temporary, now defunct profession.
‘The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.’
E.Phelps .speech at the Mansion House 24 Jan 1899
