The Darker Side of the Sorting Hat

Alexander, Jonathon and Black, Rebecca. “The Darker Side of the Sorting Hat: Representations of Educational Testing in Young Adult Dystopian Novels. Children's Literature, Volume 43, 2015, pp. 208-234.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/childrens_literature/v043/43.alexander.html

Image from Project MUSE

Jonathan Alexander and Rebecca Black write, “As such, utopias and dystopias are less blueprints to embrace or to avoid as they are opportunities to interrogate how we understand and imagine our present… As we approach these dystopias about high-stakes testing, we explore how our current cultures of educational testing might be structuring our imagination of both the present and future.” Alexander and Black argue that in looking at dystopias that have some form of high-stakes testing or competition as narrative element, the readers are viewing these books with thought of modern day rigors of high expectations of college applications (with the concomitant pressure for more and more external activities and internships) as well as the dire punitive results of dashed hopes if students have a single bad testing day. Alexander and Black look closely at four recently published dystopia series of novels with testing or completion as a driving narrative motif: Collin’s Hunger Games, Roth’s Divergent, Lu’s Legend, and Charbonneau’s The Testing.

They identifies a common thread in these novels are the use of tests for societal control, where “the types of learning that took place leading up to testing, as well as the types of questions and challenges that made up the test themselves, were all aimed at constructing and winnowing out certain types of knowledge and people. The types of people, forms of learning, and skills and strategies being cultivated are clear indicators of the cultural values of the governments represented in these novels”.  Alexander and Black highlight the similarity that this bears to the rhetoric used in modern-day education circles, where “skills-based instruction and work-force focused topics” are being used to educate the next generation of the workforce.  They point out how in these dystopia, acquiescence to the tests leads to a passive and productive workforce at the expense of individuality.  In these books, “Testing emphasizes the battle of individuals for access to limited resources and opportunities… the competition for survival is often framed as a series of tests that individuals must face for inclusion into a community or even for educational advancement. The stakes for failure are often extraordinarily high.”

As Alexander and Black point out, these tests are less about discovering the fullness of their participants’ desires, goals, and interests and more about finding ways to mold behavior into socially-appropriate roles that further the society depicted in these novels. As they explains, “individual agency is nonexistent in the face of state interests and needs.”  One additional element is that while these tests are portrayed as impartial and equitable, it’s clear that socio-economic status (SES) helps determine access and success in these tests. For example, in The Hunger Games, viewers from the districts are able to influence the game by providing food, tools, and medication to the game participants, but poorer districts don’t have the money to purchase these types of assistance for their tributes, and they are thus less likely to be victorious. They write that “these books show young people coming into some critical consciousness about the inequities and injustices instantiated in the governmental systems to which they are subject. To varying degrees, we see these young women rebel against and combat those systems.” But a shortcoming of theses dystopian novels is that, while “ …[o]n one hand, the books are deeply concerned with fascistic tendencies; on the other, they have a hard time imagining nonviolent alternatives…”

Alexander and Black question why these types of books might appeal to teens and seems to answer that “tales of life-and-death struggle attract adolescent readers responding hyperbolically to their own personal and social transformations. But it is hard for us not to read these books of “high-stakes testing” as also appealing to students’ and young people’s sense of their own increasingly high-stakes choices for employment and life direction at a time of economic downturn”.  In other words, part of the attraction to teens is that in these novels, they see a fictionalized extreme of the sorts of pressures they are feeling in their own real world experience with standardized testing. While the testing in these novels in hyperbolic in its life-or-death stakes, I think it resonates with teen’s fears of failure and inability to integrate their identities with societal expectations. Alexander and Black explain, “Surely, the texts, in their representation of extreme situations that limit youth and force them into ethically compromising positions, might resonate with increasing youthful frustration—even rage—about current impoverished choices, both in education and career.”  Ultimately they posits “…that the readerly interest in YA dystopias could provide the grounds for a new set of discourses that helps readers—young and old—think through systems of inequality.”