We’ve all probably had some version of the same dream — it’s the end of the semester, and you’re late for a test. It’s for a class you forgot that you enrolled in and are completely unprepared, but have to take the test anyway. After you arrive in the classroom and sit down under harsh fluorescent lights, you discover that you’re out of number two pencils — and all you have to write with is a crayon that keeps breaking.

In these days of No Child Left Behind, testing is on a lot of people’s minds, since so much depends on the results of high-stakes tests — not only for students, but also for teachers and schools. While test scores and evaluations can be useful ways of seeing how people are doing, it’s important to keep in mind that any kind of test has limits. Test scores and grading can create an illusion of scientific precision. Grades are useful as a kind of shorthand, but multiple choice questions really can’t deal with problems that have ambiguous or complex answers, and one teacher’s C could be another teacher’s B or even A. Now that schools in New York City are being graded, many of them are feeling the same pain that students are traditionally expected to endure.

When I was in graduate school at Teachers College (a few years before the Web), Ernest Rothkopf introduced us to an interesting framework for thinking about the settings where education takes place, in the context of considering when educational technologies should be used — he divided them up into informal settings like museums or public television stations (the “arcade”); formal educational settings like schools (“contract”); and training programs in the military and businesses (“closed”). His argument was that education is most efficient in closed settings, and the least efficient in informal settings, where people are under no compulsion to learn, aren’t tested, and can spend as little time as they want thinking about something. His idea was that it made the most sense to use expensive educational technologies in closed settings because of the efficiencies they offer.

While he had a point about the forces that might make education providers most efficient, it’s hard to imagine that military or business training programs are best suited for what we normally think of as the most important goals of education — for example, helping learners grow as individuals, or producing critical thought. Each educational setting offers learners opportunities to increase their abilities and capacities, and it’s worthwhile to remember the roles that each can play in what and how we learn.

Public television has a lot to offer people who are interested in learning, both inside and outside of the classroom. Beyond the sheer pleasure of providing entertaining and thoughtful programs, it can provide some relief from the relentless impulse to quantify everything, the idea that every aspect of learning has to be measured and graded. There’s up-to-date information in documentaries that can’t be found in text books, and individual voices and points of view that may not surface in other educational settings. Educational materials like the NATURE comic book we published recently are both fun and thought-provoking, and also give kids a break from the cycle of test prep and evaluation. One of the reasons I like working in Thirteen’s Education Department is that we help teachers bring a little more of the unpredictable outside world into schools, and that what we do helps to expand the possibilities for learning both inside and outside of the classroom.