on the dangers of assessments

I had a conversation recently with the Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Renata Salecl. As part of my careers seminar I have been looking at a variety of self-assessments, including the popular MBTI. Personally, I have mixed feelings about such assessments – on the one hand, I enjoy them. I consider them useful heuristics – they can give us language, frameworks, which we can use to understand ourselves. On the other hand, I think they are epistemologically flawed, insofar as they pretend to help us discover who we are. Who we are is a construct – we don’t discover it, we make it up. I don’t mean we pretend, to be someone we’re not, although there is an element of artifice, the feeling we’re pretending, while we’re trying on new identities, moving from one way of being to another. “Authenticity” is a simple matter of being true to ourselves. If we are always becoming who we are, if we are beings “in process,” it is actually less authentic to cling to an old identity than to allow a new one to emerge, however awkward the new one might feel at first.

I was not surprised to learn that Salecl is deeply suspicious of such assessments and avoided taking them in highschool in Slovenia where they are almost de rigueur. She said she did not want to feel “limited” by the results, or to be given reason to question her choices.

I am having fun with the assessments now because I’m old enough, and smart enough, to hold the results lightly.

I have a friend who is a gifted shaman. She told me today that she is very suspicious of anyone, whether its a career counselor or a medical doctor, who tries to “seal her destiny.” She said there is actually considerable evidence of people given a diagnosis of cancer who have refused to believe it and who have gone back only to learn the tumor, or whatever, has disappeared. This is very different than denial, I think. Denial has to do with the external world – refusing to acknowledge the feelings of another, for example. Not allowing someone to seal your destiny is not giving up authorship of your life.

I think this is another reason I am homeschooling – I didn’t want “school” to seal my child’s destiny – even before he reaches an age where he can comprehend that his life is his own.