Streaming

The natural tendency of both geography and biography is to stream things, to let nature take its course as diverse forces and pressures (forces confined, or spread out over areas) act on fluids. And so it is with human education.

The most effective thing is to let fluids find their level, and then channel them accordingly. The least effective thing is to do co-current heat transfer or to force all fluids to spread evenly in a thin and unnatural film over a thin and unnatural landscape (like some movies I've seen).

When people are streamed (at airport gates, by means testing, or in education), it is always a nett gain to society in terms of resources saved, as long as the streaming medium is relatively responsive to changes in the environment. What we shouldn't do is abandon any idea of streaming in the name of that soul-deadening anti-scientific anti-human thing called 'artificial equality'.

And that leads me to banding in school systems. If we no longer have it, is that a good thing? The point is that it is bad to avoid banding. This is because people do it anyway. It is biologically impossible for humans to avoid comparisons.

The better solution is to make ALL the data available and let humans test themselves against the data, making their own sense. Is a school that claims 'green' efficiency really so if it spends $500/head on electricity and water? Is it better to send your children to a school that is religious and cheap or secular and expensive? And what if one masquerades as the other?

What I propose is that far from scrapping banding, ranking and streaming, we should make all the data publicly available while suppressing the names of individuals. Show at least the bulk population data. For every school, release their accounts to the public for reasons of accountability. Let everyone see what schools do, so that people can make conscious pseudo-rational decisions that they can no longer blame on anyone else.

How's that for a different take? *grin*

Yearly

Looking back on the year just past, I can now see that the learning experiences I suffered through have made me rethink education. It is becoming more and more true that direct intervention appears to jump-start learning, but habituation is a powerful force and conditioning polishes the responses and reflexes. Learning occurs best after severe trauma, while the brain (if we thought of it as self-aware) would be desperately re-organizing its networks for optimality.

In other words, throw all the blocks into the air, and while they are falling, catch and reassemble. The people who can do this to themselves most quickly and usefully will win the education sweepstakes. If you can indeed think of several impossible things before breakfast and then have dinner at the restaurant at the end of the universe, you have indeed got it made.

Whither then assessment and evaluation? Last year, some very bright people concluded that increasingly detailed fMRI scans would allow us to decide very clearly whether someone had learnt something or not. Who knows? In a few years' time, maybe examinations for certain simple or easily-defined tasks will consist of a 30-second brain scan.

In fact, perhaps an annual medical exam would tell us what our individual rankings should be. Haha!

Kinds of Assessment (Part II)

Of course, you can always consider other attributes of assessment when differentiating between the different kinds. You can consider the kind of assessor, the perspective of assessment, and the intention behind assessment, for example. This last is quite different from mere purpose.

1. Differentiated by assessor

1.1 Self: if the assessor is the person or institution being assessed, there is of course an opening for charges of bias. What people don't realise is that there is almost always bias; the real problem is groupthink or inability/refusal to resist bias.

1.2 Other, human: if the assessor is another human, then assessment is subject to indeterminate bias. No two humans assess exactly the same way; even the same human will assess differently under different conditions.

1.3 Other, machine: at least, machines tend to be consistently biased.

2. Differentiated by perspective

2.1 Internal: if the assessment is carried out within the same institution or group, the advantage is insider knowledge leading possibly to more useful, detailed, and relevant assessment — the disadvantage is insider knowledge leading to the exact opposite.

2.2 External: if the assessment is carried out from outside the institution or group, the advantage is that it looks more objective — the disadvantages are that lack of objectivity (if present) is harder to discern, and that feedback (if required) tends to be vague and less useful.

2.3 Subjective: if the assessment requires a personal standpoint (i.e. the assessor is the subject and the assessed is the object) then obviously all assessors will differ slightly in standpoint.

2.4 Objective: if the assessment has an enforced, pre-determined, external benchmark with no subjective choice required of the assessor, and the assessment is mechanical in a deterministic sense, then it is very reliable and accurate. Only the validity of the assessment is likely to be problematic. Note that the more realistic or complex the assessment is, the more unlikely a valid objective test can be made.

3. Differentiated by intention

3.1 Quantitative justification: some assessments are designed to convert a complex concept into simply measurable numbers. This is a highly debatable, occasionally politically-motivated practice.

3.2 Data consolidation: some assessments are designed to collect potentially useful data, and the candidate is not told that this data may be used for purposes beyond the explicit ones. This is an ethically dubious practice.

3.3 Normative ranking: some assessments are made so that a convenient ranked list can be made of all assessed candidates. Since assessments are of limited dimensions and are not supposed to contain interpretation (that's for evaluation), this practice is philosophically dubious.

3.4 Other intentions: there are as many intentions behind assessments as there are forms of assessment, but most of them lead to gratification, money, power or sex (just like crimes do). It's quite possible that assessment might lead to none of these, but if you think about it, society is generally complicit in using assessment in such ways. Sad.

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Well, I hope you who are reading this enjoyed my somewhat offbeat take on assessment. Some of it, I'm aware, was more true than we pretend; some of it less true than we believe. Most people wouldn't know how to assess assessment, though. Heh.

Assessment and Evaluation, Knowledge and Mind

People have different philosophies of assessment and evaluation. The kind of philosophy you have depends a lot on your theory of knowledge, and perhaps your theory of mind.

Here are some crude approximations. A theory of knowledge is your concept of what it means to know, and what it means for something to be (usefully or otherwise acceptably) called 'knowledge'. [Good starting link here] A theory of mind is your concept of what mind is, how we conceptualise mental states, and how we decide what these mental states are. [Good starting link here.]

It follows that if your idea of knowledge is ontological — derived axiomatically through reason but without 'real' evidence — then you would test for abstract knowledge. It is true, so all you have to assess is whether the candidate knows it, and perhaps whether the candidate knows why it is logically necessary to believe in it (e.g. by mathematical or theological proof from basic principles or axioms).

It also follows if your idea of knowledge is empirical — derived from observation and collation of 'real-world' data — then you would test for concrete knowledge. It is true only if it has reliable existence which can be detected by an observer. So you would need to assess whether the candidate can produce what is required (e.g. by making a pot, by swimming 50m, by making up a 1.0M solution of sulphuric acid).

Very often, we have conflated our idea of knowledge so much that we have no idea what to test, and the act of a candidate writing down an ontological proof is taken as empirical proof of reality. We thus evaluate the candidate as intelligent despite knowing full well that we can't tell. Which brings us to the theory of mind.

If you believe that mental states are not only apprehensible but comprehensible, it is quite likely you believe so by congruence. In other words, you believe that if a person does X, that person would be thinking much as you would be if you were doing X. Some people get this right more often than others, and they are said to be high-empathy or to have high EQ. Some people get this wrong more often than others, and we think of them as psychotic or low EQ (or otherwise deficient).

This is why when students do things that our tests don't rate highly, we think of them as not having appropriate intelligence or preparation or skill (or whatever). That's if we're being cautious and/or charitable. Many of us would just say, "This candidate is low-performing." (Or 'dumb', or 'stupid', except that nowadays we only think it but try not to say it.) Our concepts of high performance depend on how difficult it would be for us, the educators, to carry out. What's easy for us should be easy for those we have taught, right?

Wrong, of course. In my ramblings on this blog, I've pointed out the circularity of our ideas about intelligence and its vulnerability to subjective evaluation even when considered by experienced educators and scientists.

In effect, we need to stop thinking of intelligence as a scored function — high-scoring, low-scoring or whatever-scoring. We need to think of it as a) what jobs need to be done, b) what are the ways they can be done, c) does this person figure out such ways quickly? We can omit b) if we just want to see whether a person can get the job done, regardless of whether we are able to figure out how it might be done. We need also to think of it as d) can our candidate figure out what jobs need to be done?

You see, we have no ability to actually get into someone's head, short of telepathy. We cannot tell how cognitively brilliant someone is except by whether that person gets the job done fast. We can plausibly rate candidates on how convincing their products are to us, but that would be subjective — the more their thinking corresponds with what we think is good, the more points they get. All these are old criticisms.

Moving forward, I suspect what we should do is empower candidates by teaching them every tool we know, how to evaluate the usefulness of tools, and how to create their own tools. A lot of that teaching will comprise meaningless exercises. We must be honest and tell them that we don't know how valuable the education we're giving them is. When we are long gone, they will have to prove those tools in the crucible of reality, and our hope should be that they will survive it.

Assessment and Evaluation

In education circles, these two flap around like much-reduced versions of Odin's ravens. Yet they are not a symmetric pair, or even orthogonal. They are linked by differences that were once obvious and are now subtle, much as 'right' and 'wrong' are, but not quite.

Assessment (from Latin assidere = 'sit down beside', 'be continually present with', 'constantly attend to'), implies that you sit down beside somebody, look over their shoulder, and decide exactly how much they score. The purpose here used to be the determination (from Latin terminus = 'boundary') of income for tax calculations (from Latin tangere = 'to touch' and calculi = 'stones'), a practice known to this day as 'assessment'. I've deliberately stressed the Latin etymology here to point out that the Romans were very heavy on tax assessment and related practices, because that is how you run a great empire administratively.

Assessment is meant to be a purely quantitative exercise. You touch up someone, estimate (from Latin aestimare = 'appraise') his wealth, and assess his tax. When we assess students, all we're looking for is their quantitative achievement so we can compare them to a chart or table and place them appropriately.

Evaluation, on the other hand, comes from a venerable linguistic stem from which we also get 'valour', 'valency' and 'value'. Also from the Latin, evaluation is about determining the potency or worth of something in its social context. When we evaluate something, we aren't looking only at its obvious quantitative attributes, but at its potential and actual usefulness or quality when compared to everything around it.

When we evaluate students, therefore, we are looking at them in terms of how much skill and potential are revealed by what they have done and are doing. We are thinking of them qualitatively, in as many dimensions as necessary to figure out how valuable they are in their present and future context.

Thus, evaluation is to assessment as sculpture is to sketching — the former needs the latter more than the latter needs the former, but it is much more well-rounded. Evaluation gives assessment a greater purpose, although assessment itself can have its own purposes.

Here's an example. Think of a physical fitness test battery. You might want to include chin-ups (to evaluate upper body strength), standing broad jump (to evaluate one form of lower body strength), juggling (to evaluate coordination), a 2.4 km run (to evaluate basic aerobic fitness), and so on. The numbers you get here form an assessment, and the methods used to obtain the numbers are called assessment rubrics.

Now consider what the entire test battery tells us about the subject's overall fitness levels and what they mean in terms of employment prospects and potential job scope. (If you had a trained observer watching the candidate's approach to taking these tests, you might also have one kind of psychological data.) Put it all together to form a narrative about this person's capabilities, and you have an evaluation.

Evaluations are too complicated to have fixed rubrics. Instead, you tell the evaluator what you are looking for, and the evaluator decides how to put the assessment data together to tell you what you will find. It requires a much higher level of cognition, and the burden of responsibility (moral or otherwise) is also much greater.

In examinations, anybody can use a marking scheme and turn in a reasonable assessment of an examinee's performance. In fact, for the so-called objective tests, a machine can do the assessment.

However, not all who get 27/40 for an MCQ test got there the same way — some may well be unusual candidates of great promise, while others may be drones who studied hard and got only the obvious questions right. It takes a trained interpreter to tell you what exactly the pattern of right and wrong answers means about the candidate, and even then, without asking a student why they chose their answers, the evaluation is very thin and may not very helpful.

In short, assessment is all about 'what do we have' and evaluation is all about 'what does it mean to us'. Assessment is simple, evaluation complex. Assessment can be a science; if it is, then evaluation is an art. And I'm quite sure I will have more to say about them.

The Big Change

Some time ago, I noted an amusing change which I believe to be of great benefit to everyone concerned...

In recognition of the concerns raised by colleagues regarding [redacted] assessment, the prescribed titles will be split from November 2012 and a new set of 6 titles will be issued for each examination session. The appropriate set of titles for each session will be made available on [redacted] as follows:

• 1 March for the year of the November session
• 1 September for the following May session

Marking guidance for examiners has been severely restricted because of the use of one set of titles to service two examination sessions. This improvement will enable the senior examining team to compile detailed marking notes for each title thus providing greater support to the examining team.

What it does mean is a lot less work all round for those of us who work on such things. Wonderful!

The Five Percent Rule

It has long been heuristically suspected that in any population, only about 1 in 20 will actually achieve a performance that is at a level of 1 in 100 or better (i.e. better than 99% of the population's performances). This kind of supposition is not always true of all populations, but it is a good heuristic.

Look around you. Who is the best person in your class, group, set or other population for a given task? Is that person capable of beating 99% of all performances by your population? That person must be at the very worst a 1-in-20 phenomenon — in a group of 40, only 2 such are expected.

In a staff of say 300 people, this would mean not more than 15 are A-class. By this I mean using a measure of something like: A = top 1%, B = next 4-5%, C = next 10-15% and D = next 25% or so. Anyone after the top 45-50% should be considered a failure.

Why? Because in such populations, the people have already been selected for the job. If they can't do the job well, the question that should be asked is, "Why are they so bad?"

And this is one of the reasons that I believe all human resource executives and suchlike should be fired. They appear to serve no useful purpose at all and I am willing to think that basic filters plus luck-of-the-draw would do better.

Measures of School System Success

Over the last few weeks, an interesting debate about the success of the Atlantean educational system has sprung up. So far, people have weighed in with various ways of measuring that success: some have mentioned behavioral qualities such as filial piety, some have mentioned awards such as Nobel prizes. Some have said the system is unsuccessful since it has produced neither.

It is with amusement that I note that a national system of education normally has only two real criteria for success: 1) that it produces the kind of people the state wants, and 2) that it produces the kind of people the state needs. You can divide this another way: schools must produce the people needed to run the country from within (at all levels) and the people needed to preserve and defend the state's interests against the interests of other states.

That means that by any measure, social cohesion is a more useful 'product' of a school system than are Nobel prizes. Most students have some sort of bond to their classmates, to their schoolmates. This is natural, and it is useful. Then again, social cohesion within a group or institution is not necessarily harnessed to the needs of the state — gangs and multinational companies come to mind, as examples that are not necessarily positive with regard to the states they operate in.

Useful skills help too. A system that produces lots of lawyers and doctors in a state that fancies itself a legal and medical hub is a system that is doing its job. However, a system that is producing hundreds of mediocre teachers in a state that fancies itself an educational hub is a system that is dysfunctional in at least one aspect — especially since breeding bad teachers leads to breeding worse teachers down the road.

So how does one measure the success of a system such as the Atlantean School System? Perhaps the most fun way of doing it is to see how others think of the system. It has become legendary in many other 'advanced' nations that the Atlantean system is horrifyingly great (or greatly horrifying, depending on what your political tendencies are).

So yes, it must be pretty successful. But perhaps not successfully pretty.

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Note: actually, Nobel Prize winning is most strongly correlated to a) the power and influence of a state in the worldwide community (see here), and b) whether you are Jewish (Jews account for about 25-30% of the prizes).

Severian

Wolff sat wrapped in fuligin, the heavy blade of his profession once more in his hands. By midday, the news had escaped, and what he knew no longer mattered so much as a weapon in his hand.

The Grand Inquisitor had been tracked down, and the lictors and pursuivants had hunted him into his deep earth. Now the former Master of the Darkness stood enchained by negative light, and reinforced legations bound him to an iron post.

And the Autarch had sent word that the sword of Wolff's forefathers was needed once again. "We have scotched the snake, not killed it," was one cryptic phrase.

Wolff pondered it deeply. He had little to say, except that the new leadership of the Citadel should possess character first, then competence, and also culture. He had seen too much that was... nekulturnyĭ, or perhaps varvarskiĭ, as his friend the Rock had once said, without much irony.

He looked at those who now claimed the places around the Black Table. He saw insecurities and incompetencies. He saw the ruin of the past and the erosion of the future. He saw people unprepared to think.

To his surprise, it was this last vision that angered him the most. Where there is lack of thought, there is thoughtless faith. Faith is more worthwhile when the one who possesses it has retained it even against fierce trials of the intellect. For that was the lesson of the epistles, bound tightly in the flowing Greek of debate and argument, sophistry and casuistry.

He wiped the dust off the long, black, two-handed sword.

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Note: The fictional adventures of Sir Wolff do provide much that is of interest. You can find them linked here. Just ignore the one about earwax. That was an accident.

Bad Poetry

I started writing poems when I was just about a teenager. I wrote nearly a thousand poems from the time I was a teenager to the time I started working. Then I looked back, appalled at about 99.5% at what I'd written. I think only about five of those poems were any good to me.

But how did I decide they were 'good' or 'bad'?

I think that when you look at a poem you've written, it's hard not to think about it in the personal context in which you wrote it. Quite apart from that, though, if a poem creates a fresh personal context when you read it — if it makes a new landscape, if it shifts your perspectives, if it makes you think thoughts you'd never thought before — then it has fulfilled what I think is one criterion of 'good'. This is all hard to evaluate if it's your own poem.

Another, more technical, criterion is the idea of whether you could think of better ways to express a given thought. If you can think of many such ways, then either you have missed the point of the poem or the poet's word choice was not 'good' to you. I cringe at some of my attempts because I was hopelessly clumsy with language in some of them.

Sometimes, technical expertise can be found in the way words are used to evoke qualities like atmosphere, mood, pace, tone and style. You can tell when you're reading Auden or Hopkins, Blake or Milligan, Kipling or Chesterton. If you can parody a poet, he must be good in the sense of sufficiently exact expression to convey at least his core character. It is this I find lacking in much of my early poetry — it wasn't me, it was someone else I was imitating.

I became a much better poet after I stopped trying to use poetry as a weapon or a tool. I think some of my best poetry came late in life, a clear indicator that I'll never be a 'good' poet. But at least, I don't think I'm such a 'bad' one anymore. I'm also quite aware that all this is subjective to a large extent. That doesn't worry me.

Science and its Pyrrhic Victory

When I first gave the TOK lectures on Sciences back in 2006, I deliberately and with 'malice aforethought' presented the case that the scientific paradigm (note: not science itself) had devoured all other disciplines convincingly. Science, in effect, had won by debasing itself into the lowest common denominator.

I shan't recapitulate the arguments here, since I don't intend (as I've said before) to give that lecture again. But what heartened me so much was that the 2006-2007 IB batch at the College of Wyverns spawned a lot of debate, sometimes rather contentious, about whether I was right or not. There were many sophisticated arguments propounded in opposition to my case, some of which were difficult to defeat.

The trick, as always, was to choose a pillar of modern thought (or two, or three) which had been taken for granted (as a given) by everyone. Using this as the basis for an argument resulted in the sure-win case that I propounded. What my very dear (and often very capable) students really needed to do was to rid themselves of their own quotidian perceptions and preconceptions and question everything I'd said from first principles.

Very few came close to succeeding, but I admired the attempts, futile or not. I can only hope that future wyverns will display as much fighting spirit against overwhelming cunning, age-fermented intellectual treachery, and deliberately crafty propaganda as those of the First Flight did.

Meanwhile, I have to note that the Hive has responded in the latest round of evaluations. It's amusing that of all the highly-integrated programmes, only one institution failed to garner an award at the pre-university level. I am highly entertained, and yes, I am seriously amused. It is the triumph of the scientific paradigm over the abuse of intelligence.

Programme Evaluation

It's seldom that I see educational programmes properly evaluated. In many schools, programmes that are touted as cutting-edge, large-scale, innovative, holistic (etc) are left to run at enormous expense without rigorous evaluation. It all comes down to a sort of epistemological problem. The problem is: How do you know that the programme actually works to produce the effects you claim?

In most cases, the claim is supported indirectly:

• Someone else said it works somewhere else, so it must work here too.
• Our results are good, so it works.
• The relevant literature is...
• The students we get are poor, and they get better.
• The teachers are good.
• We do better than other schools using other programmes.

... and so on. But any student of the theory of knowledge (or equivalent) can easily see the loopholes in these varieties of 'supporting evidence'. The fact is that most such programmes are theoretical constructs designed to squeeze funds out of overburdened budgets.

Is there a way out? Yes, there is. But it requires more spine than some people have.

Out of Commission

Over the last year or so, I've had ample opportunity to kibitz on the goings-on involving the Joint Commission International. This interesting organisation does accreditation for many hospitals worldwide, using standards that seem pretty rigorous and certainly work towards enhancing patient safety, security and survival. It's sufficiently well-known that is has a disputed Wikipedia page, which means it must have some sort of celebrity status such that people can make disputable or arguable claims about it.

But I'm not so much interested in the healthcare ramifications of JCI as in the idea that it might be possible to have something like that for schools. As long-time readers of this blog know, I've looked at fish-tanks and Petri dishes while researching education, and I have many ideas about what constitutes a good education or a good school.

The JCI, if I'm not wrong, sets ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED criteria for a hospital. They get extremely sharp healthcare people to come down, physically check random items, interview random people, run around all over the shop, and then write a report on how well your hospital did by those measureables.

I wish they did it for schools, because I can imagine some worthy objects of this fantastic evaluation strategy.

Towards a Better Quality Teaching Service

In my previous post, commenter Lone Rifle asked if I had alternative suggestions for evaluating teaching quality. Yes, indeed I do.

They're all in this blog, I think. I'll confine myself to more recent posts, because that's about all one can expect people to have read.

Firstly, does the candidate have awareness of the demands of the profession, as well as the ability and capacity to meet those demands? One outline of the requirements can be found here.

Secondly, does the candidate have a sense of what professional mastery entails, so that he or she can work towards it? One possible way of looking at this can be found here.

Thirdly, is the candidate dedicated to the idea of the profession? One vision of such a professional ideal can be found here (along with some hazards encountered).

Actually, I've covered the points in many different ways in many different places. Here's another one. Suggestions? Heh, I think I might have made too many. Ah, hell, why not just use this search?

Worthless?

Today's post was triggered by something somebody said about how worship comes with a sense of one's personal unworthiness. I think that's partly justifiable; after all, you are indeed facing the Infinite and Eternal — compared to such things, you might feel finite and timebound. But further examination proves that the position of unworthiness is philosophically and theologically untenable beyond certain limits.

Let's begin with some simple assumptions. Let's say you are conscious that God is infinitely greater than you, and not bound by time, space or any physical limitation. This makes you feel infinitely small. I would say that you have a perception problem. Why? How on earth are you perceiving (or conceptualising) infinity (whether infinitely great or small)? The Good Book says that God has set the idea of the infinite universe in the hearts of men (see Ecclesiastes 3:11). If this is true (I am assuming you must believe it is so), then you have a piece of that infinity and eternity in you. You are only a smaller infinity, a kind of aleph-null (for the mathematically inclined, look here).

You cannot therefore be thinking of yourself as worthless, only less worthy than you think you ought to be.

But that's wrong too.

Let's go to another assumption. The standard of 'worth' must be external to the things being assigned a value of 'worth', or else it can't be used as a benchmark. God must be the source of this standard, or else 'worthiness' with respect to God is a useless measure. So either you are not worthy enough (according to God), in which case you can't even aspire to come before Him or worship Him or even interact in any other way with Him; or you are worthy enough — and it's not because of you, but because He has assigned you a sufficient value of 'worth' so that you may approach Him.

You cannot therefore be too unworthy, and to think you are is actually some sort of negative pride or false humility (or humility based on false assumptions).

There are hymns with lines like, "I, though so unworthy, still am a child of His care..." and those have quite another meaning. It means that you are indeed unworthy of your own merit, but you are thankful that he has assigned you sufficient merit to be worthy of grace.

But what is the textual evidence for all this? Many Christians think that philosophy is the next worst thing to sorcery, and the textual evidence for it is that human philosophy (the philosophy of men, human philosophers, the philosophy of the world etc) is quite soundly rejected as long as the basis does not accept the major premise. That major premise is of course that God exists and interacts with us, and St Paul, for example, uses philosophy based on this premise quite shamelessly and extensively (his own words, not mine).

So let's look at the text. From searching the Good Book in its many versions, I have yet to see a human claim unworthiness successfully. God does say that many things are worthless or of no value, but the text says even physical training has value. The text also says that humans have been given (or will be given, conditional on their free-willed request or acceptance) many things — gifts, grace, wisdom, peace... the list is very long, and all of it confers and implies God-assigned worth.

Hebrews 12:3 does caution against the peril of considering oneself more highly than one ought (after all, that was the sin of the greatest of the Kherubim), but it also enjoins us to consider ourselves with sober judgement, and the next few verses talk about our gifts. The implication here is clear: don't think too highly of yourself, but do evaluate your worth according to the standards of God.

A similar concept arises when humans are told that the wise man should not boast of his wisdom, the strong man of his strength, or the rich man of his riches; rather if they must boast, they should boast of how well they know God, specifically in terms of the countervailing virtues of kindness (a scholar should be kind and teach, not mock, the less-educated), justice (an officer should be just and not tyrannical in his exercise of power) and righteousness (a gentleman should be righteous in his use of wealth, and be generous, not hold on to it out of avarice).

In other words, you can hold on to your sense of self-worth, provided you know how that worth is calibrated and what it is measured against. It is no sin to be honest, but it is a sin to bear false witness; in this context, 'bearing false witness' means to either inflate or deflate your actual worth. The Good Book tells us not to use dishonest scales or measures. And this is why we have to soberly judge ourselves.

Have we done what we are told to do? Are we fit (as in exactly a match for) the tasks we have been given? The point is that we fail these tests often, but we do succeed sometimes. And when we fail, we suffer the consequences, but we also know that the Master does not hold most failures to be the be-all and end-all.

So, we're not so worthless after all. What we need to do is figure out how much we're worth and then use that capital to do what we're supposed to do.