The author calls for a reexamination of educational aims. Tracing the evolution of education in this country from earliest days, he questions today's over reliance on test scores as the final indicator of school success. Noting that during the 1800s the schools made a commitment to broadly educate all and to produce the educated electorate that Washington, Jefferson and others of the colonial period saw as the bedrock of a democracy, he sees equating achievement to test performance as dangerously short-sighted, overly simplistic and actually detrimental to the development of a real love of learning.