Every spring, like clockwork or ritual or sacrament, the testing machine comes to life. Acronyms stretch their limbs and begin their work: EoC, MAP, CLT, ACT, HiSET, LSAT, GRE, GED, MCAT. The testing calendar replaces the learning calendar. The day’s purpose shifts—not to wonder, to create, or to reflect—but to assess. To verify. To confirm. We usher students into rows and fill the room with the silence of proctoring protocols. The lights hum. The #2 pencils scratch. The stakes, though invisible, press down on us like weather. We all know what’s riding on this.
We say it’s about growth, about standards, about preparedness for life beyond the classroom—but sometimes, I think we’re really just peering into jars and hoping to glimpse something that resembles truth. And this is why Godfried Schalcken’s The Doctor's Examination has settled into my imagination like a parable I can’t stop turning over. Painted in the late 1600s, it’s at once historical and uncomfortably familiar. A woman stands near a doctor, who lifts a glass flask of her urine into candlelight with dramatic flair. The test: a pregnancy check, through uroscopy. The outcome: already suspected. The diagnosis: a foregone conclusion dressed in performance.
Her father leans in, expectant, already convinced. Her face—anxious, tearful, or maybe performatively so—is the only thing not posturing. And off to the side, a boy smirks, barely containing laughter. He’s the only one not pretending this is about science. And the baby? Not in her arms. The baby is in the flask—or rather, that’s where they’ve decided it will be found.
Schalcken, ever the satirist, knew what he was doing. In his time, uroscopy was considered legitimate medicine. Physicians—real and self-appointed—believed they could discern everything from pregnancy to melancholy by analyzing the color, sediment, and odor of a patient’s urine. The flask was not symbolic; it was diagnostic. And yet, Schalcken paints the physician not as a scholar, but as a stage actor. His robes are rich. His expression is comically grave. He performs knowledge, but his tools are ceremonial. The diagnosis isn’t made with inquiry. It’s made with confidence and props.
The whole thing is theater.
I watch this same theater unfold in my own work. The students walk in with their sample—only it’s a test booklet or a login screen—and we raise it to the light. We read. We interpret. We enter scores into spreadsheets. We write comments about growth and performance and efficacy. But how much of it is real? And how much is ritual?
The truth is, I’m not sure anymore.
As a researcher, I like systems that promise clarity. I like methods. I like inquiry. I’ve used the “Five Whys” method more times than I can count—ask “why” five times and you’ll arrive, supposedly, at the root of the problem. So I tried it with testing.
Why are we testing students?
To see if they’ve learned anything.
Why do we need to know that?
To prove they’ve made growth.
Why prove growth?
To show teachers are doing their jobs.
Why show that?
So schools get funding and students get sorted.
Why do we do it this way?
That’s the part where the room gets quiet. The candle sputters. Someone coughs into their sleeve. And I realize that I’m not diagnosing anything. I’m reenacting an old scene. One where we pretend the test will reveal something new, even though we already believe we know the answer. One where the doctor lifts the flask, nods solemnly, and everyone pretends this is how truth is revealed.
The fifth why doesn’t lead to insight. It leads to tradition, performance, and bureaucracy dressed up as science.
It makes me think of Ivan Illich, who warned that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” His critique wasn't against doctors themselves, but against systems that confuse tools with ends, rituals with reality. In education, we risk the same mistake. We act as though the numbers are the learning. But the test is only the flask. The student is the story.
And what about the woman in the painting? She stands at the center but has no voice. Everyone reads her, but no one asks her. She is the student reduced to data, the learner whose body is interpreted but whose mind remains silent. Her shame, real or performed, doesn’t matter. She’s become symbolic, and symbols are easier to judge than people.
Then there’s her father. He doesn’t look for answers; he looks for confirmation. The test, to him, is a tool of control. He’s the administrator who already suspects a problem and just wants the data to match. The test isn’t about understanding. It’s about certainty, and certainty is often just doubt that’s been dressed in confidence.
And then the boy. I keep returning to him. He’s off to the side, barely restrained, practically laughing out loud at the whole spectacle. He sees what no one else will say: that this isn’t medicine—it’s theater. That this isn’t science—it’s farce. That the emperor, so to speak, is holding a pee jar.
I’ve taught students like him. The ones who ask, with a raised eyebrow or a whispered joke, “Why are we doing this?” Not to disrupt—but because they see through it. They know when we’re pretending. And sometimes, I think they’re the most awake people in the room.
Shakespeare wrote, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Maybe wisdom starts with laughter—the kind that doesn’t mock but reveals. Schalcken’s boy doesn’t ridicule the woman or the doctor. He just sees that the performance is ridiculous. And in seeing it, he tells the truth.
There’s something oddly comforting about this painting, with its shadows and candlelight, its seriousness and silliness. It reminds me that we’ve always done this—cloaked power in process, dressed doubt in language, chased certainty with jars of piss. That our systems, for all their metrics and models, often just reenact old rituals. That sometimes, we are less scientists than stagehands.
But Schalcken doesn’t mock to destroy. He mocks to wake us up.
So when I return to the classroom—when the next round of tests begins—I’ll think again of that candle, that flask, that uneasy young woman, and that grinning boy. I’ll remember that to diagnose is not always to understand. That some rituals conceal more than they reveal. That data is not destiny. That truth isn’t always in the jar.
And maybe, most of all, I’ll remember to laugh. Not to dismiss, but to disarm the illusion. To make space for honesty. Because if I can still laugh—at myself, at the system, at the spectacle—then maybe I haven’t lost my way entirely.
There may or may not be a baby in the flask. Just like there may or may not be growth in that score. But if I forget to ask why I’m holding the jar, if I stop listening to the boy in the corner, then I’ve become exactly what Schalcken painted: a character in someone else’s farce, mistaking performance for truth.