Power and Progress

How the Power Struggle affects Testing and Research

First let it be said that we are in a constant struggle for power. The modern world's economic and political power structure requires constant access to information as well as faster and faster means of accessing it. The saying, "Knowledge is Power," is more true now that it ever it was. It is a commonly known fact that to simply survive, one must keep up with the ever developing world; but if you want to succeed, you must make progress. The dominant culture uses this term progress to describe the testing and research one carries out to ”get ahead in this world” and then what he or she does to stay ahead. (Research will be viewed as a series of tests.) Other strategies exist as well, but will be excluded for the sake of space. This struggle for power fosters a “do or die” attitude that is not just an after-effect of, but is also partly responsible for the Western approach to using research and testing to “get ...