“Standardized testing has become the measuring stick of modern education – precise, efficient, and deeply inadequate. It tells us what students can recall under pressure, not what they can think when no one is watching. The highest-performing countries in international rankings have, paradoxically, begun dismantling their test-heavy curricula in search of something harder to measure: genuine understanding.” Source: adapted from an opinion column on education policy — genre: op-ed
The author's primary rhetorical strategy in the passage above is best described as: