The shape of schooling to come

It is not generally known that a large publishing company called Pearson has been printing and publishing NAPLAN tests in NSW, overseeing the marking processes and reporting on results since 2012.

It has cost the NSW taxpayer $51.9 million so far.

What is Pearson ? It says:

Pearson is the world's learning company, with expertise in educational courseware and assessment, and a range of teaching and learning services powered by technology. We're committed to helping everyone learn - whenever, wherever, and however it suits them.

Our mission is to help people all over Australia make progress through access to better learning. We know that learning unlocks a rewarding career and a better life.

Unlock your future.

In a country that thinks about its future, it is clear that he who controls the school curriculum in this way, controls the future of the country and the well-being of its citizens. Heil, Testucators!

For generations the responsibility for imparting curriculum requirements has been given to classroom teachers who are expert at what we might call 'pupilling learnacy'. By this, I mean that teachers and learners understand that they have a serious contract. The dictionary meaning of the word 'pupil' becomes active in a serious interpersonal exchange.

This exchange not only involves the learning of facts and of gathering, remembering and using information, but the teacher teaches the pupil how to adapt and adopt a personal learning style using his or her own learning neurons and genes and interest and gumption that both of them know about and understand. The teacher pupils learnacy….or the time spent in the exchange has been wasted. Because each pupil is so different, the 'freedom to learn' has to be encouraged in the programs of work that each school arranges.

No sham, coercively enforced, fear-based, money-making enterprise has ever improved learning like child-oriented teaching aka pupilling does.

It was Goldie Hawn who said, "We need to shift the focus to children and not just tests. Children need to shake hands with their brains and develop their emotional literacy in classrooms that are joyful." Love you, Goldie.

Shake hand with their brains or a keyboard?

There is nothing so magical, nothing that promotes the joy of learning and high achievement as the buzz of interpersonal, shared learning in a rich pupilling classroom….nothing! You just cannot package it or buy it from overseas . [You can have on-line stuff available or make your own, if you need it.] Basic pupilling is beyond the reach of sham pedestrian testucating and testifying. It doesn't just 'cover' the curriculum on-line. It enriches it from the inside.