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.

Schools might arrange multi-aged groupings, use thinking techniques, brain-power operations, freedom-to-choose, voluntary class attendance, 'open' schooling, library-based arrangements, music or art based time tabling to achieve the ideals of pupilling learnacy. There are so many ways to administer productive learning laboratories.

This recent addition of rigidified Pearson Learning to our existing fear-based Kleinism is a sick standardised arrangement. Its conditional bluntness prevents innovation and individualised creative learning. Together, these two classic Stalinist state theories of learning merely extend the attack on the integrity of teaching which started in 2008…..and do nothing else.

By taking over the classroom pupilling activities for on-line test preparation in order to prepare learners for embarrassingly shallow, mandatory tests just to hold teachers accountable for outcomes over which they have no control, you know that our children are enduring toxic times. Such practices represent shameful bogan political smuck.

The narrowing of the curriculum and the decline in PISA scores has already had devastating consequences for Australian children. We can get better PISA results than Kazakhstan if we do things properly. The eagerness of our leaders to compound the problem and ignore what is really happening, is immature and plain dumb. Such efforts clearly inform us that we are rapidly losing sight of what is important.

On-line junk can certainly be used to manipulate on-line test results, but where does that leave our kids? When our hard-lined politically bankrupt leaders attack the greatest of the caring professions by ordering it to use useless testucating, unreliable and suspicious bumf; and the professionals sheepishly do as they are told, you know that the country has a problem...a big, very big problem.

Only about thirty years to go before we start thinking about how to operate a happy, high-achieving schooling system that starts from the child in the classroom and not from a monied manipulator from New York. Only 30.