The shape of schooling to come

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.