First time commenter Griffo posted this comment in an older thread. It deserves a wider audience…
The other night I resigned from the bot of my local school. My experience in the field of education is fairly varied, with time on both sides of the chalkface as it were. This education system is one of the cleverest in the world, and it is self improving. I am very proud of our school, in fact I have good reasons to believe that it is the best primary school in the district, but the bot has been forced by the government, through the moe to include national standards, and I can’t in good conscience be a party to such foolishness. I do believe in national normative testing, as we have used for some years now, and a wonderful tool it is, when used in it’s place.
There are a variety of reasons why NS is bad for the education system, such as:
Stratification of the system with league tables
Publication of students’ achievements in the public sphere
Unrealistic comparisons between unlike schools
Unrealistic comparisons between unlike students
Unreasonable influence over the way teachers teach
Unattainable goals
Disempowerment of bots and there communities
Starting points are ignored
Cultural learning is ignored
True individuality is supressed
Students whose learning style is not “normal” are disenfranchised
Lack of early success dooms the student to long term failure
Long term loss of flexibility in the populations mentality
Creation of an even more pyramidal society
And on
And on
The only other countries that use this system, worldwide, are Australia, the USA, and Great Britain. The Aussies are delusional, the Americans are falling fast, and the battles have started on the streets of England. In fact just today I read of strong reports coming out of England that teachers are upgrading test results and dropping the hard stuff to get the “achievements” that are demanded. No one in the press connected this with the mistake that this government is shoving down our throats
I haven’t met an educationalist who even remotely supports this.
I haven’t met an Englishman that supports this.
Same for the Aussies.
The young Americans shake their heads in despair when you ask about it.
The politicians who introduced this stupidity are acting on one of two impulses. The first is that they were told what to do by their philosophical masters, or Two, it was a quick grab of a policy that was different to the Labour party, and seemed like an easy do. You take your pick.
Please don’t force the schooling of our children to take a backward step.
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