The Treehorn Express
NAPLAN – The Macabre Assessment Program
NAPLAN is supposed to assess the capabilities of a million or so Australian school children by using worn-out testing devices that only serves to illustrate the disrespectful attitude that measurers and their ilk have towards children…and nothing of any use. Their stony hearts aim at gathering useless data at great emotional expense and cognitive damage than at a teaching-learning system that has greater potential for national progress on an intellectual, social and cultural scale than their crude notions can ever develop.
The fact that NAPLAN is part of the national schooling landscape is not to the credit of the Australian adult population.
This week’s NAPLAN testing program reveals more than it is supposed to…
FOR MOST OF THIS YEAR….
- Children have spent a few months of this year undertaking stress-ridden full-group classroom operations that damage children’s attitudes to learning instead of polishing their natural abilities for their personal welfare and for national progress. The time has been wasted.
- NAPLAN has forced the teaching profession to adopt stress-ridden instructional strategies that mar more than they measure. Many are irrelevant and wasteful. The profession is being ‘used’ by powerful people who clearly disrespect the more difficult but effective pupilling processes that lead to high holistic achievements and promotes child zest to always do better at whatever one does.
- In the Murdoch sweatshops, though, gathering crazy, unreliable data, children must spend three wasted days each May so that his schooling-ignorant number-crunching flunkies can compare Australian results with those from other countries that employ so many other methods of gathering scores from cohorts that are nothing like each other. It’s all so plain crazy. How can you compare Melba with Mauboy?
- Australian ‘test’ results are revealed months afterwards, useless for sincere evaluation purposes, and telling the Australian electorate absolutely nothing on their ‘better-worse’ comparative scale.
- What NAPLAN does tell learners is that they should be frightened by what happens to them at school. Teachers have great difficulty in keeping an even keel under trying circumstances.
IN A DOWN-TO-EARTH EXPOSE…
Children all over Australia have…
- …endured endless sleepless nights that Tom Chapin sings about.
- …taken performance enhancing medication whose long-term effects are uncertain, as Josephine Toovey describes the practice. Should there be a medical investigation into this?
- …been tutored by out-of-school tutors dedicated to NAPLAN so that better results can be obtained. Fair results? Some cost $50 per hour. It’s a growth industry. Ever been checked?
- …feared that they will be allowed into a private school unless their NAPLAN results are respectable.
- …shared their distress with parents who become even more distressed.
- …changed the tenor of their schooling by undertaking home schooling. No stress…. Love…. On-the-spot evaluation and purposeful direction.
- …been practising, practising, practising to the detriment of full cognitive effort and progress.
- …”kicked the cat” when false inadequacies have been revealed. Playground bullying is, mostly, a product of NAPLANish activities in the classroom.
- …developed a distaste for learning that inhibits their cognitive development.
- …learned a fear of the tests; and parents are unsure of what to do. They yearn to seek advice from their schools, but the truth is not allowed to be expressed.
There are so many evil aspects to NAPLAN testing that, for Australian adults, it has become a real litmus test of our humanity….and nothing short of it. Are you indifferent …and…don’t care as well?
ON TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY OF THIS WEEK…
No teaching of the pupil-centred kind will occur in Years 3,5,7,9 in Australia for three long days.
- Parents and their children should be preparing for what should be a normal school day, full of interesting learning challenges.
- Parents have had their democratic rights maliciously hidden from them. What can they do?
- Most will just “wish them well”, give their kids a “Try hard. Make us proud” farewell kiss; and pretend that everything will be okay.
- Upon return, children will assure their parents that everything went well.
- If the sufferer will bide its time, it will pass.
- The media will not dare to incur the wrath of the almighty by telling the whole truth.
- Politicians will talk about the Budget. It’s easier to handle.
Parents do not realise that their children would be far better off if they stayed at home and undertook some self-selected or parent-directed learning experiences this week. Home schoolers know what joy this can bring. It is so difficult, however, for parents to know what to do, so they tend to ‘go with the flow’; not realising that NAPLAN is a dangerous current.
Meantime, the floggings will continue…….
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The Treehorn Express 