(no subject)

Sit down, shuttup, it's GCSE English by the wonderful Michael Rosen. (Who I always have to mention with the PSA that "Michael Rosen's Sad Book" is perhaps more exactly what it says on the tin than anything else I've read.)

A lot of the mainstream debate about testing and education standards sort of takes it for granted that it's not, ultimately, an ideological debate. Everybody wants children to learn; everybody wants children to have good teachers. Right? You can criticize how many days are spent on testing and how much school is lost just practicing filling in bubble sheets, but -- it's sort of off-limits to say, as Stephen Krashen says, that Common Core is above all about making money for the people who conduct the testing; it's off-limits to say, as Michael Rosen says, that

The real reason for all this is down to the point we have reached in society, the era we are in. We are living at a moment where the decision has been made that the UK can only survive financially in the world on the basis of having an extremely low wage economy, with no job security. One way to assist this process is to release on to the labour market each year, people with low grade qualifications or none. To bring this about, you have to produce a) a tiny elite b) a large cohort of failures.

That is what these 'reforms' are really about. Schools are being made into the servants of an economic imperative that is bringing poverty and hardship to millions while the superrich are increasing their wealth.

In all the debate about whether teachers are underpaid or overpaid, whether teacher's unions are a force for good or a force for evil, there's a kind of misdirection from the ideologies of the public education system. People talk about how schools or teachers are failing children because they can't admit that even if everyone got mechanical engineering degrees and computer science degrees, there wouldn't be jobs for everybody.