Great article Graeme...very thought-provoking and right on.  I say this as a teacher who spent 30+ years in the system.

Remember the old Departmental exams?  I am old enough to have been a victim of those.

Interesting how the pendulum swings, and our children suffer because the people who should be consulted, namely our teachers who know what should work best because they are the ones in the trenches everyday, are largely ignored. 

I used to teach or try to teach this poem to my students...resulted in some great discussion on the limitations of our educational system then and now.

The Examiner
by F.R. Scott, A poem written in the 1940's in Canada concerning
the American schooling system

    The routine trickery of the examination baffles these hot and discouraged youths
    Driven by they know not what external pressure, they pour their hated self-analysis, through the nib of confession, onto the accusatory page
    I, who have plotted their immediate downfall, I am entrusted with the divine categories: A, B, C, D, and the hell of F
    The parade of prize and the back door of pass, in the tight silence, standing by green grass window, watching the fertile earth graduate its sons with more compassion
    Not commanding the shape of stem and stamen, bringing the trees to pass by shift of sunlight and increase of rain
    For each seed, the whole soil; for the inner life, the environment receptive and contributory
    I shudder at the narrow frames of our textbook schools in which we plant our so various seedlings
    Each brick-walled barracks, cut into numbered rooms, black boarded, ties the venturing chute to the master's stick
    The screw-desk rows of lads and girls, subdued in the shade of an adult, their acid sub-soil, shape the new to the old in the ashen garden
    Shall we, shall we open the whole skylight of thought to these tip-toe minds, bring them our frontier worlds and the boundless uplands of art for their field of growth?
    Or shall we pass them the chosen poems with the footnotes, ring the bell on their thoughts, period their play, make laws for averages and plans for means, print one history book for a whole province and let 90,000 read page 10 by Tuesday?
    As I gather the inadequate paper evidence, I hear across the neat campus lawn the professional mower's drone clipping the inch-high grass.
 

Standardized testing isn't about the kids...it's about "accountability".  Don't you know that teachers only go in to teaching for the long vacations?  It's not like we would actually teach anything without a test to teach to. 

Personally, I want to completely overhaul the educational system.  I want to abolish age/grade groupings and instead allow all children to move at their own pace.  I want to open up opportunities to DO stuff instead of just sitting in a classroom with a textbook.  I want the curriculum to be interesting, relevant and useful at the core and allow for a wide range of optional courses that attract kids of various interests.  I want to bring back basic skills type classes such as home ec. and shop.  It would all cost money, though...funny how schools have money for new counters in the office, a completely renovated staff room, an electronic sign for in front of the school and a flat screen in the main foyer to replace the old bulletin board instead.  (Oh wait...maybe that's just MY school...)

It took me most of my career to learn how to teach. Too bad. By then I wasn't teaching high school (which wouldn't have allowed me to do it anyway). And the universities just don't give a damn about teaching.

Education departments throw away all the training and experience that teachers bring to their work. So why do they bother having training at all?

oh, Beshpin, you demean yourself. (I should say even yourself.) Check out the regular contributors. They include a cabinet minister in the harper government, several CEOs and corporate lawyers, and the head of a very conservative think tank.

Nice kid,Beshpin. Calls people names real good. But can't read.

Interesting article.  If anything, you were a little light on your criticism of standardized testing.  Those things are all kinds of wrong and do all kinds of harm -- particularly in the USA where funding is tied to test results. 

I look forward to reading more!

And i am Graeme's groupie.

Very nice Graeme, particularly the last line.

LB

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

     Albert Einstein

 I bookmarked it.  One more good thing to make  me late for work!  But smarter- lol

I don't have time to look at the site right now, but will when opportunity arises. It sounds interesting.  I am wondering who "Attorney General Kenney" is. The Attorney General of Canada is Rob Nicholson. If you're referring to Jason Kenney, he's the minister of Citizenship & Immigration. Or is there a provincial attorney general somewhere named Kenney?

You're quite right. I fluffed on that. I think I picked up the mistake on the first list I saw of contributors to The Mark News. I know the title Attorney -General was there. I guess Kenney was on my mind because of his recent involvement in the immigrant booklet.

I wish I could figure how to get my own blog publicized. There is a guide to New Brunswick blogs. But I can't figure out the instructions.

As to the criticism being mild, that's because I had to cut down the length from a couple of thousand words to 500 or so for The Mark News.  The original version is in my own blog. The original also takes a much tougher line on the news media. The original is at

http://themonctongrimes-dripdrain@blogspot.com