Silly, silly tests...

[bunn]

A friend of mine with a daughter who has been sitting her SATs says: "She says they've been much easier than the practise exams they've been doing for weeks and weeks. She can't wait to get back to normal because since Easter they've dropped art so that they can practise and art is her favourite subject."

This makes me want to stride up and down ranting about the idiocy of a system that prioritises test practice and form-filling over creativity - for over a month, for children not yet even in their teens! Good grief!

If the next generation ends up either entirely a) golgafrinchan 'B' ark candidates or b) maniac hooligans, I don't think anyone will be able to say the poor little sods were not provoked.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear. The SATs seem designed to be crammed for, rather than adequately assess a child's progress; and one could be forgiven for thinking that golgafrinchan 'B' ark candidates seem to be the desired outcome, as they are easy to govern. As for manic hooligans, there are ways of buying them off, or hoping that they sink into drunken stupors. None of it is very encouraging.

Meanwhile the universities are expected to cover for the inadequacies of earlier phases of the education system, and Manchester is apparently leading by example (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7402737.stm).

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I thought this was the generation that was going to have to cope with the worst excesses of global warming. Should we not be teaching them how to make nourishing rat stew and shoes from old car tires, or at least enabling them to enjoy the last few years of a comfortable high-tech civilisation...?

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

This does not surprise me in the slightest. No1 son will be doing his first lot next year- the pressure will be on as they are a small year group and one of the children in it will have been kept in reception for three years, because she can't make progress.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

As I have no children, I have been isolated from the worst lunacies of the education system recently. I knew SATs were pretty grim, but I hadn't appreciated that genuinely important, useful, life-enhancing stuff like art classes (and apparently, also music, I am now told) was being cancelled just to *practice* for the tests.

I'm still shocked.