No! No! No to NAPLAN!
What is it you don’t understand about No?
The educational treasure trove of the late Phil Cullen, OAM, is still available on this website with his "Treehorn Express campaign." Phil railed against the adoption of the Global Education Reform Movement by the Federal Government in the early nineties under the Howard government's privatisation of the nation's education system through its "Parent Choice" mantra.
http://primaryschooling.net/?page_id=231 Phil’s hard hitting campaign aimed to alert the nation’s education community of the dangers NAPLAN posed for the education of its children, through a regular and widely distributed newsletter “The Treehorn Express,” a copy of which elicited the following from Paul Wildman https://independent.academia.edu/PaulWildman
Phil was Queensland’s Director of Primary Education for fourteen years and is still dearly remembered by those who saw the vision of one of the nation’s great educators.
Phil’s “No to NAPLAN” through his campaign encapsulated the following main concerns:
During the life of NAPLAN we have learned....
1. School children are unfortunate victims of NAPLAN testing. Their ability to learn has been assaulted; some ruined.
2. NAPLAN testing has degraded Australia’s schooling systems.
3. The scaring-kids tests do nothing to improve learning in the classroom.
4. Test publishers and on-line lesson producers have grown enormously rich.
5. Professional teaching ethics have been devalued.
6. It has cost the Australian taxpayer, billions of dollars – all wasted.
Let’s tell the world that this has happened, but, together we can fix things. NAPLAN testing has been a very sad patch in our history. Think of the kids.
This is Paul’s reply to myself and former NSW primary principal, Ray Armstrong
and it is Paul's observations that I should like to use to provoke further discussion.
Phil and Ray well done. A few comments please –
Ray’s conceptual understanding of NAPLAN (and yours Phil to a point) is still quite narrow. The solution will be in our techno-utopian mind set will be More Of The Same that is more and intense NAPLAN applied by computers and discipline, funding loss, fiscal corporal punishment, so to speak, if failure occurs will expand exponentially. Our culture is, I submit from a political perspective, only interested in the scientific-technical side of things not the socio side of things i.e. seeing schooling as a socio-technical exercise as per the late great Aust systems theorist Fred Emery.
NAPLAN is actually emerging as a complete alternative pedagogical world that is part of Big Business just like Big Pharma and Big Brother – in fact in NSW from next year you can’t sit for your senior certificate if you haven’t got an ‘8’ in NAPLAN – can you/we see how the Western Anglo mindset reproduces itself herein. NAPLAN has now become THE pedagogical system for Australia NOT conventional subjects etc. And this is just the beginning.
As with the EPA and FDA in the US we see what in ancient Greek is called ‘enantiodromia’ where the opposite is achieved to what is set out to do. So these US bodies, by their decisions and actions (not their public remit) are now responsible for increasing pollution and increasing obesity and cancer in particular, respectively. So, I fear, it is thus with Education Big Ed as it may be called.
Stopping NAPLAN and continuing says schools, centralised curriculum, hierarchical power over systems therein, Nation State based, same age cohort class groups, exclusion of community from pedagogy will solve only part of our dilemma as schools themselves are as we discussed simply antiquated machines for producing factory fodder for industries of yesteryear (indeed our whole Governance structure is similarly outdated) – now universities are the same mix - right down to Kindy curricula all decided centrally by the elite and all based on this failing user pays system.
You Phil support the work of school inspectors. I submit the inspectorate as a whole, functioned as a surveillance mechanism for the elite – which you were part of. Systems wise the momentum was and is, in Anglo countries, only towards NAPLAN and its intensification within Anglo Nation States.
I welcome discussion of these broader issues as well as NAPLAN.
Ciao Paul.
Wildman, P. (1998). Biting the Bullet with Fred Emery. Futures, 30(6), Second Thoughts section: 573-583.
Wildman, P. e. (1998). A Retrospective on Fred Emery. Futures (August), 30(6), 573-584.
Paul Wildman (1) Our future is not ours to colonise but is loaned to us by our grandchildren. (2) Scale needs to be sensitive enough to pick up context.
Go CRAFT! crafters-connect.com .
Go kids and adults learning kal.net.au .
Go the Bush Mechanic bushie.weekly.com
Phil’s reflection on Paul’s observation’s of his crusade are in his own words:
Paul's observations are accepted without equivocation. The narrowness of my [aka Treehorn's] crusade to get rid of NAPLAN, was confined to the criticisms of the macho-seditious way that it was introduced, the meek acceptance of the scheme by 'education' groups, the use of fear as a motivational instrument of learning, the deceitfulness of keeping parents' democratic rights hidden from them. I tried to concentrate on the lack of humanity in our treatment of children and the basic stupidity of NAPLAN. Tough luck. I just didn't do any good.
​
As Paul suggests, the use of NAPLAN tests has initiated a new pedagogical system for Australia and my thin, weak form of argument has been too focused on its effects on the mental health and educative progress of young children...and little else. Indeed, I thought that little else would be necessary, to have it banned, but I was wrong. I have received a big red F for my efforts, and my stubbornness has not helped. I overplayed the criticism of kleinist attitudes. I guess I thought that I could crack the style of Aussie casual indifference to such schooling; and that every primary school principal in Australia would adopt my point of view; but I couldn't and didn't. We should now -at this present time in history - be undergoing a monumental shift from traditional pedagogy and the malpractice of learning/testing traditional techniques to an unfulfilled urgent need for a nation of self-determined learners who can adjust to the dark side of corporate ideologies. THERE IS A SERIOUS NEED TO DISCUSS THIS. WE NEED A RENEWED FOCUS ON SCHOOLING. AS AN ISSUE, IT IS BIG!
​
Curriculum issues have been limited to accountability, diagnosis and remediation. We have dwelt on problem-solving related only to data gathering and the passing of tests, instead of enabling the young to be proactive in their efforts to make sense of a rapidly changing, innovative world. We need to talk about a curriculum that will help them to cope, but we seem to be prohibited from talking about it at length. As we move from a pedagogy based on 'teacher knows all' and will teach children what they should know and an andragogy that promotes more personal responsibility for learning and liking it, through to a future of heutagogical learning styles that will be essential for survival, there is no place for stupidities like NAPLAN. It had its day in 2009 when we learned about its seductive sabotage of basic child rights and its seditious intent, well described by Paul. It's still around doing its damage and it shouldn't be.
​
Within the profession, there is a critical need for a deep discussion on professional ethics and their relationship to UNESCO's Rights of the Child. Why isn't there a Code of Conduct that relates to them? Do teachers observe a professionally initiated Code of Conduct or a bureaucratic Code of Control concocted by sciolist bureaucrats? Are we, as Paul suggests, running schools that are "....simply antiquated machines producing factory fodder for industries of yesteryear.."
​
When Bill Ford [1997] said that we should prefer 'knowledge sharing' rather than 'knowledge hoarding', Hase and Kenyon* said, " In this respect heutagogy [i.e. self-directed learning] looks to the future in which knowing how to learn will be a fundamental skill given the pace of innovation and the changing structure of communities and workplaces"
​
While we have always spoken blithely about the need for pupils to 'learn how to learn', Australia has yet to discuss the kinds of pedagogy that work to set children on their learning trail from Year 1. Australia has also yet to discuss its casual indifference to schooling and learning matters and especially its toleration of the abuse of children's mental health through the creation of fear and anxiety in the classroom. Why do Aussie adults prefer to ignore serious issues such as these? How can we continue to tolerate the distress and anxiety it causes to almost every pupil...the suicides and the like? Would anybody notice if fictitious Treehorn regrew to his normal height and then turned a livid green..he did, and still is..[That message didn't get through either, did it?] .....or notice that NAPLAN is failing with Greek 'enantiodromiac' spirit? Will 'Noticing' itself ever become a syllabus requirement?
Did Aussies notice that Paul's 'enantiodromia' was the main feature of the most recent NAPLAN results. The fear element was supposed to produce better results, but it took control of the contestants attitude to learning. Learning, after all, is an individual act and you will not make me learn if I don't want to. The pupils reacted to the last NAPLAN test in a very noticeable way....but....did we notice? They reversed the intention. The next trick is for testucating sciolists to dumb down all future tests [if we are silly enough to persist with them] to ensure better scores on My School noticeboard. Who cares? Who would notice?
*Google: "From Andragogy to Heutagogy" by Stewart Hase & Chris Kenyon (2001) USC