Nats Education Policy Came From Business Round Table

Q: Testing seven year and eleven yr olds with a nation wide-examination has been proven destructive to children's well being and has been dropped by Scottish and Welsh Education Authorities who found children were suffering extreme anxiety for a test which provides nothing of lasting value to a childs education but can produce severe failure syndrome in young kids. It has also been found that teachers experienced work overload and stress with national testing contributed to teachers leaving the profession.

A:While my heart leans strongly toward Labour and Green, and while I admire the near-Redbaiter-like tenacity of your posts have added much welcome counterweight of opinion to nz.general, I cannot go with this particular 'national exams hurt kids' tentacle of PC-ness. Fact - it's a harsh hungry competitive world out there. Deal with it. The All Blacks are national heroes because they accept, even revel in, this fact - and are leading the international rugby world because of it. If the AB's training regime was subject to even a tenth of this 'competitiveness causes damage' PC bullshit they'd be a national joke, languishing at the bottom of the table, getting the shit kicked out of them by Fiji, Spain and Ecuador. A streamlined national benchmark of educational achievement is a must. Testing kids against this benchmark does not of itself damage them. Cushioning them from the truth about their levels of academic achievement, and confusing potential employers, *does* damage kids, as does any notion that pure academic achievement is the *sole* standard of a kid's worth. That was a good presentation, thanks Janice. Describes the issues associated with post 1999 Labour party reforms and proposes some positive solutions to get things back on track. I get awfully confused here - it's amazing how 'giving a hand up' can very quickly translate to 'not giving a fuck', and is the catchphrase of those clamouring to get a quick hit of liquidity by selling off NZers' equity in their own national assets. I've yet to see a party come forward with the right mix of moral/economic liberalism and conservatism. In the context of superpowers like the USA jealously protecting their own homeland economic interests, Brash's agenda of 'bring the ky gel folks, it's party time, get here by lunchtime' is set to expose NZ to a new level of long term economic devastation. I must have said this a dozen times - any parent who put the home mortgage on revolving credit, sold the car/furnishings/appliances and leased them back, and cashed in the family investments, for the sake of a quick spend-up, would be slammed as irresponsible. But one who does this at the nation level meets with the hoots of approving hordes.

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