Meaning
The Exam Machine
As our schools continue down the path to achieve factory status and our children become units to be slotted in the machine I wonder how this will meet the needs of the modern world.
Each school will become a self-contained business, worshipping on the altar of flawed international PISA tables.
The religious fundamentalists and big business are keen to get in on the academy act. They do not have to employ qualified teachers. That’s fine when all you are doing is getting the poor mites to recite medieval verse or learn how to stack a shelf; it cuts running costs.
The government loves this academy business. They can farm out a lot of the costs to those people, whoever they are, who are dying to get their hands on our children. As a bonus they can zoom up the PISA tables, break the teacher’s pay and conditions, wrest control of schools away from commie county halls and parents, and appeal to nostalgia where previous generations were terrorised and fed boring drivel to regurgitate.
It’s a race back to the fifties with knowledge based exams. Because what we need now are kids who can recite facts. I know all facts and knowledge are readily available at the push of a phone key but regurgitating them is fun. We don’t really need any of those namby pamby social skills, teamwork, qualities, creativity, lateral thinking or all those useless subjects like music, art, ICT, history, drama or geography. Double doses of Maths and English are all that’s required.
We can employ ex-soldiers to control the bored lovelies as they progress through the tedium.
Besides – they are only state school kids. Anyone with anything about them pays so that they don’t have to kow-tow to Ofsted or follow all this rubbish. The Public School kids are the ones that really count.
The Exam Machine
Putting my kid through the exam machine –
A number in a box.
I’m proud she a fine statistic,
But she’d better pull up her socks.
She cannot let the side down;
She got to learn
To take the knocks.
There is no time for fun
In the shadow of the exam factory,
No skills, partnership
Or room for creativity.
They sit in lines
To learn the goods,
Raising standards
On the way.
As they tick the box
When you test them
They have all the rote
Things to say.
Opher 26.3.2016
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