Your kid is not an empty storage container, ready to be filled with curricular content.
Stories like this creep me out, even if they say Primary school testing and targets are to be streamlined to make exams for seven-year-olds less formal and part of a wider teacher-led assessment yada yada.
Testing programs are not about educating kids. They're about perpetuating the bell curve. As a kid who spent most of his formative years at the back ends of nearly every bell curve the system could throw at him, and who regarded his school experience as a 13-year prison sentence that commenced at age 5, I can tell you there isn't a damn thing in any top-down government-mandated educational testing program that answers any kind of market demand from kids themselves ? who are born with extravagantly unique souls, each with its own agenda and an endless series of questions (there's your real demand) for the purposes of its own education. Few of those questions are addressed by official curricula, testing programs, or even compulsory school attendance.
The unintended agenda of bureaucratized education is laid out very nicely in The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto in 1991. Dig it. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
Well, it is an article about England but many of the points are just as true for American public schools. They are all top-down hierarchies that are ill-equipped, in my opinion, to deal effectively with this current era. Where they work, it is through the bottom-up approaches taken by individual teachers. Teachers who are seldom rewarded for their effort. The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher is well worth reading, even if you disagree with it. Modern public education is an outgrowth of the needs of the Industrial Revolution. Standardization is what drove this revolution and these processes were applied to education.We need a new reformulation of public education to deal with the Information Age. I hope we see this in my lifetime. I fear it will be as big a battle as any but the groups that learn how to do this will succeed at a more rapid pace than those that follow old processes. This will, of course, scare the old guard which will react in ways that will only hasten their own demise. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]
I am now convinced that our approach to school is one of the most powerful blocks to a better society. If we deconstruct what we really learn at school it gives us this picture.
1. You are an empty vessel and I am the expert. It is my job to fill you. - Result, we stop taking responsibility for our own learning. It is very hard to rediscover later in life that you can and should be your own teacher.
2. Everything you need to learn is in a book or in my words. Actually experience is the best teacher not abstraction. We now medicate 30% of the kids in school because they cannot sit still and hear their "mother's voice" drone on. Only 43% of places at university today are held by men! Most have been crushed and put off by a passive over-feminized system. So much for Girls being second class school citizens!
3. All knowledge comes in separate boxes. The bell rings and it is English. The bell rings and it is math. The real world is a connected system. More than anything this concept of separate subjects with no linking context is a tough meme to break.
4. Collaboration is bad. We are taught that you should share toys - bad idea - but not share work. Sharing work - the key to life and productive work - called cheating and is heavily punished.
5. We are so frightened of failure that we have taken all risk and challenge out of school. As a result we have taken out the value of achievement.
8:49:00 AM 
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