As a genuine discussion starter: --- There are a number of serious and fundamental problems with our school system -- take for starters 3 fundamental flaws: -- Its pedagogy is based on managing and regurgitating knowledge produced by trusted sources instead of developing the tools and opportunities for understanding --and that sets us up for a culture of believing and obeying authorities instead of finding out the real truth for ourselves.--- Then it is crudely stratified and set up to produce pupils as grist for the vocational mills instead of developing the understanding and skills for individual enterprise, creativity, innovation and productivity. ---- and then its competitive dynamic means that it acts like a filter, forcing students under fear and pressure to perform (fear makes us stupid and worse: -cunning) instead of inspiring and cultivating personal potentials. As a result its competitive structure sets us up for a society of winners and losers, the resultant hierarchy and the objective of sportingly accepting personal exploitation finds us hoping that one day we will get to the top and kick arse too! And don't forget that if competition is the prevailing cultural and economic dynamic then empathy, cooperation and responsibility for the welfare of others becomes one's greatest liabilities and can find you on the bottom of the economic and educational food chain!

Education focussed on mediating the tools for understanding and empathetically dealing with complexity is a universe away from the knowledge acquisition and management based system that is the schooling default today. That is if you consider that understanding is the process and knowledge is the product! This current system does a far better job of stratifying, compartmentalizing and preparing humanity for a life of replacing reality and truth with the blind acceptance of largely vocational and political instructions and edicts issued by established authority masquerading as trusted sources and accredited fonts of knowledge.

Interestingly NAPLAN appears to attempt to measure the understanding about a subject whereas the tools for such understanding (cognitive functions and strategies) are never taught –at least consciously– and instead students are unconsciously expected to somehow “bootstrap” their understanding of the subject by virtue of the sheer volume of knowledge processed. And we all know what the retention rate of that strategy is!
I am just curious to know when we are going to wake up from the fact that both precedence and consensus do not create truth or reality –and that particularly goes for education!!

duncanmacmartin, frankly say you sound like a teacher. So if you were a parent, what would you expect your children to perform academically at school?

sounds like a dream!! you talked about "a library or a data base or google" just like without any effort or knowledge involved.

I am a parent, and totally disagree with what you said: not sure if you want to advertise your thinking (your website), or else. Anyway, I have a question: why we force our dogs to understand human language?