The Education Ministry's Abecedary

A is for Apple,

Professor Michael Apple,

but they would not let him speak

because A was already taken,

and so it goes:

A is for accountability initiatives,

proliferate 

and ever more complete

in education, 

where sham scientists

man the bridges

and claim to understand 

the life of children

as one long performance

on someone else's stage.

C is for complex demand,

for which there are a limited number

of clinical solutions.

C is also for competition,

and counterpart

(classroom, school, inter-school, 

state, national, international, etc.).

C is also for Callicles.

K is for key performance indicators,

essential for leaders

whose eagle eyes

are 

for the most part 

inattentive.

L is for learning jurisdiction.

M is for Mao.

N is for national averages,

as well as appearing twice

in the word inane.

P is for platform,

an alternative to a stage -

if you prefer to watch children fall

when they fail,

or when they disengage.

P is also for powerful pictures

of performance

for people who pretend

to be Charlemagne.

P is also for PISA,

that great empire 

that spreads like Esperanto

into the honeycomb world of education,

including the industrial cities of China.

R is for rich experience,

and rich is another word for good.

S is for specialised learning experiences,

and surveillance,

and system,

and snake.

T is for talk of trusting teachers

once they have been 

reformed

into accountability frameworks.

And that completes 

the improved, more efficient version 

of the alphabet.

You are welcome to leave the room

if you disagree with it.