ABSTRACT
Parents want 'good' schools in their vicinity, i.e. such that endorse a similar worldview to their own and acknowledge their child's existence. Industry and tertiary education demand knowledgeable, skilled, 'learnable' youngsters, quick to learn the trade in their new environment. Yet everywhere that the Global Education Reform Movement, or GERM, has infected, educational practices have been reframed in the same 'neoliberal' way. The most problematic aspect of this GERM might not be the fetish of numbers as such even though all this measuring, as people will see, does affect the measured. This shift in educational policies is part and parcel of the same paradigm, within which public services, ever since the 1980s, have been reformed by means of deregulation and privatization. Especially, the introduction of quality-control systems and feedback mechanisms, as developed in the private sector, and the persistent 'culture of measurement' that has come along with it, has caused education or 'learning' to become essentially 'worth-less'.
