A reader describes the impact of GERM in Spain, where she teaches. The Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg coined the term GERM in his book “Finnish Lessons.” It refers to the Global Education Reform Movement. GERM refers to interlocking strategies of testing, choice, competition. PISA spreads GERM. GERM turns education into a competition for test scores, instead of a process of human development.
“Thanks for your blog I have just discovered two months ago.
“Here in Spain we are having lot of troubles in schools and as teachers, due to the policy of our new goverments whose only aim is to reach higher figures in school results without paying any attention to the needs of our students or the increasing difficulties of budgets. During the last year, they have been cutting our budgets and criminalised teachers, they have only paid attention to PISA results, but not in order to solve real problems. So reading your posts makes me see we are not mistaken, and our fight for a public and democratic school is legitimate.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How fitting…GERM … This germ is causing a chronic illness in education, globally, I am seeing.
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So sad this reform agenda is making its way to Spain. Spain is a country where children, family and community are valued and teachers respected. Don’t let this horrible global influence destroy your beautiful country. Buena suerte!
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GERM is a pandemic causing mental and physical illness to children equal to a modern plague. It will lead to global genocide unless it is stopped soon.
GERM is a sinister force from social dysregulation that is driven by Greed, Pride, and Paranoia. It is perpetuated by callous arrogant immature self absorbed politicians and weak school administrators who are either deviant and get pleasure from punishing children, are too ignorant and self absorbed to notice the impact on children, or see themselves as helpless victims and unable to advocate for the children.
Parents have been drawn into the bullying and scapegoating of their children by their own fear of failure and obsession with performance. They participate and supervise the hours of punishing mind numbing meaningless homework that takes away from quality family time. This adds more chronic stress to the children’s fear of disappointing parents or teachers, and the chronic shame of never fully measuring up. This chronic shame leads to a self punishing thought disorder that begins in early childhood when adults put too much focus on “performance” too early, rather than social emotional development and “imaginative play”. It creates the anxiety in childhood that is known to cause Borderline and Narcissistic Behaviors and mental illness and addictions in young adulthood.
This is not dystrophic speculation. It is reality and a formal diagnosis from scientific research. Do not trust the school administrators or be mislead by a school’s physical appearance. Only trust the symptoms of anxiety or desensitization you can see in your children.
This systemic psychological cancer will strip your children of their spirit, take away their imagination, and make them emotionless desensitized robots. It is permanent psychological damage that is hard wired into young children’s personalities for a lifetime.
If you love your children, then protect them by keeping them safe at home or take them to work with you. Then fight like Hell to clean out this putrid performance testing infestation and get healthy elementary school environments like the Finland or Montessori models. Stand Up to Arne Duncan and the Dept of Ed, ignore the threats and bullying, stop the testing! Take back your own community school. Throw out Pearson & the Performance Enhancement Imposters. Turn the “work camps” for child slave labor into safe places of creative imaginative learning where happy children are valued in environments that build strong leaders and good thinkers.
Texas, are you listening….send Arne Duncan the “Shot heard round the World”!
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I wrote an article about Pasi’s GERMS in my local paper. Check it out.
Click to access 12192013.web.pdf
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