Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Tests are making children hate books, warns Pullman
"The award-winning children's author Philip Pullman today launches a broadside against the government's "brutal" school testing regime, warning that it is creating a generation of children who hate reading and "feel nothing but hostility for literature".
"Writing in Guardian Education, the author of the acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy attacks a lack of focus on enjoyment in the teaching of reading and writing. Drilling to meet the demands of tests makes children's writing "empty, conventional and worthless", he says."
I think Pullman's spot on with all this, though of course, he's said it all before, most notably in a NATE speech which is reproduced in his 2002 NATE Perspectives on English Teaching pamphlet 'perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things' .