Stop tinkering around the edges: A call for the deterritorialisation of assessment praxis in the age of Anthropocene predicaments

Due to anthropogenic impacts generated by colonial and neocapitalist cultures, the world is now moving on accelerating trajectories toward dystopian futures. Education, traditionally engineered as an instrument of cultural reproduction, now urgently needs to adopt a leadership role for cultural transformation to generate a sustainable future. To fulfil this role, the aims, objectives, and practices of education must be strategically revisited. Here, in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, the overbearing role of the National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA) assessment culture in secondary schools is critiqued for its territorialising impact on educational content and praxis and the stifling of teacher-led innovation. Based on the author’s own experience and research with secondary-school teachers, a call is made for the deterritorialisation of assessment culture with the aim to liberate and instrumentalise student and teacher agency to promote humanity’s search for Deleuze’s new Earth and new peoples.