"Factory Farming "

[Odessa Dawn]

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The children’s author and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen spends two or three days a week visiting schools. And in a climate of constant assessments, he fears real learning is giving way to ‘factory farming’, he tells Richard Garner
"He likes to help develop children’s imaginations andencourage them to work on their ownwith riddles …"
He hopes his visits are not a one-off event and that the children pass on what they have been doing to other classes who were not there “Think of it as a seed,” he says. “You don’t want it just to be, ‘today, we are doing seeds’. You want to watch that seed growing through the year.”
More: Michael Rosen:#

Does "factory farming" in the given context refer to students who depend on teachers not those who think out of the box or students who don’t share knowledge with other students? Is "to work on their own " an antonym for "factory farming?"
Does "factory farming" over here mean being consumer not productive?

 

[SoothingDave]

"Factory farming" refers to (what critics say is) overly-mechanized and impersonal production of food.

The analogy here is that by insisting that students display rudimentary skills through testing that we are making teaching impersonal and mechanical.