Education, the great shared experience

Lydia Wevers

Professor Lydia Wevers is Director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

South Auckland police recently announced they were hitting the streets and parks to find truants and send them back to school. According to TVNZ, up to 30,000 kids cut school every day, but according to police, they are not hard to find because they mostly stay in sight of their school—presumably because they have tried to make their parents think that’s where they’re going.

The police motive seems to be reducing petty crime, but the problem is of course a much more complex one, and some of it is to do with the ways our education system is not managing to engage these kids.

Education, like health, is a perennial hot spot, and more so in an election year. And it’s not hard to understand why. On the mega level, education is one of the great social systems. For up to 20 years of your life — kindy to the end of a first degree — your day is structured and shaped by classrooms, curricula, teachers and fellow students. What you learn and don’t learn shapes the future; yours and collectively ours.

Education is the great shared experience — everyone has an education and almost everyone has an opinion about it from one end of the spectrum to the other. Noam Chomsky said education was a system of "imposed ignorance", which perhaps some critics of National Standards might also think. According to a 2016 report by researcher Linda Bonne for the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, over two-thirds of teachers recorded a narrowing of the curriculum they teach, associated with National Standards. But according to Nelson Mandela, education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world. In between those two statements lies both the welter of policy decisions and choices made by governments, bureaucrats and individuals and the utopian dream education constitutes: the dream of knowledge, of betterment, of social progress and resolution. Sending kids to school always carries with it an air of hope.

Nevertheless, in New Zealand we have had some difficult propositions and problems put to us in recent years.

National Standards are one of them — there is still a lot of uncertainty about whether they work and what their overall effects on students and learning are. Another is the spectre of Charter Schools, which raise high feelings on both sides of the debate, partly because they prompt uncomfortable reflections about what education is and how it should be done. Is a military-style school, like Vanguard in Auckland’s Albany, a model for success, for example? What is the role of religion in schools? Do all teachers have to be qualified and registered?

New Zealander Professor John Hattie, Director of Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, says decile ratings have been wrongly used as a proxy for school quality. Instead, the Ministry of Education has suggested replacing them with an individual student-based system based on four "risk factors": a parent who has been to prison; child abuse; the family has been on a benefit for a prolonged period; or the child's mother has no formal qualifications. It remains to be seen how that would work.

Then of course there are school fees. The Australian Scholarships Group (ASG) Education Programs New Zealand Planning for Education Index recently estimated the cost of "free" education will be nearly $40,000 for a child born this year. How will that fit with the online classrooms recently proposed by Education Minister Hekia Parata?

One of the things I value most about our education system is the strength of the state school sector. It seems both socially cohesive and well-rounded that children from different socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities and abilities should share a classroom and a social world. Perhaps this dream of diversity is already only that, in our increasingly socially and economically demarcated towns and suburbs, but it is a dream worth hanging on to if we value equality of opportunity and a chance of happiness for all our children.

Beginning on Wednesday 15 March, Victoria University of Wellington’s Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies and Faculty of Education are holding a seminar series entitled The Road Ahead, which will raise questions about education across the spectrum. Debate about what we do and how we do it is an essential precondition for a living education system. I know what I want and I am prepared to argue for it.

This article was originally published in newsroom