New director at Four Avenues

Press, 15 August 1981, Page 11

New director at Four Avenues

Mr Graham Mundy thought he had run into an anti-Springbok tour demonstration when he arrived at Christchurch Airport and saw a group of shouting, banner-waving young people.

In fact, he had run into his own welcoming party. It was the students of Four Avenues School welcoming their new director. “You would not have that happen anywhere else," he said, “and that showed me that what I had heard about Four Avenues was true.” Four Avenues is a State school unlike any other. It is an “alternative” school which has no set curriculum, where the students have as much say in the running of the school as the teachers, and where the students decide what they want to learn. Mr Mundy accepted the post of director last month because he thinks other schools are being manipulated by political and economic interests to blind people to the reality of the future. In other words, Mr Mundy, who is 46. and used to be guidance counsellor at Huntly College and chairman of the Post-Primary Teachers' Association guidance counsellor advisory committee, has a bone to pick with the education system.

The system catered to the interests of employers and politicians rather than the interests of students, he said. “The Government thinks that high unemployment is a black mark against it, so w’e

hear the Minister of Education saying that unemployment is temporary,” he said. “Schools are being used to force this ‘con’ along by trying to educate people for the work-force and careers when they well know that many children will be unemployed when they leave school."

Employers supported the Government's policy of emphasing training for work because it was in their interest that the demand for jobs was greater than the supply, Mr Mundy said.

“We know full well that unemployment will be the lot of a growing number of school-leavers,” he said. Four Avenues’ new director believes that instead of catering for the demands of the work-force, schools should cater for students’ own needs.

“In a world of unemployment and constantly changing requirements for steady work the priority should be to teach students how to learn," Mr Mundv said.

"Both during unemployment and while working, people will have to keep learning if they are to avoid stagnation and being overtaken by the demands of the work-force,” he said.

“When students leave school they must therefore have a positive attitude to learning, but we find that because students are not having their needs met they are alienated from the educating process. “They leave the school gates saying, ‘Thank God that’s over’,” he said. “Children who leave school with that attitude are not likely to survive in a world where continual learning is essential.”

Four Avenues was the logical place to go for Mr Mundy, a self-confessed educational radical. He is there because he feels Four Avenues is succeeding where other schools, because of their inflexible curricula and emphasis on authority and discipline, are failing. “This school justifies its existence every time a student walks out the front gate feeling happy about the experience of learning,” he said.

“We have to chase the j children out of this place j every night.”