Testament of a battling teacher

Press, 12 October 1985, Page 20

Testament of a battling teacher

I Passed This Way. By Sylvia Ashton Warner. Reed Methuen, 1985. 370 pp. $19.95. (Reviewed by Diane Prout)

Sylvia Ashton Warner’s autobiography, first published in New Zealand in 1980, is a fascinating, passionate and intensely moving testament of a woman whose innovative and creative ideas on primary education were a generation ahead of her time.

This paperback edition, published to coincide with the Michael Firth film “Sylvia,” starring Eleanor David, covers the early part of her life — her primary schooling, Teachers’ College, marriage and professional life, culminating in the death of her husband-teacher, Keith Henderson. Unlike the earlier publication it does not describe her exile at Aspen College, Colorado, a radical experimental institution, where her real worth as a teacher and writer was finally acknowledged. However, the formative years covered in this posthumous book reveal much of the brilliant, many-faceted and unconventional personality that was Sylvia Ashton Warner because she is totally candid about her successes and failures, her loves aand losses. It is ironic that she struggled all her life against becoming a committed teacher. Her creative instincts strove to find their fullest expression in music, painting, writing and sculpture. Wherever she made her home in a lifetime of travel and change, she established for herself her “Selahs” — retreats where she could give range to the passions which consumed her. Sometimes a packing case, a sod hut or a cave during the early years of teaching Maori children on the East Coast with her husband and three young children, they were bolt-holes where she could release the “monster” within her and let her “hot imagery” flare.

Her early family life shaped her profoundly. She was one of nine living children born to an extraordinary teaching mother who would on occasions ride horseback to school while her crippled husband sat at home preparing pan-fried potatoes for the family meal. The evenings would be spent playing the piano, laughing,

quarrelling and learning despite the most appalling financial hardship. Ten changes of primary school and three high schools did not daunt her fiercely competitive spirit and despite the privations of living in a pre-Welfare State era, she managed to graduate from Auckland Teachers’ College, a brilliant erratic student, but a reluctant teacher. The decision to leave “civilisation” and suffer geographical and cultural isolation on the East Coast of the North Island was made more for financial than professional reasons. It was among the Maori children that she began to come to grips with the powerful but conflicting instincts that were to dominate her working life. The series of early readers that she wrote and illustrated herself for her pupils satisfied their needs ’ but after prolonged and bitter battles with the educational authorities were found to be pointless in a white man’s culture. It is poignant that her intuitive and

far-sighted understanding of the fundamental needs of Maori children (developed in detail in “Teacher” and “Spinster”) as expressed in these transition readers should have earned only disapproval and suspicion from the inspectorate. When Taha Maori is allegedly being promoted by schools and media throughout the land today it is interesting to consider that Sylvia Ashton Warner was pioneering multicultural language experience in the 19405.

Although this abridged edition does not account for her total achievement in over 50 years of writing and teaching (her appointment as Professor of Education at Simon Frazer University, Vancouver, and the publication of eight novels) it does give an insight into the important influences on one of our most original and gifted writers. Her advice to her trainee students sums up her own attitude to life as expressed in this autobiography: “Live now, Teach later.”