THE PRESS SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 1987. National’s education plan

Press, 27 June 1987, Page 20

THE PRESS SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 1987. National’s education plan

The public’s anxiety about the results of the New Zealand education system has persisted, even increased, in spite of or perhaps because of, the large sums of money spent on schooling. The rate of youth unemployment, largely a reflection of the country’s economic malaise, is also a reminder of how schools fail many of their children in the middle and lower ranges of ability — fail to stretch them and to motivate them, and fail to provide them with a worth-while certificate of education that is valued in the work-place.

Helping school-leavers to avoid unemployment is not just altruism. The cost of unemployment in money and in human waste is shameful. A cause for shame, too, is the inability of many of these young unemployed to teach themselves additional skills because sufficient reading ability and application are, for all practical purposes, beyond them. Far from being ashamed of the results, administrators of New Zealand’s education offer soothing assurances that we hold our own in overseas comparisons. Why, then, should it be necessary to take youngsters who have completed 10 years of full-time education and give them special training so they can read and add sufficiently well enough to get a job? Do young people really have to wait until they leave school before someone teaches them essential English and arithmetic? Many manage very well, and attain considerable skills at school. Too many do not.

In these circumstances, the National Party’s education policy, which was released this week, deserves a high mark. Fulfilment of just one of the promises contained in it would be sufficient to give it the stamp of a big leap forward in education. This is the promise that a National Government would ensure that every child learned to read and write early in primary school, the only exceptions being children with “substantial” learning handicaps.

The policy over all would mean the most sweeping changes in education in New Zealand for decades. It would replace the Department of Education with a five-member commission, introduce achievement-based gradings, abolish secondary school, zoning, and introduce what amounts to a 'voucher system for tertiary education. Detractors from the policy have been quick to attach labels such as “elitist” and “socially divisive” to the policy, making a pejorative of excellence. Some are aghast that the policy would cater for the successful, echoing the obsession of earlier reformers to dilute the “poison” of ability and cleverness that used to find reward in education. Moving away from education pitched at the lever of the lowest or slowest common denominator would be no bad thing.

Teachers and educators might have been expected to be overjoyed at the promise of a reading recovery programme for six-year-olds in all primary schools by 1989; the welcome has been muted and most comment has been directed adversely against the abolition of zoning and the return to assessment of pupils on the basis of marks.

The removal of zoning and the renewed emphasis on external examination are central to National’s approach to education. This emphasis might have been expected to upset those who regard schools not as places of learning but as workshops of egalitarian social engineering. In fact, zoning has achieved little of what it was meant to do. And the trend away from external examinations has done nothing to disguise the slipping standards in education; it has made an objective measurement of the decline for so many pupils more difficult to obtain. Under zoning, New Zealand has a secondary school system that works best for those who live in the right place. Selection is no longer by ability, but by locality — that is commonly by wealth and class. Parents with money gravitate to good neighbourhoods, and it is the children from poorer homes who must take pot-luck. Accordingly, real estate agents have grown school-wise as they help parents to move to the right catchment area for the right school. To adapt Bernard Shaw’s aphorism about education: “Those who can, move.”

If there is privilege in education for those who can afford or exert themselves to live in

the appropriate area, if there is the social and racial discrimination in the quality of education about which proponents of zoning complain, surely the zoning system codifies and perpetuates it. Because of zoning, “haves” tend to be concentrated in some schools, “have-nots” in others. Zoning has done nothing to discourage the natural corollary of this, namely the concentration of the most able teachers at the better schools, while at the other end of the spectrum schools in depressed areas are hard put to it to find staff. The criticism that abolition of zoning will result in schools accepting; pupils who show, promise of enhancing the school’s academic record needs no apology. The practice is a virtue rather than a fault. Certainly the abolition of ■ zoning will enable intellectually able children from less well-to-do environments to claim their places alongside academic peers in schools providing impressive results.

Instead, under the present zoning system, able children are trapped in schools that must cater for the non-academic majority of their pupils. Zoning puts extra hurdles in the way of bright children and makes more difficult their attainment of an educational passport to social and academic mobility. Far from bridging social differences, zoning equally can be held to institutionalise them. Education seems to be in the grip of people with anti-competitive beliefs. Educators who view competition with distaste, and teachers who pretend that the competitive element of exams is damaging to young egos, purport to prepare their pupils for an increasingly competitive world. Thus, an education system that tries to disguise — and is trying to abolish — failure at school is prepared nevertheless to launch children into a world where a significant proportion of them will, transparently, fail at the first hurdle. It is a hard and aggressive world; pretending otherwise is cheating our. children.

Because it is now considered'distasteful to sort out the bright from the not-so-bright, education has become a sort of handicap race in which it is the ablest that are handicapped. The result is likely to be mediocrity. Exams are not the purpose of education, any more than profits are the purpose of industry. But exams, like profits, are the best indication available that the true purposes of education are being achieved. Those who suspect that the reason people in charge of the system sought to get rid of exams was because exams test the system as much as the pupils, will be glad of the renewed emphasis on external examinations in the National policy.

The policy is not altogether without fishhooks. For instance, a National Government would adjust the training entitlement for tertiary students to nudge them towards occupations desired by the Government and its “planners.” As the party’s spokesman on education, Miss Ruth Richardson, put it, they would “load the dice in favour of particular areas of learning.” Presumably this would mean higher monetary support for some forms of training or courses than, for others. Politicians will succeed in wasting scarce resources if they attempt to dragoon young people into particular courses for reasons of some national manpower planning scheme. Such planning is frequently mistaken — witness the constant see-sawing between a glut and shortage of teachers, for instance, when intakes are controlled tightly to match forecasted need.

The time is opportune for a serious review of our education system. The school population is now in a decline that will continue for several years to come, even allowing for the number of pupils who are staying on beyond their preferred time of departure because there are no jobs for them. Classes can therefore gradually become smaller; better performance can be demanded of teachers; and a greater effort can be made to move the standards of the worst schools towards those of the best. In this context, National’s policy provides lines of discussion that can profitably be pursued, particularly the notion that schools should encourage effort and provide an incentive for industry and achievement.