Education Thoughts

In 1877, adopting the approach developed in Nelson province our Parliament established a nation-wide system of ‘free, compulsory and secular education’ for children between the ages of 7 and 13. Maori need not attend but they had the right if they wanted to. Introducing the Act, Sir Charles Bowen said, ‘the higher branches of education may be taught upon payment of a fee. … and there is provision for scholarships which enable children of unusual attainments and ability to carry on their education. It is not intended to encourage children whose vocation is honest labour to waste in higher schools time which might be devoted to the learning of a trade.’ Well-intentioned this two-way division fastening different expectations has bedeviled our system ever since.

Just as the industrial revolution changed society and education, so will the information revolution.

This revolution assumes mobility, flexibility, and the capacity to change, to adapt, and to be innovative. It means knowing that the shelf life of much learning is short, that the knowledge base is increasingly complex and that society will increasingly be characterised by continual upheaval and dislocation.

New Zealand’s best educational practice is along the needed lines for the future - group work, projects, ownership of learning, skills across the curriculum, inter-disciplinary studies, greater linkages to enterprise, portable qualifications, holistic learning, and collaborative knowledge creation.

Education is a human system devised to help people, especially young people learn. Schools are the devices that have been developed to assist this process, to facilitate learning. They reflect community values, needs and pressures. American research finds students spend over four hours daily in front of screens, (computer or TV). Peer pressure is stronger than it used to be. Schools are caught in the crossfire of a pluralistic society.

Authority now has to be earned. When I started a teacher had it - could lose it, but they had it as of right. .

I consider the teaching profession is devalued and underpaid Admittedly, teachers are sometimes their own worst enemies, especially secondary teachers who advise their students not to go teaching.

Long Live the Sheep-dog

MAKESHIFT HOLDING PEN
.
My grandfather possessed
places with great names,
Omana,
the big house
overlooking the railyards,
Rocky Peak,
a view of nearly
all of Banks Peninsula,
Western Valley,
a quiet creek,
dragonflies & native bees

He seemed to spend his time
shifting sheep between the three

Any excuse to practice the dogs
for those heroic winter days
when he would stride out to
the circle & with whistle, shout
& stick, control all brute creation.

This is a poem I’m particularly pleased to have written. My grandfather lived for his dog trials. My stepfather was also a keen triallist. I helped raise their pups. Watching a half-grown pup eyeing and rounding up the chooks is an early memory.

My country upbringing showed this morning when I read that animal rights activists were campaigning to remove sheep-dogs from the farm. High country mustering would be impossible. Centuries of interdependence would be lost. My hackles rose.
Long live the sheep dog.

Eileen Morris

Eileen Morris, aged 94, died peacefully this week. I first met her in 1979, a gracious, dignified, grey-haired lady, mother of Anne’s friend Lani. Nothing about her demeanour prepared me for the surprising statement that she should have a t-shirt made with the words ‘when I was 21 I ran away to sea with a German sailor.’ Over the years I learnt snippets of her story, how George in his yacht arrived in Napier in 1935 and despite her mother’s disapproval and the condemnation of the provincial city, the young typist went with him sailing around the Pacific. She was a brave lady.

By coincidence I am at present reading Dark Sun, the life of George Dibbern. As a roving young man he had been in New Zealand during the First World War and was interned on Soames Island in Wellington Harbour. He had returned to Germany, married and had three daughters. He left them in 1930 to sail vagabond style around the world, Mediterranean first, then across the Atlantic and Pacific to New Zealand. He had a succession of woman sailors but he described Eileen as his ‘best mate.’ The book reveals what a competent yachts-person she was, navigator as well as cook and deckhand.

They had an idyllic time, though there was hardship as they lived hand to mouth, in the South Sea Islands, before heading north to Hawaii and then east to Canada. There they contemplated settling but they could not get citizenship, George was German and they had little financial prospects. They sailed south to Seattle and San Francisco before heading back to Hawaii. War had broken out, their American visas had expired and so they headed south surviving a battering hurricane to limp back into Napier. George was interned again at Soames Island.

The war over, they resumed their sailing life together. Lani was born and lived on board as they sailed around the Cook Islands. Eventually, Eileen decided Lani needed schooling so she left George and settled back in Napier doing office work. Her days of adventure were over.

Daylight Saving

Daylight saving ended this morning – a now accepted part of the calendar year. Its origins goes back to English monarch Charles II establishing the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675 with the aim of developing a star map to help ships determine longitude. With these maps, plus developments in watch-making, sea captains such as Cook could work out whereabouts they were while at sea. But accuracy in knowing where you were did not guarantee knowledge of the time of arrival home. Sailing ships like horse and stage-coach were at the mercy of the elements. The advent of the steam railway train in the 19th century ended this randomness of arrival. From departure to arrival time could be accurately measured. Obviously a common time was needed to enable people to catch the train. Local time created confusion. So the various British railways decided to use London time as the Greenwich system was called. Some of the provincial cities objected but common sense prevailed.

Nations began to use the same system. New Zealand was one of the first (1868) to adopt a standard time to be observed throughout the country, set at 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of Greenwich mean time. Greenwich time was not adopted officially by the United Kingdom until 1880. Four years later an international conference decided to make the world-wide standard an imaginary line running from pole to pole and going through Greenwich. Ever since it has been the basis of all time-zones. Liberia in West Africa was the last nation to accept it. In 1972 they abandoned their stubborn insistence of their own local time, out of step with all their neighbours.

The USA is more complicated, the distances are vast and run in all directions. To end the confusion of local time in 1883 the railway companies there divided the country into artificial time zones. During the First World War the Federal Government introduced daylight saving. As soon as the war it was removed for farmers were bitterly opposed to it. After Pearl Harbour it was re-introduced but again was repealed as soon as the war was over. Cities and states reverted to choosing their own time. This caused so much confusion that in 1966 the Federal Government legislated for national daylight saving.

New Zealand’s first advocate of daylight saving was Dunedin MP Thomas Sidey. In 1909 he argued that clocks should be advanced by one hour each summer to add an hour of daylight to the evenings. For the next twenty years he regularly introduced draft legislation, until in 1926 the House of Representatives passed it. But then the Upper House, the Legislative Council rejected it. New Zealand once, like most western democracies, had two legislative houses. Our Upper House was abolished by the National government in 1951. As a result of that particular change tremendous power was given to the one debating chamber, a major reason for the introduction of MMP in 1996.

The 1926 debates over the introduction of daylight saving indicate the arguments of the time. Sidey claimed “the extra hour of daylight after working-hours during the summer months is of especial value to indoor workers and the community as a whole as it gives one additional hour for recreation of all kinds, whether playing games or working in garden plots ... one cannot overlook the economic advantages that will also accrue. There will be a saving in the consumption of artifical light.” Opponents expressed concern about the women “who live in the backblocks”. Further, it would cause “the wife of a working-man to get up an hour earlier in order to get her husband away to his work.” As there were no women in either house Hansard does not record what they really thought. Sidey, however, continued to persevere. In 1927 both Houses passed a Bill enabling an experiment whereby the clock was put forward for an hour in summer. This change did create much rural resentment. Radio listeners got better reception at night so they were also opposed. Sidey compromised and in 1928 he got a new bill making a half-hour change. By this New Zealand summer time was set 12 hours ahead of Greenwich, and the passage of the legislation indicates our switch from a rural to an urban society. For a while there was an amusing spin-off. People arranging to meet had to ask where they using real time or Sidey’s time.

Then during the Second World War as an efficiency measure, standard time was altered to be 12 hours ahead of Greenwich time. This advanced our daylight saving once again. Daylight saving is now one hour in advance of New Zealand standard time. The Chatham Islands are a further forty-five minutes ahead of that time. Late in the 20th century after extensive consultation it was decided to begin the saving earlier and ending later. The dates now are the last Sunday in September and the first in April.

So the modern world runs on arbitrary clock time, part of what we take for granted. In a hotel I stayed at in Kyoto I could programme my wake-up call in English, Japanese or French, male of female. I tried all three female voices and settled for the French for my stay. The computerised machinery for that voice was based on Greenwich time.

The Goose Bath Poems

I am reading The Goose Bath Poems, an edition of Janet Frame’s posthumous poems. In my first poetry anthology for secondary schools, Ten Modern New Zealand Poets, I included some poems from Janet Frame’s recently published The Pocket Mirror. A teacher rather caustically said ‘I suppose you included her to make up the women’s numbers’. He didn’t believe my reply that she was one of the first I selected. I said something to the effect that her work was excellent though uneven. I knew that she had been writing poems ever since that first and only publication. I hoped they would be published and delighted they have been. She is one of our finest wordsmiths.

I would I were a teacher again to share these poems. The book is a joy to be savoured again and again. Given her experience it is not surprising she writes about death so frequently. But what I like about this selection is its celebratory nature, the affirming joy of existence rather than a morbid sense of extinction. It’s her use of language that’s so exuberant.
The sweet daily bread of language.
Smell it rising in its given warmth
taste it through the stink of tears and yesterdays and
eat it anywhere with any angel in sight.

The intriguing title tells its own story. When Frame lived near Shannon she kept a goose and a gander, in her words “watchdogs and creatures to be watched.” Friends gave her a discarded ornamental fibreglass bowl as an ablution pool for the birds. When she left to live in the city again she took the bowl (about the size of a child’s paddling pool) with her. There it became the receptacle for her poetry manuscripts. “I’ve been looking through the goose bowl again,” she would say long after the bowl was discarded – a way of saying she was looking at a second volume of poems.

A Fresher

A FRESHER

On the Sunday before orientation week, with only a scattering of people about, shyly resplendent in my new maroon blazer, I walked through Canterbury University's old clock tower with its well-worn geometrical tiles. It felt splendidly baronial. The quad with its vertical stone walls, high, steep slate-tiled roofs, cloisters, small stone-clad library in the middle, the one extensive copper beech and several green-leaved ginkgo trees appeared Old World befitting the education I was about to receive. The scene conveyed a message - observe, have faith in the institution and obey. A stranger to such higher halls of learning, and equally an amateur at architecture, I sensed history, a impression reinforced when exploring the quad I discovered in a corner a plaque stating Sir Ernest Rutherford worked in the nearby underground room.
I was the first of my family to go to university so it was real unknown territory. I count myself favoured in that its location meant town and gown were merged and meshed together. The distinction has been made between a uni-varsity, a community united in a common enterprise for a common purpose, and a multi-varsity, a loose confederation of distinct groups pursuing special interests or agendas. During the 1950s the Arts faculty at Canterbury stressed the first approach with missionary zeal. Graduates, no matter what occupation they would enter, should drink from the well of Oxbridge wisdom, a self-confident, cultural enclosure. One would graduate with certain intellectual approaches and a storehouse of knowledge. The proponents of this viewpoint saw the more vocational oriented courses, law, engineering, education and commerce as second-rate disciplines.
Its leading advocate, Professor Neville Phillips next day gravely enrolled me for stage 1 History, the subject in which I intended to major. During orientation week I joined a group of other `freshers' for an evening at the Phillips' home. The meal was bacon and egg pie, mashed potatoes and peas. The Professor gave us wine. I had had the odd beer, hot toddies for colds, brandy on the pudding at Christmas time, and sherry in the odd trifle, but never wine. Inexperienced, I drank too much of the pleasantly sour stuff. We stood around to eat with only a fork, another new occurrence. Foolishly I ate the pie and spud first, which left me with a pile of peas which rolled round the plate as floundering I tried to spear them. Worse was to come. The Prof produced a bottle of Benedictine and poured us each a tiny glass. My first liqueur. He toasted “Good Study".I knocked mine back in a gulp - dim memory of movie characters doing so and certainly a few glasses of unaccustomed wine dulls judgement. The liqueur burnt down leaving me with an inflamed gullet and eyes that refused to function properly. In agony I coughed and spluttered for the rest of the evening - indeed for the rest of the week. The shame still lingers - not a good beginning to four years' work with the Professor.

April Fool's Day

Today is April Fool’s Day. During my primary school years teachers received great respect except on this day when they remained fair game until midday. At the newly-built posh Little River two-teacher school Miss Kennedy who took the top room used to come out on Monday from Christchurch by the morning bus, she'd arrive five minutes late. One April First morning we turned her desk around carefully rearranging her papers. "Good morning boys and girls" she said as she swept into the room, taking off her gloves, which she always placed in the drawer where the roll was kept. Probably our expectant faces gave the game away, she would be anticipating some prank, it happened annually. "Ah I see you have had your little joke, could you turn the table round again for me, thank you." Four boys rushed out and quickly righted it. Then to our delight as she went to put her gloves away she placed her hand on the hedgehog hidden in the drawer. Her scream proved most satisfying. She took it good-naturedly except the animal had shat on the roll - Government property and that created a problem. How the problem was solved we never found out.