It’s called education, one of the few absolutely sacred responsibilities of any democratic government.
Our education system has been in turmoil for most of the past 20-odd years. Every Government, National-led or Labour-led, has come up with ideas to improve it — and have failed every time.
And every time a Government has come up with what it sees as a solution to the education system’s failures, the teacher unions have jumped up in arms and done their damndest to oppose any change.
Teachers seem to think only they know what is right and what is wrong with the education system, although it is rare for them to find anything wrong – particularly anything that could be laid at their feet. Any effort to make them accountable has been met with ferocious resistance – time after time, right up to the past few weeks as tyro Education Minister Hekia Parata has tried to bring order out of chaos but seems only to have made matters worse.
How any Minister could decide that increasing class sizes and doing away with a lot of specialist teachers can improve our education system must be mentally challenged, particularly since the idea originated with the bean-counters in Treasury, who have shown over the years that they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The money saved was to be directed towards raising the qualifications of teachers, and that is an eminently desirable aim. But surely not at the expense of the schoolchildren who might suffer from increased class sizes cutting down the attention that can be given to them.
However, I wonder about the extent to which the cult of the individual, which has taken over so much of today’s society, has infected education and the extent to which far too many “special” subjects have been introduced to cover the inability of many to absorb the basics.
It has always seemed to me that the principal duty of education is to instil in those being taught the fundamentals of learning — reading, writing and reckoning.
That was this Government’s intention when it introduced national standards over the rabid resistance of teachers. Its insistence that primary schools give priority to teaching literacy and numeracy was a no-brainer.
Grave concerns over children’s competence in reading, writing and reckoning when they leave primary school, and even high school, have been around for years.
So it’s long past time that the teaching profession was directed to concentrate on those things, even to the exclusion of other easier and more popular subjects.
Back when the debate raged over national standards, teachers raved on about the curriculum having to be broad enough to ensure that children received a “well-rounded education” and were given “employability skills”.
They did not seem to understand that without having mastered basic literacy and numeracy skills, there can be no future employability skills or even a well-rounded education.
Surely it’s not difficult to understand that unless children are competent in reading, writing and basic mathematics they are unable to take their education any further — or get a job.
One can understand that teachers are reluctant, and for a number of reasons, not the least of which may be that many of them can’t themselves spell, add, subtract or multiply.
In its efforts to raise the qualifications of teachers, the Government should receive our support, particularly if it will raise the level of literacy and numeracy so that tens of thousands of children don’t leave primary, and even secondary, schools unable to adequately read, write or figure.
But it must not be at the expense of weakening other areas of schooling. Find the money somewhere else.
l Garth George’s columns appear in the Bay of Plenty Times every Saturday and in the Daily Post, Rotorua, every Friday.
