OPINION
Tani Newton
In my last article, Socialism Saws Off the Branch It Sits On, I argued that the school system is collapsing because society is collapsing, society is collapsing because the family is collapsing and state schooling is a major driver of that because it undermines the natural family and parental authority.
It’s intriguing that all the comments I got – very nice and interesting comments – were about how to fix the school system.
We’re often told, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Most of us would agree that the state school system is broken. But my point is that it is inherently broken, and not only so, but it’s breaking society.
About 15 years ago when I first started reading up on the history of New Zealand’s state schools, I began with an assumption that I think most of us have – that our country used to have a wonderful system that gave everyone a wonderful education and that something had gone horribly wrong. I was to be surprised. It turns out that it never really worked; whatever hopes or plans or dreams there may have been for it, it never succeeded in delivering a fully erudite or even fully literate population.
In the first generation, most people naturally assumed (or optimistically hoped) that the obvious problems were mere teething problems that would soon go away. When they didn’t, successive governments tried one thing after another – centralising, decentralising, restructuring, regulating teacher qualification, regulating the curriculum, regulating teacher training, increasing the hours or years of schooling, renaming, reshuffling, blaming…It was the same in the classroom: individual desks were thrown out in favour of group tables, tables were thrown out to make way for desks. The “playway” was brought in and thrown out again; one educational fad after another has been inflicted on generation after generation of children, with a faceless herd of parents somewhere in the background calling for ‘more emphasis on the three Rs’. An Olympic swimming pool of money has been poured into this sump, and the result is a society no less dumb than it was when the Education Act was passed in 1877.
It’s never worked. If I may hazard a very broad generalisation, it has been OK for about half of the children, who have obtained some sort of decent education (either because of or in spite of the schools). For the other half, it’s been a jail sentence where they have simply sat out however many years of boredom, frustration, humiliation and fear.
An exceedingly complex combination of social and political pressures, one that would need a book to describe, has kept this system going for 140 years. Not anymore. In a society that no longer cares, where we no longer bother to keep up pretences, the half of children who never benefited from school have stopped pretending. That’s how I read it, anyway: the half of children who have stopped going are the half who were just marking time. The social pressures that kept them going to school have been a casualty of a long process of social disintegration in which compulsory state schooling has been not one of the victims, but one of the perpetrators.
Educate yourself. Educate your own children, or pay someone to do it in accordance with your wishes. The state school system isn’t broken: it’s just like that. You can’t fix it because it never broke.