Talk to Training-College Students

I will talk a little about matters that are close to my heart – not abstractly, because too much of what we hear and say is abstract to a point where meaning is lost. Because you are becoming teachers, I will say something about education. But you are persons – individual persons – before you are teachers. Not to speak falsely one has to speak first of all to persons. Love as well as knowledge is necessary for this. After I have spoken, you may wish to put questions to me. I am a man, and therefore ignorant. To know that is half of one’s knowledge. I cannot promise good answers. I can only promise honest dialogue.

You may think in your hearts – ‘Why does this man have long hair and bare feet? Why does he dress in old clothes?’ Other people ask the same question – sometimes not very politely. And I try to calm their feeling of being somehow offended, with a joking answer. I say – ‘The beard keeps me warm in winter.’ Or else I say – ‘In the Latin language, humus, the ground, and humilitas, humility, have the same root meaning. I do without shoes in order to acquire humility. I want to keep my feet firmly on the ground.’

But some friend may question me quite seriously. He may say – ‘Look, page 443 Jim, I sympathise with some of your attitudes. But why do you make yourself look like a hobo or a hippie? There’s no need for it. You are in danger of falling into the vices of singularity and ostentation.’

To that friend I make a different reply. I say – ‘Yes, I will cut my hair. I’ll cut it when the Government gives two per cent of the national income to help peoplewho are dying ofstarvation overseas.

‘Yes, I will shave my beard off. I’ll shave it when people are no longer put in jail for having no money and refusing to work at bad, stinking, servile jobs.

‘Yes, I will put shoes on my feet. I’ll put them on when the Maori leaders in our varsities and training-colleges have established a two-way dialogue with the Maori leaders who are rotting in our borstals and our jails.

‘Yes, I will put on a collar and a tie. I’ll do it when the Government departments put people before regulations – when the mental hospitals treat sick persons as persons, and not as disposable garbage – when the Churches, including my own, cease to be an enclave and sanctuary of the middle class, and open their doors with full friendship to the methos and the hippies and the ones who might meditate sitting cross-legged on the floor.

‘When these things happen I can put off this uniform, and go towards the graveyard with a quiet mind. But until then, although I hate war, I am like a soldier. I wear my uniform – the uniform of poverty, recognisable to those who are also poor. I did not come exactly as a volunteer. God conscripted me, by planting in my heart a certain kind of anger (not anger-against, anger-on-behalf-of ) when I could no longer endure the sight of the unhealed, unregarded wounds of the people, and in particular the wounds of the young.

‘I do not tell them to revolt or to hurt anybody. I tell them to hold their heads up – to speak the truth – to love one another, and show it by an embrace – to share food, money, clothing and shelter – and I tell them that if these four things are done, the soul will come to the surface of the friend’s face like a fish to the surface of the water – and the soul is always beautiful. Then the world is worth living in, and there is no need to swallow pills or do other things of a kind that may be destructive to oneself or other people.’

That is the kind of answer I am inclined to make to a serious question. But I admit it leaves aside two important factors – the matter of work, and the matter of how this kind of radical community life can be fitted in with existing social institutions.

In the matter of work, I have strong hopes that some pakeha people in this country may still be able to learn from the remnants of the Maori tribal structure that still survive among us. The Maori word ‘mahi’ means work undertaken by members of a community on behalf of that community. It has a sacred connotation. But in the Western world at large, and in New Zealand pakeha society, work is severely desacralised. It tends to mean the weekly chore one undertakes to do, often in servile conditions, for the sake of a pay packet at the end of the week. Therefore, very naturally, people become depressed page 444 when they are working. They develop various character deformations. These facts are probably familiar to nearly all of you.

Institutions have also to be considered. You are yourselves living and working in the shelter of a particular institution – this teachers’ training-college. Schools are institutions. The educational system itself can justly be regarded as a gigantic institution. It is centralised, desacralised, and in a large measure depersonalised.

Because it is centralised it is clumsy. Like the Israelites in Egypt, teachers have continually to make bricks without straw – to handle large classes with inadequate and unsuitable teaching material, in an atmosphere twenty times as authoritarian as the training-college road-guide would lead any student to expect. Many teachers, originally idealistic, are crushed by the authoritarian atmosphere and the endless road-blocks they encounter in our schools, and themselves become disillusioned martinets. This will already have become apparent to many of you.

When I say that the educational system is desacralised, I do not mean that religious instruction is necessary or even desirable. I mean that schools, or classes in schools, have insurmountable difficulty in generating a true community spirit, when home life is not communal – I mean, there are no guests sleeping on mattresses on the floors of the homes the children come from – and the aims of the society at large are narrowly acquisitive and individualistic.

When I speak of depersonalisation, you may consider the effect of mass media – the fictitious worlds of advertisements for soap powder and rigid copand-robber fantasies, which parents, children and teachers, enter when they sit down in front of a TV screen. Or you may consider whether you yourselves are regarded in this institution – this training-college – as full subjective persons – Bill, Jack, Sally, Joan – or as instrumental creatures who cease to exist if you cannot adequately cope with your institutional function. If it is the latter, remember it goes on like a recurring decimal. The poet Auden spoke about –

What all school children learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return . . .

If you accept the situation of being regarded as instrumental creatures – It, not Thou – you will come to regard the children you teach in the same way – as noisemakers, or failures at spelling, or problems for a psychiatrist to solve. That would be your tragedy as well as theirs.

When I talk of bringing life into education, the people on the staff of this College agree with me. They are well-intentioned people. I doubt if any of them are just seat-warmers or power mechanics. But they say – ‘We’d like to do this and that. But the institution – ’.

page 445

When I suggest to an older teacher, idealistic in his own field, that a few teachers might come together, in an honest and creative fashion, ignoring all desire for higher pay and grading marks, and make a school that would actually be a community, taking the children nobody else would touch or handle – he gives me the dusty reply –

‘I doubt if you’d find even a handful, Jim. They’d want to climb up the ladder. They wouldn’t be prepared to fight the institution. If they’ve got any desire for social change, they get out of the profession.’

Who is getting brainwashed? As you may know, I am myself a Christian – a Roman Catholic. But Pope Paul cannot tell me what woman to marry or what job to take. That is my personal decision under God.

A girl comes to me from a training-college – not this training-college – and she says to me – ‘Hemi, I had a nervous breakdown last year. I think I’m heading for another one. I want to teach – to teach children in a creative way. But I need a year off College to sort myself out.’

I put my arms round her, and say – ‘Well, why don’t you take that year off? Your mental health should have first consideration.’

She says – ‘My people are terribly upset about my doing it. The training-college authorities are going on about the Bond. They treat me like a delinquent child.’

The girl is nearly twenty years old. Why should she not be free to decide what is good for her own health? Perhaps the clash between an institutional atmosphere and a desire to teach creatively has played a part in driving her up the wall. Her training-college knows quite well she is a born teacher. They are afraid that if she goes she won’t come back. They know they lose the best of their teachers more often than the worst. Why don’t they treat her like an adult then, and let her make her own decisions? As for the Bond, it is like selling one’s soul to the Devil. What good are penalties, when the only effective teachers are the ones who want to teach? I think all training-college students should band together and repudiate the Bond, as a device to bully people into bad compromises, an unworthy mechanism of a decrepit bureaucracy.

Sometimes I have said publicly that people in this country worship the Dollar Note, Respectability and the School Cert. Exam instead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It sounds like rubbishing education. In fact I don’t rubbish education. Education is communication – it is learning what you need to know – I hope it is happening here right at this minute.

What you need to know – for yourself, that is, for yourself as a person. It could be learning to pray. It could be learning to make love. It could be learning to dig a garden well. It could be learning to fix a motorbike. It might come from a book. It might not come from a book. But we say the children need to know what they don’t feel they need to know. We pile a vast heap of information on their heads which is mainly useless and boring to both us and page 446 them. They could tell us roughly what they need to know. But we don’t listen to them. Instead we penalise them for inattention created by the boredom we have ourselves provoked in them, and invent little tricks to force them to swallow sawdust bit by bit.

Teachers do this because they are slaves of a highly dishonest society. They are employed, directly or indirectly, by the hard middle class core of that society to ensure that the children grow up with the same fantasies and prejudices as the parents. If the teacher disagrees with the view of that hard middle-class core, he or she, on the face of it, will either have to abandon teaching or tell lies to keep the job. And telling lies, as part of one’s daily work, produces a dead area in the gut. And the dead area produces nausea and ulcers and a sense of despondency that may lead eventually to a trip to the bin. I don’t suggest, though, that you should leave teaching. A few people, like myself, stand more or less outside the system. I suggest you should have the courage to stay in teaching and fight the system by talking honestly with the children. If the system kicks you out, that’s its funeral.

You could tell them how Titokowaru, the friend of Te Whiti, a great fighting chief, had to pull a cart through the streets of New Plymouth and shit on the ground like a horse. That was necessary in order to break his mana. The event is not recorded in our history books. But it shows how virulent the hunger of the land-grabbers was, and how this present culture is founded on the humiliation of the Maori people.

The truth is always interesting. Lies are always boring. I remember how, when I was working for the Department of Education, I decided, in that crippling atmosphere of centralised bullshit, to make a bulletin for the primary-schools. It was to be about the wharves. So I approached my friend Wally, a wharf-worker who was also a good journalist. He had got off the booze by apomorphine treatment – so he was able to write – and I knew that layer after layer of knowledge about the wharves was stacked away in his subconscious mind.

I said – ‘Look, Wally, this is the way you can bring it to life. Have a wharf dispute – a minor dispute about the loading of cargo. Show the personalities of the people involved – workers, union secretaries, foremen, managers. But keep it even. Be entirely fair to both sides. I don’t want a Leftist document – just a social vignette, showing people and work and all the rest of it. And let the dispute be settled amicably.’

It would have made a good bulletin, simple and direct. Of course the Department wouldn’t touch it with a forty-foot pole. Instead they had an old half-witted wharfie – a man who could never have held a job for five days – rowing two kids in a boat – male and female, they had to be both for the kids to identify with them – showing them the seagulls and the sunlight on the water, and saying how many tons of concrete were shifted by boat from this place to that. It was dead meat. I suppose it is still used in the schools. It was page 447 dead meat because it was about process, apart from a few frills. It showed a society without conflict, a business man’s fantasy when his business is going well. That’s what I mean when I say we make education boring and drive ourselves crazy by telling the kids lies.

People sometimes complain that I’m a bad influence – that I hypnotise students at the varsity and training-colleges, and drag them away from their studies to dig potatoes. It may be so. Yet I can only think of two students who came my way to settle down there. There are, after all, very few people who have a vocation to voluntary poverty. Nevertheless, if I have hypnotised you, I urge you to de-hypnotise yourself. Don’t follow this old man. In many ways he is a fool. Perhaps God looks after him. But he is going most of the time in the dark.

I cannot define myself, or my role in life, except as a hole in the Maoripakeha fence that the wind blows through. Recently I came into a small town called Seddon, south of Blenheim, after a walk of fifteen miles in the dark. I slept for a few minutes on a ledge of grass near the War Memorial. The stars were very low like a roof. The wind had rain in it. The town was lighted but empty. It had a certain terrible aspect, like a house men had once lived in. On that occasion I saw myself, probably correctly, as an old bum, slightly psychopathic, walking round the lip of the grave. Identity is a difficult thing to find.

For me perhaps death is the door to life. I mean death during this life. When a woman I loved, youthfully and ineptly, with my head and heart and prick, went away with somebody else, the poems, the real poems, grew like a bunch of grapes inside the hole where my guts had been removed. When my memory banks were blown for good with alcohol God came, like water in a creek, to fill the gap. I suppose you could say a religious man was born.

When the poet forgot to be a poet, and the religious man could no longer distinguish good from evil – only love from non-love – I found the whole country came into my heart to occupy the larger gap where an ethical code and (I suppose) the desire for personal salvation had been torn out by the roots.

Poverty. Poverty. Poverty is the door broken in the wall between man and man and man and God. To be virtuous is to fall short of poverty. Our offence is to fail to be poor – that is, to be what we are.

I am only an old man – slowly dying, like all men – who happens to love you. You know as well as I do the hellhole of materialism in which your souls are being put to sleep like pet dogs or cats. Why do I go barefoot and go without sleep and hurt this old body? Because love has to share, directly or indirectly, the pain of the beloved.

This is not wrong. The man I love – the One who became us, and lived and died with us – says to us – ‘Enter my pain and find my peace.’ And before he died, he said – ‘Peace I leave to you, my friends. Shalom, my peace I give.’ Friends; not slaves.

page 448

Pain is the road of peace. If the maramatanga, the light to travel by, is given, then one has to be a doorstep for the people to walk on.

Despite the terrible woodenness and falsity of the institutional educational pattern, it is no different for teachers. If they do not love their children, they cannot communicate with them. If they do love them, they will find a means to fight for them. The hen is a timid bird, but she will defend her chickens against the hawk. I hope that is what you will do, and laugh at all the nonsense of grading marks and money.

Hemi

1972? (682)