Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 26. October 2 1978

The Narrow Approach

The Narrow Approach

No-one is going to claim that the New Zealand education system is perfect. Nor is anyone going to suggest that to be perfect, it would have to be 100% successful in turning out children who have reached "satisfactory" levels in reading, writing, music, etc. Yet it would seem that underlying the rhetoric of the back to basic pundits are these very beliefs. Find a child who can't read properly and you'd better find the teacher responsible, quickly. Find the teacher and the chances are you'll find the system has put her/him up to it in the first place. Worse and worse.

Some people involved in the "basics" movement have quite literally taken this tack. A Hutt Valley woman went on television a few months ago to tell the country she had personally met some children who suffered serious problems in reading. But she said, their school introduces a new course in "Values" nearly every week.

Quite apart from any speculation about what these courses might possibly contain, there are two serious points of misunderstanding that such an attitude immediately reveals, The first is that our education system is not in the business of operating such a flexible approach to the syllabus even it educators wanted it to.

The second concerns the attitudes of teachers, To assume that teachers are so out of touch with the basic schooling requirements of their students, so poorly trained as to have so little idea of what their job involves, and so irresponsible as to sacrifice basic requirements for "irrelevant frills", is to display a singular lack of understanding about what goes on in schools.