Editorial: Wealth is in our schools

So you're the clever clogs then, are ya?" It was an accusation. He was a big bloke, an old farmer who could talk endlessly about potato blight; scarily authoritarian in all his opinions. There were no others.

"Ummm. Not really. I just thought -- it'd be interesting studying. Something to fall back on." I was infuriated I was even bothering to explain my life when he clearly felt no need to justify his own. He'd taken offence that I was at university studying obscure, useless subjects - and learning a language which, at that point, was entirely useless and obscure: Mandarin. Go figure.

He felt I should be hard at it in the real world - in a job. The truth was that I had three - juggled around full-time study. For a brief time student allowances were parentally means tested. Which meant that unless you were over 25 or your parents hid their money in trusts or were on the minimum wage, students could not claim an allowance.

I was well acquainted with the real world and met it often as I walked home through Cuba St after a late shift at 3am. There were two choices for getting home at that hour: leg it through Aro Valley state housing, which was the headquarters of Black Power, or walk up a steep, isolated, unlit path beside a forest. The sacrifices were worth it.

I had and appreciated the opportunity to study whatever the hell I liked and I also knew and appreciated there were millions of young women who would never taste that kind of freedom. A walk in the dark was a walk in the park to the many illiterate women I had seen on my travels spending a life-time planting rice. Experiencing that made me hungry to learn.

We still exhibit our agrarian roots when we display our disdain of education and teaching. We do not value it culturally as other nations do. Try finding one Mum in the Asian tiger economies who thinks education is a waste of time- They also appreciate to a far higher degree the teachers they entrust their kids to.

The idea favoured by this Government that you can save money by putting more kids in a classroom and that good teachers will manage this well is absolutely correct. They will manage but at what point does a classroom change from a place of true learning to a tent in which the ringmaster displays his or her ability in lion-taming? Are teachers just resource units who can magically produce a higher yield under pressure or do they hold the key to developing our society and therefore are valued? There must be some reason wealthy Asian families pay a fortune to educate their kids here.