Dialogue: Education gurus selling us short

By LOUISA HERD*

A few days ago, my sons came home from primary school with notices concerning two forthcoming school trips - one to plant trees on local Department of Conservation land and the other to visit a new, state-of-the-art, enormous milking parlour that has just gone up in the district.

Nice trips for the kids, you might think. Get them out and about instead of sitting in a stuffy classroom.

On a recent night, my older boy, aged 11, asked me to check through a letter he wanted to send to his penpal, Emma. In it, among other things, he told her the sad news that his dog had "deid" the previous week, addressed her as "emma" and exhibited his knowledge of punctuation, which is apparently negligible.

Way back in the 1970s, when no one had even thought of social studies for 8-year-olds and pocket calculators cost 50 and were the size of a small brick, I, too, went on class trips.

They happened once a year and were to places like Edinburgh Zoo or the Loch Lomond Bear Park, where the harassed teacher tried, unsuccessfully, to feed us to the bears.

The rest of the year we sat in the classroom and - without benefit of computer or calculator - learned stuff. Stuff like the nine times table, that a verb is a doing word, about collective nouns and how to reduce fractions to their lowest common denominator.

I left primary school literate and arithmetically competent and if it's all gone to pot now, it certainly isn't the fault of my old teachers.

Nowadays, hardly a week goes by without notices coming home for soccer days, hockey days, puppet-show trips, Celtic musician afternoons, fire station outings, visits to ancient pa sites, swimming sports, African storyteller mornings ... the list goes on and on.

It is a comforting thought to me that in later years, my son may be unable to pen a simple job application letter, but, hey, he knows how to play the bodhran.

In spite of having had my share of dodgy dominies, both as parent and pupil, I feel that my boys are getting a better education at our remote school in the counrty than they would get in a big city school.

The three teachers there are dedicated and caring and I am more than aware that my sons are not rocket scientist material. The elder only cares for possum trapping and the younger cannot seem to bring the same enthusiasm to reading that he does to golf.

All the more reason, I queried, to stop wasting valuable learning time on trivial pursuits? The headmaster was helpful but said he was obliged to follow the demands of the national curriculum. The outings appear to fall under the blanket term of social studies, and social studies is a core curriculum subject. Wow.

What academic, embowered in his ivory tower, thought up this garbage? I'm not particularly brainy, milk cows for a living and wouldn't know Piaget if he jumped up and bit me.

But I have lived nearly 40 years in the real world and raw experience has taught me that the ability to count, read and write is paramount.

Regardless of whether you are Pakeha, Maori or Chinese, without these skills you are, to put it politely, up life's creek without a paddle. They are the cornerstones of all knowledge and there's no point in chucking up a glitzy house before laying the foundations, is there?

Please, no more trips, days out or visits from Eskimo bagpipe artistes. Just get my kids' bottoms on seats and drill them on their times tables.

Why African storytellers? We have heaps of great Kiwi writers, so get them reading Margaret Mahy or Linley Dodd. They do Saturday soccer. They don't need to go on umpteen sports outings, but they do need to know that a sentence starts with a capital letter, ends with a full stop and has a verb in the middle.

How many folk make a living out of kicking a ball around?

Life can be very hard on the illiterate. The job market is cut-throat and the prime pickings go to those with an education.

What this ordinary mother wants to know is: why are the eduational gurus selling our kids down the river?

* Louisa Herd is a Wellsford freelance writer.