Dialogue: In public services we get what we pay for

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Most people in this country are irrational and self-indulgent when it comes to public services.

They want the highest professional performance from school teachers, police, nurses and social workers but don't want to pay for it.

They believe in the law of supply and demand when it comes to salaries in private enterprise but not in public service, where pay is artificially held down even when shortages are destroying basic infrastructure.

They want to pay less and less tax for better and better public education and health services and they blame governments for inadequate service when funds dry up.

They bask in the dreams of economists who spin theories of efficiency to make less and less money go further and further.

They do nothing for nothing in their own jobs but expect a high level of dedication and volunteerism from teachers, police and nurses, always reserving the right to hold them all in contempt for the frailties of a few.

And teachers, especially, are not what they used to be.

Or are they?

When I was 15 I read a double-page spread in Truth about the dire consequences of declining standards of literacy among the graduates of New Zealand secondary schools.

Truth was then a hard-eyed weekly newspaper, not at all like the fantasyland publication that bears that rubric today.

It carried news from the divorce courts when marriage was regarded not so much as a binding union of partners as a set of handcuffs and leg-irons clamping together in the name of God even couples who had learned only visceral hatred for each other.

The only quick and sure way to divorce was to commit adultery. So private eyes looking in bedroom windows and reporting on this to the courts was a steady if despicable industry.

But I digress.

Truth then sold more than 200,000 copies a week, although few admitted to buying it. In most homes it was kept away from the children but my parents were not that punctilious.

So I read the long story about literacy which quoted people like office managers and senior clerks deploring the inability of the latest crop of young people to spell even simple words correctly; and as for grammar and arithmetic woe were they!

I remember all this so well because I showed it to my father, who had briefly been a schoolteacher and asked him if it were true that my generation was so ill-educated and badly equipped by the schools.

He laughed and said it was a recurring fact of social history that the older generation berated its juniors for their irresponsibility and stupidity and blamed it all on the schools with their loose discipline and woolly-minded teachers.

He quoted Socrates to demonstrate that the certainty of declining standards among the young was more than 2500 years old: "Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannise their teachers."

When my own children were young, arguments erupted regularly on what they called playway teaching in primary schools. Most people seemed to want something more like Dotheboys Hall.

One of the problems is that while no one will claim a profound knowledge of bridge design and engineering or nuclear physics, everyone knows more about education than teachers, without ever having to study the subject for even a few hours.

Someone who has been looking at literacy learning for years is Gordon Dryden. He unfashionably focuses on those who make schools work successfully rather than on those who airily theorise about what ought to.

He tells me that some schools in this country are up there with the very best anywhere and have achieved extraordinary results with classes that include significant numbers of Maori and Polynesian pupils.

If there is a special problem with this generation then why doesn't someone consider identifying these schools and their teachers and using them as pilots for wider adaptation?

Or is that absurdly practical?

In the meantime, it's okay for Education Minister Trevor Mallard and Opposition spokesman Gerry Brownlee to thrash the subject about in Parliament, not because it adds anything to the sum of knowledge on educational theory or practice but because it keeps them out of Bellamy's and off the streets.

But surely there's someone in the Administration who can work down at the level of the successful schools and the many gifted teachers to devise practical solutions?

What substance there is to that boringly repeated Kiwi ingenuity tradition refers to the technique we had for seizing problems, examining them and applying practical solutions.

Lately we have tended to mull over them, and over them, and over them, paralysed by yapping indecision.