Dialogue: You just can't get through to some

"Do you not feel," I asked the grey figure across the luncheon table, "that you and your joyful buddies at the Ministry of Education have somehow, well, not to beat about the bush, rather missed the point?" She raised an eyebrow, an eyebrow that both asked a question and at the same time cast ironic doubt on my temerity. I gulped down a mouthful of chorizo seethed in its mother's milk, took a swig of Dutch courage - so superior to the British beer of the same name - and went on.

"The National Certificate in Educational Achievement," I said, "you know, your wonderful new system for assessing schoolchildren, the system that will put an end to School Certificate and Bursary - don't you feel it's just a little poorly considered?" Up went the other eyebrow. She stabbed at a rogue pea, transfixed it with a tine of her fork at the second attempt, slotted it between carmined lips. But never a word she said.

"I mean," I said, suddenly uncertain what I meant, faced with this obelisk of bureaucratic silence with its condescension and its immaculate grooming, and I could sense she could sense my sense of weakness, "do you not feel, perhaps," and I hated the tone of doubt and apology that crept into my sentences, whipped by fear and a sense of inferiority, "that the NCEA system, whereby every step of a child's alleged progress is ticked off as they pass each little test, is merely a replacement of one big annual exam with lots of little exams?"

Was that a sneer playing like a moth about the corners of her mouth? My eyes briefly met hers and were instantly repelled as if we were two opposite magnetic poles colliding and I the weaker one. And still that silence more formidable than any speech.

"Don't you think," I said, "that you have misjudged by a smidgen or two the whole business of secondary education? I mean, cast your mind back to your own schooldays," and immediately I saw a picture of her in those distant times, riding to school with her heavy skirt demurely masking her cycle clips, her wicker basket crammed with earnest tomes, her chorister's, hockey First XI and prefect's badges weighing down the left lapel of her jacket, "how many of the so-called skills which you learned at school are useful to you now? How often now are you required to titrate potassium permanganate, or to define the gradations of the polychromatic scale?" I paused. "Eh?" I added. Still nothing.

"Well, would you not agree with me," I said, "that what makes a teacher a good teacher is not their ability to assess your progress in their subject by infinite tiny and pointless gradations, but merely and simply the ability to transmit enthusiasm? Surely there was at least one teacher who wormed their way into your consciousness, who made contact with you in a way that has affected the rest of your life, who put a zest in your belly and a light in your mind?

"And do you not see that your new system of what you are pleased to call standards-based assessment is more likely than not to repress such a teacher, to discourage them, to quench their fire of enthusiasm?"

But I could see it was useless. I had lost her. She was chewing at a sliver of chorizo and daydreaming. But I persevered. I would jolt her.

"Teacher enrolments are plummeting," I exclaimed so loudly that a bunch of real estate agents in cheerful ties at an adjacent table broke off their laughter about how one of their number had induced a vendor to go to auction, and listened in on my outburst. "The profession is dwindling. People no longer want to teach. They see nothing in it but the ticking of boxes and abuse from their pupils. Crisis is looming," I all but screeched, "and you sit there and watch it loom.

"School," I said, "is about people, not about assessment, nor about training children for jobs, nor about information technology, nor about the acquisition of petty skills, but about opening eyes to possibilities. It is the one chance to open windows on the world before the doors of the prison house of adulthood slam shut."

But I was talking to a wall and it had no ears. I shoved my half-eaten plate aside and leaned over the table towards her. "Education is what remains when you've forgotten what you were taught," I said. "Assessment is an irritating necessity best dealt with by the once-a-year ritual of exams, allowing the rest of the year to be devoted to the altogether greater cause of teaching.

"Swallow your pride," I said, "ditch the national certificate before it is too late. Bless the little children."

"No," she said.