KEY POINTS:
The Prime Minister plans to force children to stay in education until they are 18, and our next Prime Minister plans to provide all sorts of "fresh starts" for underprivileged and/or recalcitrant teenagers.
They're both missing the mark. They're both putting the cart before the horse. What they
should be doing is devising means to correct the chaotic state of our primary education.
Because that's where the trouble starts. By the time children reach their teens, many are so set in their ways that even the most enlightened efforts to turn them round are bound to fail.
If, on the other hand, we had an effective primary education system, many of the negative, antisocial and just plain nasty traits some children develop could be nipped in the bud.
In her speech to a business breakfast in Henderson last week, Helen Clark made a token gesture in the right direction with her plan to introduce health checks for 4 and 5-year-olds, designed to identify children who have conduct disorders and/or severe antisocial behaviour.
But the fact that these checks are necessary is an indictment of the state of primary education and the quality of the teachers who are delivering it.
Because if a primary teacher can't pick up whom the potential bad buggers and troublemakers are, and deal with them in such a way that their behaviour is quickly and permanently modified, then they're not up to the job.
And they're not. A report at the weekend revealed that primary schools are so desperate for teachers that they are considering people who cannot speak adequate English and would not be understood in the classroom; and that a survey of 79 schools in Auckland found that nearly three-quarters of teachers shortlisted for jobs in November and December last year were of "poor" or "very poor" quality.
Then, on Tuesday, we read that "research has found" that male primary school teachers should be heterosexual, rugby-playing "real men" if they want to be good role models.
Leave out the rugby-playing bit and I agree wholeheartedly, although why it took "research" to confirm what has been obvious to any thinking New Zealander for years is beyond me.
The trouble is that there are only 2876 male primary school teachers compared with 17,302 female teachers, a drop in male numbers from 42 per cent in 1956 to just 18 per cent in 2005.
Why? Because the education system has become so stiflingly politically correct over the past several decades that "real men" don't want a bar of it.
Education authorities and parents have become so wimpishly risk-averse that male teachers are seen as a threat, although you could count on the fingers of both hands the number of them who have, in fact, abused their charges.
This is the area on which the Government, and the ministers-in-waiting of the next government, should be concentrating their collective intelligence.
If they can brainstorm a way to attract more real men to primary teaching, and to do away with a lot of the nonsense that hamstrings schools these days, then they would go a long way towards solving many of the problems that come to a head in teenagers.
And prominent among the solutions to the primary school malaise would be paying teachers according to their competence and performance. To do that they would, of course, have to cut off the all-too-powerful primary teachers' union at the knees.
One of the things that has most held education back in this country is the stolid adherence to the philosophy that teachers should all be paid the same, whether they are good, bad or indifferent.
Any move to alter that and to pay teachers according to their ability will be fiercely fought by the unions. Which is not surprising since so many of their members are mediocre at best.
That is not to say that there aren't a whole lot of deeply committed and top-class teachers in our schools. They are the ones who should be better rewarded for their dedication and given a financial incentive to continue to strive, to improve, to attain.
There is a need, too, to take a long, hard look at how schools are funded. "Free" education, as any parent will tell you, has long been a myth, not, perhaps, because of Government parsimony but because of the way the money is allocated and spent.
A huge investment in primary education would pay immense dividends for our nation. For, in the words of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in the Catholic Church: "Give me the child until he [or she] is 7, and I will give you the man [or woman]."
