Garth George: Teachers must be told they've a job to do

About 50,000 children started school last week. For most of them it is the beginning of up to 13 years of primary and secondary education and schools will, for all that time, be their second homes.

By the end of that time they will be expected to be educated to a standard that will either qualify them for entry into university, or to find a job.

What a fearsome responsibility that places on those charged with providing a useful education for these little ones, who are taking their first steps in an increasingly complex world.

Some of these 5-year-olds will take to school and learning with gusto, having been well prepared by their parents and, perhaps, early childhood educators. For their age they will already be literate, numerate and socialised. They will be off to a flying start, absorbing knowledge, as most children do, like a sponge.

They will have been given books at an early age, will have been talked with constantly by their parents and older siblings, will have had stories read to them at every opportunity, been encouraged to work things out for themselves, and will have made friends so they will readily do so at school.

But for many, particularly in the lower-decile schools, the start of their education will not be nearly so propitious. They will be the victims of parental ignorance and indifference and between 33 per cent and 50 per cent of them will have the oral and written skills of 2-year-olds, and no social skills to speak of.

Among them will be those for whom the television set has been the babysitter almost from the day they were born, who have never enjoyed real human communication because their parents are incapable of it, and who have been treated as inconvenient byproducts of their parents' lives.

Some, because of abuse and neglect, will have a highly-developed distrust of all adults, animosity towards other children, and other seemingly incurable behavioural problems.

That's the bad news. The good news is that schools these days have equipped themselves to deal with these unfortunate little ones and have developed methods of bringing them up to scratch.

Speech therapies, and intensive attention from specially trained teachers and their aides, will bring all but a few up to the level of their peers, but it will take until the end of their third year at school to do so.

The best low-decile schools - and believe me some of them are first-class - will also set out to actively involve parents in their children's schooling. So successful has that been in one decile 3 school I know of that the percentage of disadvantaged 5-year-olds has dropped from half to one-third in a few years.

So what of the controversial national standards? I hold no candle for the teacher unions and deplore their paranoid words and actions in recent weeks.

Their protest bus trip from far north to far south reminds me of the marches and protests mounted by unions such as the wharfies, the freezing workers, the miners and the seamen over decades before their hold over workers was broken. It's long past time the teachers' unions, too, were put in their place. Teachers are public servants and as such ought to be made to do what they're told. Just imagine the anarchy that would result if, for instance, police, the armed forces, customs, immigration or social welfare bureaucrats insisted on telling their employers what procedures they should or should not follow and refused to carry out government policy.

The teachers' inconsistency alone is enough to make one question their competence. They berate the Government for preparing publicity material to promote and explain national standards, and in the meantime teachers are doing much the same by visiting schools throughout the land to promote and explain their point of view.

Their concerns about the standards, they say, include that teachers would narrowly focus classes so students pass the standards rather than get a rounded education.

Yet the fact is that without competence in reading, writing and reckoning there can be no rounded education.

Nevertheless, the teachers do have a point when they argue that national standards results, without explanations being included, could be destructive for some schools seen as poorly performing.

Sure, there are plenty of incompetent teachers and principals - many of whom have no idea about dress, deportment or discipline - who should be exposed and held to account. But there are even more incompetent parents who contribute to the failure of their children.

Teachers in many schools are doing their damnedest to help children overcome that awful handicap; national standards will do little, if anything, to help.

Incidentally, thousands more children could have started school in this country last week. But 18,211 potential Kiwi kids were torn from their mothers' wombs by induced abortion in 2004.