What they needed, it was decided, was a good solid dose of School to wake their ideas up.
This notion proved to be an immediate success. Various classroom situations were devised utilising basic materials that could be quarried locally - chalk, slate, graphite and the like. Education, then, was a very mineral intensive industry, which was good for exports, too.
Most importantly, this new-fangled education achieved the pre-eminent aim of waking up the ideas of misguided fun-loving youth. It did this by the cunning ploy of sending them all to sleep.
No more interesting and relevant learn-as-you-go out in the real world. No, sirreee! What kid could possibly get ahead in the modern cut-throat jungle without the savvy necessary to decipher a PAYE form? These were the new survival skills.
But the trouble was this new education thing was getting too big for its boots. Far too many kids were learning stuff apart from just essential IRD knowhow. They needed to be taught another lesson - and the new lesson was Failure. And so School Certificate came to be.
And School Certificate taught that, no matter how good your essay on mixed cropping in Canterbury was, you could still be in for the chop. Culled as surely as forlorn bobby calves left in a roadside crate.
In farming circles it's called drafting: in education circles, scaling. Yes, only 50 per cent of you whipper-snappers are going to be allowed through the gate. Because education is all about excellence and what use is excellence if riff-raff are allowed in, too.
Yet the funny thing was, even though the education panjandrums had decreed that 50 per cent of all school kids were going to be failures, the populace at large had more common sense.
The local trucking company owner didn't really care if his drivers could write good essays about mixed cropping in Canterbury - he just wanted guys who could drive and were generally pretty handy. So he hired them, School Cert or no School Cert. And employment was full across the land.
But the education mandarins could now see their lesson on failure was a failure.
Not enough school leavers were failing, so they decided to cunningly make all students a success. And thus NCEA was born - and all the permutations of complicated unit standards and achievement standards and internal and external exams ensured that no students left school without a healthy mixed crop of credits to prove they were all successes.
Except that a good many of them now couldn't get a job. Ahh ... success! Nothing more satisfying than a well-crafted lesson on successful failure.
But for all you failures, there's one last chance for you to get ahead, they say. I'm sure you'll get a job if you do just one more course, even if it means taking out a teensy $20,000 loan.
The course is called "How to keep the Australian bank manager - the one I play golf with - in the manner in which he wishes to remain accustomed".
And as for that long-established charter school, Turakina Maori Girls' College, we're going to close it down. Why? Because we need the money to open a charter school.
And let that be a lesson to you.
- Frank Greenall has a master's degree in adult literacy and managed Far North Adult Literacy before moving to Whanganui.
