There seems to be an article of faith that underlies our politicians' thinking. Education is the means whereby people can lift themselves out of poverty.
It's on that basis that the parties offer their plans, each one costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Where they differ is in the direction of how those millions are to be spent.
John Key, who tells his own story of rising from poverty, focuses on competition. While he acknowledges there is a widening gap between top students and those performing poorly, his over-riding concern is with decline in math test scores compared with other OECD countries.
As a result, his proposals, borrowed from Singapore (a rather different culture from ours) and from the United States, emphasise standardised testing and performance pay. The former have, after 10 years of US trials, proven disappointing.
Performance pay may convert an egalitarian co-operative profession, teaching, into a competitive profession. Neither testing or competitive pay rises address the problem of poverty simply because they place the exclusive emphasis on the teachers.
The Green's Metiria Turei does focus her proposal on poverty. The emphasis is on a free lunch programme, after-school care for lowest decile school kids, and subsidies (unspecified) for decile 5-10 schools. Her proposal also creates a bureaucracy of "hub co-ordinators" to help make sure that services like healthcare and social services are provided.
The policy rests on providing food for hungry kids and bolstering poor children's education once it begins.
Labour's David Cunliffe proposes extending parental leave to 26 weeks and a $60 weekly subsidy to parents starting at birth of a child and continuing for three years for poorer families.
What if the underlying assumption that education per se lifts people from poverty is flawed? Mr Key credits education with his rise but also says: "That's partly because of the beliefs instilled in me at home to work hard and to aim high."
Paul Tough, a former school dropout turned successful writer and editor, has published How Children Succeed which replaces the cognitive skills assumption with a hypothesis regarding character, the notion that non-cognitive skills like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success.
Character is created by encountering and overcoming failure.
Add to this the views of economics Nobel Laureate Professor James Heckman. Based upon his understanding of neuro-science and brain development and his econometric models, Heckman concludes in his 2008 paper Schools, Skills and Synapses that the rate of return to a unit dollar invested in human capital is greatest in the prenatal period, followed by the time from zero to 5 years of age.
His recommendations to American policy-makers faced with poverty in childhood are "focus on disadvantaged families, start at birth, integrate health, develop cognitive and character skills, and encourage local innovation in quality programmes from birth to age 5".
We're not there yet as only a combination of the Labour and Greens proposals come close.
The anti-drunk driving ad and education proposals do have something in common. They're both based on questionable assumptions about modifying behaviour. More seriously, they aim to change a culture - a drinking culture and a poverty culture - and no single element or approach can possibly do that.
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
