What is the Point of Education?
I have been involved with education, in one way or another, for most of my life. First as a schoolboy, then as a university student (in both New Zealand and England), a brief spell as a secondary school teacher, then as an Oxford law don and finally as a university Vice-Chancellor, I have seen education from a variety of different angles.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, I have from time to time asked myself the question – what is the point of education? Looked at from the viewpoint of the individual, the answer may seem straightforward enough; a good education may seem to be the key to a good job and a life of fulfilment. But what about the wider question – why should society invest in education and what do we expect to get out of it?
Again, the answer may seem comparatively simple. An educated population will, it is assumed, be more productive and will allow us all to enjoy a higher standard of living. But even this fails to capture, I believe, the real point.
Education is about more than equipping the individual to operate effectively as a unit of production. Yes, the economy is important, but we should hope and expect that an educated population will produce a greater range of benefits than just a statistical boost to the GDP figures.
An educated society will be one that is fully aware of who we are, where we have come from and what truly matters to us. We will understand our own history and the great riches and subtleties of our language and will take pleasure in using it properly. We will recognise the things we have in common and that bind us together. We will observe the rules that allow our society to function well, and we will reject those who invite us to ignore the principles that make for a good and well functioning society.
The first purpose of education is not, in other words, just the accumulation of knowledge – of facts and figures; it is to teach children that there is a world beyond the family. The school, as an institution, is as important as the teaching that happens there; it is a social environment where children learn that they are not the centre of the universe and that things go better for them if they learn to take account of the interests of others.
An educated person is more than someone who has passed exams and gained formal qualifications; and education is best delivered by teaching rather than constant testing. The pressure to obtain top grades – so often seen as the essence of education at school level – serves the interests of schools, not pupils.
There is a good deal of anxiety at present, right across the globe, at what is described as the rise of “illiberal” or “populist” democracy. Commentators lament the tendency of the democratic process to reflect the views of those who are assumed to know little and to vote in line with prejudices based on ignorance.
The classic instance of this phenomenon was, it is suggested, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. Trump gained his support, so the argument runs, by persuading his “base” that they should not hold against him – on the ground that they did not really matter – his tendencies to lie, to defy normal moral standards, to disrespect women and racial and sexual minorities, to attack a free press and to pay little regard to the rule of law.
It is certainly true that an educated electorate would have paid more attention to these failings and would have recognised the threat they pose to a good and decent society. The price being paid by the US (and the world) for an electorate that has trouble in understanding the significance of, for example, the rule of law – the principle that even presidents are subject to the law – is hard to overstate.
The case for education is, it turns out, an easy one to make. Education equips our citizens to play a full part in developing a good society. If we want a properly functioning democracy, we need an electorate that has the understanding and abIlity to make good and informed judgments about important issues and to hold their elected representatives to account. A democracy works well, in other words, only with an educated electorate.
Bryan Gould
20 November 2018
Picking Up the Pieces
The news that the government is to find $80 million to repair Middlemore Hospital should come as no surprise. This is just the latest instance of the new government having to pick up the tab to make good something neglected by its predecessor.
It s not just a matter of restoring to an acceptable condition a single long neglected rotting and crumbling hospital. There are, in the health sector alone, other buildings with identical problems, and right across the public sector, wherever one looks, there is evidence of the spending now needed to remedy the failings and omissions of the last National government.
We are told, for example, that our drinking water is hardly safe to drink – a shocking state of affairs for a supposedly developed country – and that it needs substantial investment if it is to be brought up to standard – and that is to say nothing of the condition of our rivers and waterways. And there are other major parts of our essential infrastructure that are in similarly urgent need of attention and improvement.
The new government, we learn, has also been able to find the millions needed (but hitherto not made available) to step up the effort to save our native flora from kauri die-back and myrtle rust – problems that were barely addressed by the previous government who seem to have learnt little from the PSA debacle in the kiwifruit industry under their watch.
At the same time as these infrastructure and environmental issues are demanding attention, our schools are struggling to find enough qualified teachers, carrying an obvious threat to the standard of education enjoyed by our new generation; if that situation is to be remedied we need to find the resources to train the necessary recruits. And teaching is not the only occupation where we have neglected to look to the future; in the construction industry, we have failed to provide the apprenticeships that are needed, and business as a whole identifies the shortage of skilled workers as the greatest impediment to their progress.
In the public sector, we find that even those who have been trained and are currently working, especially in essential occupations – teachers, nurses, midwives, court staff, civil servants more generally, and many others – have seen their salaries fall in real and comparative terms, all victims of the drive to cut costs by a government giving priority to “producing a surplus”. The current rash of strikes is a direct result of earlier neglect and irresponsibility by those holding the purse strings.
When spending is cut in this way for ideological purposes, the consequences are all too predictable. The standards we expect in our public administration (and for which New Zealand is renowned worldwide) begin to slip and we find that we can no longer rely on public agencies to do their jobs properly. These consequences are not limited to the big-ticket items, such as health care and education. So, for example, inspections of articulated vehicles are not properly carried out so that potentially dangerous vehicles are let loose on our roads, and warrants of fitness are issued without any real inspection, with possibly fatal consequences for some drivers.
Services starved of resources become vulnerable to cutting corners, turning blind eyes, and accepting inducements for doing so, so that even our hard-earned reputation as the least corrupt society in the world is placed at risk.
We have done ourselves an enormous injury in allowing cost-cutting to take priority over maintaining reliably high standards. And, sadly, by the time the day of reckoning has arrived, those responsible have long gone and it is left to others to carry the can.
It is the successors to the “cut at all costs” brigade who must pick up the tab for past neglect. They have the task of somehow finding the resources that are needed – and they must endure the complaints of those who, in the aftermath of the cuts, now find themselves under-paid and under-resourced, and – in some cases – not employed at all.
There is of course a lesson to be learned from this sad saga. It is that a government that is hostile to the public sector and to public spending can do enormous damage to our economy and to our country as a whole. Voters, however, are often surprisingly reluctant to cut any slack for a successor government that tries to pick up the pieces and put them together again.
Bryan Gould
22 November 2018
The Armistice Centenary
The centenary of the Armistice that ended the First World War has rightly been celebrated around the world. The Armistice brought an end to the horrors of a war that had been so terrible that it was described in retrospect, in a triumph of optimism over experience, as “the war to end all wars.”
The slaughter on the Western Front and the privations suffered by the combatants in other battlefields like Gallipoli were unparallelled. It was not just the casualties, the injuries and the sickness, but the nature of the warfare, and the conditions in which the soldiers fought and died, in the mud and cold of the trenches, pinned down by the relentless shelling, that caused so much public revulsion.
There was also a public anger at the apparent lack of concern that was shown by commanding officers in sending their men to the front and to their inevitable deaths. The lives of those men seemed to matter little – they were moved and deployed as though they were pawns in a board game. The soldiers in the First World War became known – in a phrase that had first been used by the Russians about the British army in the Crimean War – as “lions led by donkeys”.
In Flora Thompson’s Larkrise to Candleford, a wonderful memoir of growing up in poverty in rural Oxfordshire, she describes how her brothers learned to work hard and never complain, accepting their lot. When her favourite young brother, Edwin, was killed just outside Ypres in 2016, she says that, when he faced the odds, “he did not flinch”.
The repercussions of all that pain and suffering affected millions of people around the world; little wonder that the centenary of the Armistice was acknowledged by the leaders of the countries that had been involved and the opportunity was taken to salute the sacrifices that so many ordinary people had made. All the more surprising then that one of today’s self-proclaimed American “heroes” could not brave a shower of rain in order to pay his respects to the fallen; the sacrifices they had made were hardly “fake news”.
The attention paid to the centenary, not least through the remembrance ceremonies worldwide, but also through television programmes about the First World War and Peter Jackson’s wonderful revival of actual footage from the conflict in his recently released film “They Shall Not Grow Old” will surely have taught a new generation about the dramas and tragedies of our history. The lessons will have been reinforced by the memorial to New Zealand recently created in the French town of Le Quesnoy to acknowledge the rescuing of the town from German occupation by New Zealand troops.
And nowhere is the attention paid to this shared history more justified than in New Zealand. Incredible as it may seem for our small country at the ends of the earth, half the globe away from the battlefields, no country made a proportionately greater sacrifice than we did.
Nearly 10% of our tiny population (of just under one million at the time) volunteered to fight in the War. They represented 42% of all men of military age. Of that number, 60% were killed or hospitalised – 18500 died and 41000 were wounded.
It is important for our young people, in the nature of things inclined to dismiss their forbears’ achievements as of little consequence, to understand what earlier generations sacrificed for them, our country and the world. And they should also understand that “no man (or country – not even New Zealand ) is an island unto itself”.
In that great and all-consuming conflict of 100 years ago, we proudly took our place as a world citizen and played our part in bringing to an end that horrific and barbaric struggle. New Zealand’s standing in the world ever since – and the role we have continued to play, with an influence that belies our small size – have owed much to those brave young men from the farms and factories who went in search of an adventure but found instead a hell.
Bryan Gould
13 November 2018
What Makes the All Blacks So Good?
Both in the run-up to and during the aftermath of the All Blacks’ narrow victory over England at Twickenham, the world’s rugby media posed a frequently asked question – how can a small country with a population of only 4 million produce not only the All Blacks (who have dominated world rugby for most of the last century) but also women’s teams and age-grade teams who have been similarly successful in all forms of rugby.
The question is not lightly asked – it reflects a genuine puzzlement. It is assumed that the answer lies in some secret ingredient, an insight or a technique, that could readily be copied by other teams if only they knew what it was.
The bad news for the inquirers is that there is nothing mysterious about New Zealand’s rugby pre-eminence. The simple truth is that Kiwis are just better attuned to the game, understand it better and accordingly are usually able to play it better than others.
For those who know New Zealand’s history and culture, there is nothing surprising about this. Rugby was the game that could have been invented specifically for New Zealand – and they have returned the compliment by influencing its development so that it now reflects the way they play it.
Rugby was first introduced at a time when modern New Zealand was in the early stages of development in the mid-nineteenth century. The remote islands in the south Pacific were settled by “get-up-and-goers” from Britain and Ireland – those who got up and went, because they saw the opportunities offered by a new life in a new country.
Developing that new country demanded two main characteristics – on the one hand, a huge degree of self-reliance and hard work, supplemented by the determination never to be defeated by by an apparently insoluble problem, and on the other, an understanding of the great value of teamwork and a willingness to trust and rely on one’s neighbours and comrades.
Miraculously, these new settlers (the pakeha) discovered in the indigenous population – the Maori – similar attitudes and values. These shared attitudes – a healthy individualism combined with an instinctive readiness to work as a team – helped greatly in the creation of a bicultural society; and they found their most immediate expression on the rugby field. Maori and pakeha found that rugby offered them the chance to play and learn together and to appreciate the qualities that each brought to the game.
Rugby became not only the most obvious expression of what were seen as the essential New Zealand virtues but also provided a kind of lens through which Maori and pakeha could see each other. The game became one of the most important formative influences in the evolution of the new nation.
When New Zealand teams take the field, their Polynesian players (both Maori and Pasifika) with all their great talents are not expensively imported from far-away countries but have grown up with rugby in their own country. The game is woven into the fabric of their lives – one that both Maori and pakeha instinctively understand and relate to, and that in part defines them.
Yes, of course New Zealand rugby teams enjoy an advantage over their rivals. They grow up in a society that lives and breathes rugby; many of the country’s best athletes opt to play rugby because that is where they can best shine, and where the best sporting brains focus on the game and how to play it better.
It was somehow appropriate that the Twickenham test was played on the eve of the centenary of Armistice Day – an opportunity to acknowledge the sacrifice made by – amongst others – young New Zealand soldiers who volunteered to travel half way round the world to fight at Gallipoli and on the western front. A huge percentage of the small New Zealand population went to that war and there was scarcely a family that was not affected by the bereavement and injury of loved ones.
Those soldiers showed on the battle field many of the qualities that the All Blacks bring to the rugby field. War, like rugby, was the other great formative influence in the development of the New Zealand identity.
Our feel for and appreciation of rugby should help us not only to celebrate an All Blacks victory but also to understand the disappointment felt by England supporters who saw victory snatched from them by a contentious (but probably correct) refereeing decision.
But we should also recognise that, if the try had been allowed, the All Blacks would then have had a few minutes to score the converted try that would have won the game for them – and who would have bet against them doing just that?
Good – But Could Be Better
Labour was, not surprisingly, in good heart at its annual conference last week in Dunedin, as Jacinda Ardern celebrated her first anniversary as Prime Minister.
The past year has not been without its difficulties for the new government, but the coalition has encountered fewer problems than might have been expected. Winston Peters has performed well in his sphere of expertise – foreign affairs – and has proved to be, as some of us expected, a steadying influence, bringing the voice of experience to the consideration of complex issues.
The Greens have offered exactly what might be expected of a helpful partner – a distinctive and constructive approach to the green issues that matter most to them, and steady support for the government’s wider agenda.
Labour has handled its role as the senior partner of the coalition with good sense and diplomacy and a strong and identifiable sense of purpose. Most of the crises which the Prime Minister has had to handle have been relatively minor and have flowed from the deficiencies of individual ministers. The missteps of Clare Curran and Meka Whaitiri, and even of Iain Lees-Galloway, have reflected inexperience rather than incompetence, and pale into insignificance by comparison with the internal travails that have racked the National party.
The new government’s main difficulty in its first year has been in grappling with what seems to be a long-standing strategy developed by their opponents and one that always poses real problems to an incoming Labour government. It can be simply described.
When National is in government, it makes a virtue for ideological reasons of cutting public expenditure, preening itself on producing “surpluses” and warning that a change of government would threaten that achievement. When the voters finally decide that the cost – in the form of weakened public services – is too high and a less ideological government is elected, the second stage of the strategy is put in place.
The new government finds that it has to pick up the bill to meet the backlog of all the essential spending not made, and to make good on its promises to re-build our health services and education and defence capability and environmental protection and economic infrastructure and all those other parts of public provision which have been run down.
The struggle to reverse the failures of its predecessor and to do so overnight disappoints the new government’s supporters – and their public demonstrations of dissatisfaction (teachers’ strikes and the like) and the consequent inconvenience to the public make it more likely that those responsible for the problems in the first place will be returned to power and the cycle can begin again.
How well is Jacinda Ardern’s government doing in breaking that cycle? It is too early to say, but Labour have not made it easy for themselves. Their self-denying ordinance to the effect that they will manage the public finances within a monetary and fiscal framework defined by their predecessors has limited their options.
If the framework of policy remains unchanged, there is an obvious limit as to how much can be achieved by individual decisions taken within (and limited by) that framework.
Labour’s supporters will be happy in the main with what has been achieved so far, in terms of individual commitments such as the increase in the numbers of teacher aids for pupils with special needs, but there will be some disappointment that there is not more new thinking as to how the shackles of right-wing orthodoxy can be cast aside.
The great achievements of past Labour governments – such as the building of thousands of state houses by Michael Joseph Savage in the midst of the Great Depression – required a willingness to challenge orthodoxy. Such courage brought great benefits to those who gained jobs and homes they would not otherwise have had, but also cemented Labour’s standing and support, and at the same time strengthened our economy and our social cohesion.
The acid test for Labour will come in 2020. The task is to persuade voters by then that a different approach pays off, that breaking new ground makes us all better off, and that the real risk lies in returning to the failed policies of the past – so that the cycle starts all over again.
Bryan Gould
5 November 2018