As a society we get what we educate

Hastings St John's College student Lucan Battison, 16, after arriving at the High Court at Wellington. 23 June 2014 New Zealand Herald Photograph by Mark Mitchell NAG 28Jun14 - RELAXED: Whangarei

The business with the lad who wouldn't get his hair cut at St John's College, and the Prime Minister's Award to Makoura College here in Masterton, makes me reflect on the nature of high schools these days.

Neither story is related in a direct sense, and I have nothing but praise for the success story that is Makoura College.

It's just that I reflect on the extremes that schools today are involved in, whether good or bad.

As a high school student of the eighties, colleges were simply colleges, and coping with them was by and large a matter of routine, apart from personal dramas which are an inevitable part of life. High school extremes were confined to fiction, such as the movie Grease, or the British series Grange Hill.

I may be wrong, but in my day state schools were pretty static affairs, that got on with their business of educating students in set subjects. Technologically they were quite primitive by today's standards, and didn't have the revised New Zealand Curriculum, with the five key competencies.

Students had to be competent in maths and English, but they now have to be competent social animals, with the ability to relate to their peers, manage themselves and communicate well.

It raises the age-old question of what it is we expect the schools to be teaching. When I was at school, it was pretty clear-cut towards the subjects, with social skills largely a matter of luck, likeability and who owned the soccer ball. I would be pretty sure that's how the school's management liked it to happen as well.

Lucan Battison, the boy who won his High Court case on the matter of his long hair, might well argue his ability to manage himself - and his hair - is pretty good. And this is my point: if schools are now in the business of nurturing social skills, self-management and communication in students who are exposed to a 21st century sophistication, and who are used to publishing their opinions every day via social media, then schools are inevitably going to clash heads with students who are actually capable of raising a sound argument. Even allowing for the idea that teenagers have an over-developed sense of justice, it strikes me our society gets what we educate.