KEY POINTS:
Oscar Wilde was talking about cynics when he said they know the price of everything but the value of nothing, but he might have been referring to bean-counters in the New Zealand education bureaucracy.
I was dismayed when I saw last week that a number of rural schools will next year have their free bus services removed. At one such school, Maramarua near Auckland, children will have to walk along a highway where even driving sedately means taking your life in your hands.
Furthermore, some primary pupils in this region will have to sit on the bus for two extra hours a day because the only remaining bus will be ferrying secondary school students as well.
What madness is this?
Economic madness. A spokesman for the Ministry of Education told the New Zealand Herald that school transport funding focused on the children who live the furthest away, not on how dangerous the road might be. So it doesn't matter how long it takes them to get to and from school, nor does the bureaucracy concern itself with whether the children actually arrive in one piece, just so long as the officials can tick the boxes.
What will happen, of course, is parents who work from home will drive their children to school and collect them at the gate, and parents who are employed will beg time off from their bosses so they can dash off and collect their children in the afternoons. This is at a time when the government is trying to get us to use public transport; when we are urged to increase productivity if we wish to catch up with the wealth of our nearest neighbour, Australia. And in a culture where children are increasingly wrapped in cotton wool, with their independence curtailed to such a degree, it's hardly surprising when they reach their mid to late teens they go crazy on alcohol and autos.
I consider myself privileged that my primary school days were passed at a small country school in the late 1950s and early 60s, when risk-taking was not just encouraged, but forced on us in the name of character-building.
Crucial to us country kids being educated was the school bus. No matter what happened in the outside world, the school bus got through. Fathers and mothers - farmers sacrificing their own pressing jobs - who had their HT licences volunteered as drivers and were rostered on week by week. Being driven by parents we knew, who were not afraid to chastise us and tell our own parents if we misbehaved, meant we always had to say "good morning" when we climbed aboard, and "thank you driver" on alighting. The buses may have rumbled along on what felt like square wheels, and on hot summer afternoons their interiors smelled like stale peanut butter sandwiches and mouldy swimming towels, but they were as constant as Father Christmas, church on Sundays, and lumpy porridge for breakfast. Without them, it was correspondence school, in those days a fate worse than scratchy blackboards and freezing cold classrooms.
Have our standards of living slumped so much since those days that we can no longer afford to deliver rural children safely to and from their schools each day? Or is it that we're so over-regulated with health and safety concerns that we can't save money by having parents drive the buses? I suspect the latter, as last week I moved to live in the country and must affix a sign to the gate warning anyone entering the property they might trip over a pebble and break a fingernail.
Several years ago, the Ministry of Education embarked on a zealous mission to close down as many rural - and small-town - schools as possible. Eventually the people cried "enough", and the then Minister Trevor Mallard called for a moratorium on this destruction of a New Zealand way of life. But the damage has been irreparable - just last week education bureaucrats admitted they were wrong to close down or neglect so many schools in the Hutt Valley because they wanted to build a "super school" of 3000-plus students. That they've abandoned this idea barely compensates for their stupidity in pursuing it in the first place. Those responsible should be named and shamed.
The Ministry of Education serves no purpose at all. I've got a better idea, one I'm sure many rural folk will support. Get rid of the ministry, have Treasury distribute the money, and leave the running of schools - buses, playgrounds, lessons, sports, exams - to the teachers, parents and local communities. That way the bulk of the funding - and not just the buses - will get through.
