Dialogue: Decision marks turning point in education policy

In reintroducing a Scholarship exam, the Government is on the right track. Now its thinking must extend beyond the elite level, writes JOHN MORRIS*.

I was delighted to hear that the Minister of Education has decided to reinstitute a Scholarship examination as part of the National Certificate for Educational Achievement.

This means that for the first time in more than 10 years, the state will organise and control an external examination for elite academics at secondary school level, starting in 2004.

This represents a big turnaround in Labour Party educational philosophy because it was David Lange's decision, when he was Minister of Education in 1990, to abolish what he considered was an elitist examination.

In the interim, the Education and Scholarship Trust has done a fine job in keeping scholarship alive and well in New Zealand.

Whether Trevor Mallard's decision was based on political expedience or genuine and sincere educational reasons is a moot point. What is significant is that we have a Labour Government unashamedly saying that we must, as a nation, cater for the elite academics, give them a challenge, let them compete against the best brains in the country and recognise their achievements.

While there is a lot of work to be done on the detail of the proposal, this decision has to be seen as a turning point in this Government's education thinking.

Its underlying significance is that it represents a return to one of the founding principles of the political labour movement in the Western world - a fundamental belief in social justice and the creation of a society based on equality of opportunity.

Such meritocratic principles underlay what Labour parties around the globe stood for in their fledgling years. Success and failure were seen to depend only upon an individual's motivation and ability.

In such a meritocratic society the social class you were born into would have no bearing on your future opportunity.

This is very different from the philosophy espoused over the past few decades by Labour parties in New Zealand and Britain, where equal opportunity was replaced by equal outcomes as the main aim of educational policy, and where mediocrity replaced meritocracy.

Tony Blair's New Labour Party in Britain saw the light some time ago and its education policy has meritocratic principles writ large.

It has lately gone so far as to guarantee the continuation of selective education by agreeing to increase funding to grammar schools.

Five years ago, its policy was to destroy grammar schools.

It could just be that the Labour Party in New Zealand, by this one action of reinstating a competitive, external, elitist (in the best sense of the term), rigorous examination for the select few top academics, has realised that if it is serious about our catching the knowledge wave, we, as a nation, have to dump the insidious political correctness that has created the one-size-fits-all syndrome.

This syndrome, in turn, created an acceptance, even encouragement, of mediocrity within education. Could it that the Government now knows that we must replace that with a lauding of meritocracy and an encouragement and recognition of excellence.

I would be the first to admit that a society based on meritocratic principles is not an unmixed blessing, and the challenge of pluralistic democracies such as ours is to achieve communal purpose within social diversity. But meritocracy essentially achieves such reconciliation and can be defended by Labour Party devotees as morally and politically just because it is based on liberal ideas of social justice.

After all, meritocracy does not reward people simply because they are bright. Meritocracy rewards people who are bright and who use that ability in socially useful ways.

Meritocracy does not reward intelligence, it rewards the use of intelligence. For this reason, we should try to make the meritocratic principle work in practice.

Some teachers and educationists may decry such an emphasis on meritocracy and the rewarding of individual excellence or the capitalist work ethic that facilitated this success.

But society requires such values alongside such qualities as perseverance, exactness, commitment, patience and self-discipline.

The Minister of Education has made a bold decision with the reintroduction of a Scholarship examination. It does, however, raise the question of why the brightest and best get an opportunity to test themselves against a truly external national standard while the rest have to put up with a mish-mash of inadequately moderated, internally assessed standards, a decreasing percentage of externally assessed standards, and a system of assessment that has been shown in trials to be seriously flawed.

A civilised meritocracy cannot regard itself as fair or just unless it continues to address the needs of the vast bulk of society with the same commitment it applies to the brightest and best.

Regardless of whether the Government gets this right for everyone, Auckland Grammar School will continue to take part in international qualifications which are genuinely externally moderated and internationally benchmarked so that all our students get an education that is rigorous, challenging and one that prepares them for the wider world.

* John Morris is the headmaster of Auckland Grammar School.