Dialogue: Schooling isn't 'welfare' - it's the right of every child

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

One indelible contribution George W. Bush may make to the future of America is to separate education from "welfare," a term disparaged for two decades by the new right throughout the Western world.

He has proposed that in order to prepare the United States socially and economically for the future, every child should get a better chance of a sound education, with basic standards imposed nationally, even if that means giving special opportunities to the poor.

He has struck a rare consensual note in American politics, spreading across the political spectrum, with leading Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy endorsing the aims of his educational policy.

The detail will be debated with vigour, especially the concept of a voucher system, but what is important is the aim to give as many as possible every chance to achieve the kind of education that will make the increasing complexity of modern life manageable.

Bush seems to have tapped into a national concern. Recent court action in New York is forcing the state Government to stop a long-time practice of allocating an inequitable share of education money to schools in upper socio-economic areas, thus disadvantaging students in poorer schools.

Personally, I have never stopped believing what most New Zealanders believed for decades before the early 1970s - that those parents who want to send their children to private schools should pay all the fees. That way taxpayers' money would go only to public schools and every kid would get the same opportunity. Private schools are socially divisive. Religious sects would have the opportunity to inoculate their kids with dogma outside school hours.

That's not a political proposal that would win votes right now; but you never know, it might come back. I enjoy the quote on progress from the late great historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin: "First, you have a movement in favour of something and then the children get what the parents wanted; then the grandchildren get bored with it because they have it, and the other side seems more exciting. So we progress, or, perhaps I should say, so we move."

In the meantime, I hope New Zealand educationists are looking hard at the experiments taking place in the US. In some schools in Texas and New York, for example, students at secondary school level have been attending classes for a full day, from 7.30 am to 5 pm, in one case.

Their performance in examinations has been spectacular. An American educationist says the short working day at schools there hails back to the days when it was an agrarian economy. That would apply here too.

Not long ago, the right to free schooling was fundamental policy of the main New Zealand political parties. For a few years it even extended to free textbooks. But in the early 1980s it was lumped in with the freshly odious word "welfare" and has been in a state of decline since.

This feeling imposed on young people that they are getting something for nothing and something they probably don't deserve has done inestimable harm. I heard a teenager on National Radio this week suggesting that the reason young people took to drugs was not so much the pursuit of pleasure as a symptom of their lack of self-worth. She's right.

Young people have to be convinced of their value to their families and to their communities, not by pampering them but by valuing their work in the school and the home. Their contribution should be seen as integral to the happiness and prosperity of the family.

My father was the second youngest in a family of 11, whose ages spanned 25 years. The older children got jobs to make the family stable enough for the younger children to go to university. I once suggested to him that being in a big family must have been a happy experience.

He said it had nothing to do with happiness because alliances and strains were formed as within any organisation but - because there was always so much to do and little money - the one doubt you never had was that you were not a useful, valuable contributor to the family's well-being.

Nowadays, parents here have so little time and relatively so much money that they pay their kids off and these kids feel more of an encumbrance than an asset. That's why so many Asian nations have fewer problems with their young than we do and why their youngsters work so hard. The parents pass responsibilities and obligations down to the next generation to make the family stronger.

They would understand that education is a two-way street. When some students decided a couple of years ago to sue their teacher for not providing an adequate course that matched the curriculum, that was fine by me, as long as teachers have the right to sue kids for not working hard.

I think Americans - even a majority of the personally wealthy men in the new Administration - are attending to education because they sense an implicit danger to their democracy. In the presidential election, about 100 million eligible Americans didn't vote, and they almost all came from the poorer half of the nation.

They know that potential revolutionaries and violent criminals inhabit that concrete jungle and may one day join forces.