Tapu Misa: With love, encouragement and fun, most kids will learn

COMMENT


A few columns ago when I praised Tamaki College for trying harder to get Maori and Pacific kids to excel academically, it was suggested I was being unrealistic. Some of our children, I was told, were never going to be academic so why not just let them concentrate on the things that they were good at? Like sports and the arts.

The chairman of a small-town kura kaupapa school told me, too, that he had come up against the same attitude. He had sat at meetings and listened to parents arguing that the school shouldn't push their kids too hard because, well, they weren't really cut out for the academic stuff, eh?

Maybe someone should tell that to the 27 Maori who graduated with PhDs this year, almost double last year's crop and many times the number that used to trickle through even a decade ago.

We ended up agreeing, the kura chairman and I, that before our children could succeed we had to believe not only that they could but that they had a right to.

The middle class and the rich don't have this problem, of course. They see educational achievement as their children's birthright, theirs to claim through whatever means is necessary. They never talk about whether their children are smart enough to get into university.

Which is a good attitude, if only they weren't becoming so obsessive about the whole thing.

These days the comfortable classes seem to be driven by an irrational fear that their highly advantaged children might be left behind in the educational race. It's no longer good enough to cloister their children behind the gates of elite private and high-decile schools. Getting that all-important competitive edge means they're now countenancing ever-increasing levels of pressure on their children.

Take, for example, the move by King's School in Remuera to extend its school day from 8am to 4.15pm for boys aged 10 to 13. That's longer than the average eight-hour working day, and at least two hours longer than most schools. The headmaster says this would allow more time to be spent on "mathematics, English and social sciences without ... decreasing some of the special aspects of the King's School curriculum".

Poor little rich kids. They must really be behind if they need to spend so many extra hours at school. If I were paying $10,000 a year for the privilege of sending my children there, I'd be wondering why such a fine school couldn't accomplish what it needs to in the six hours that most schools have. I'd be wondering why they weren't more efficient.

I'm with the disgruntled mother of a 9-year-old who said the school was effectively robbing children of their childhoods and giving families too little quality time.

Yet I imagine that some parents would see this as value for money, and that the school probably feels it is responding to the demands of its market. It's a competitive world out there. What kid can afford to whittle away their precious childhood years in the pursuit of fun and games? Who has time these days just to hang out and daydream? You snooze you lose, apparently.

The truth is that 80 per cent of our children work at world-class standards, most of our schools do a good job, and private schooling doesn't guarantee educational success. A Canterbury University study of 8000 first-year students, for example, has found that students from state schools actually do better at university.

Still, the myths persist, along with the excessive workloads being dumped on increasingly younger shoulders. Despite the fact that most teachers admit that homework is overrated, and much of it pointless, schools continue to set burdensome levels, I suspect largely to appease parents who see it as a measure of school quality.

I am not, by the way, advocating mediocrity - just a bit of sanity. I value academic excellence as much as the next person. My children do very nicely at external exams. But the line has to be drawn somewhere, and I'm happy to let my kids decide where that line should be.

Choon Tan's eldest son, David, was the country's youngest university graduate at 16, when he gained first-class honours in mathematics from Canterbury University. His daughter, Audrey, repeated that feat before going on to Cambridge to complete a doctorate in pure mathematics. So did his youngest, Michael, who is halfway through his medical studies at Auckland. Michael passed Bursary mathematics at 7 and went to university at 8, the youngest to do so.

They all turned out nice, balanced people. All were taught by Choon, a former telecommunications engineer and author of Teach Your Children Well, who now spends his time making maths achievers out of privileged and not so privileged children.

He insists that his children aren't geniuses, that all children have the potential to learn.

His kids succeeded, he says, because they were given the room to make their own decisions and the freedom to pursue the things they liked, whether it was playing tennis, the piano, or ballet.

The key, he says, is love, encouragement and plenty of fun.