Tom Gerrard: Please, sir, can we have some respect?

COMMENT

Recently I was quite taken by an article in The Spectator that dealt with the general loss of respect for authority, especially for the teaching profession.

It was based, of course, on the British experience but some of the sentiments are relevant to our own educational environment.

The article was based on the comments of Pat Lerew, the president of a large teachers' union in Britain, who claims that some of today's parents, who were children in the 1980s, have no idea themselves who is worthy of respect.

She argues - a little harshly you may think - that "they have an inability to understand anything beyond their own dreary appetite ... they have nothing but scorn for teachers who [compared to them] are unsuccessful in economic terms".

Pat Lerew is, however, rightly concerned that many modern parents fail to uphold the authority of the teacher. The days are long gone when a child who got into trouble at school would be in as much trouble at home. More often nowadays the opposite is true.

If a child is disciplined at school, many parents - usually with an imperfect understanding of the circumstances - will leap to the child's defence. This erodes respect for the teacher and the authority system he or she represents.

Fortunately, one of the strengths of my school, Rosmini College, is that parents usually reinforce the school's discipline.

Pat Lerew argues strongly that much of the problem is political interference. I agree. There is an incredible political focus on schools and learning institutions in New Zealand today.

We are bombarded with endless glossy-paged directives with fancy, spin-doctored titles: Tomorrow's Schools, Closing the Gaps, The Literacy Problem, Lighting the Fire.

The buzz-words are a philosopher's nightmare but a bureaucrat's dream: knowledge wave, best practice, stakeholders, clients, knowledge economy, pathways, strategic plans, objectives, outcomes, mission statements, charters - all of which engender the frantic writing of new policies to be implemented at the expense of real teaching.

As a wise observer of the educational scene commented to me: "The glossier the package, the emptier the space inside."

The Government, while preaching freedom and individualism, allows neither to schools. It has no conception of teachers as professionals with training, experience and integrity.

They are given minute instructions on what to teach, how to teach, what to assess, when to assess.

Not mark, notice - the whole idea is to have comfort zones so broad that they penalise the bright, honest and hard-working, while they reward the lazy and work-shy and disguise their failings from parents and employers alike.

The teachers themselves are not entirely blameless, but it is to some extent a chicken-and-egg situation. Deteriorating standards lead to deteriorating standards.

There is little sense today of teaching as a high calling and, despite the rhetoric from Wellington, fewer and fewer talented young people are drawn to teaching.

As All Black coach Graham Henry once told me, "Teaching is a much nobler profession than coaching at even the highest level, it just doesn't pay as much."

Society has rendered teachers impotent and the result is that strong-minded men and women are not prepared to enter a profession where gross indiscipline and lack of respect is the order of the day, and where our political masters add to the pressure with unrealistic expectations.

The result of all this? Despite the oceans of paper, many employers and universities bemoan the lowering of standards in almost every aspect of education.

Where does our new NCEA qualification figure in all this? The NCEA was well-intentioned and, for the most part, the actual content of the curriculum is sound.

And while I respect the rights of other schools to embrace the Cambridge qualification from England, what concerns me is that New Zealand already had a history of schools laying a solid foundation for tertiary institutions.

New Zealand graduates distinguished themselves overseas and had little trouble securing employment in much-sought-after professions. Indeed, the School Certificate, Bursary and Scholarship external exams seemed to do the job nicely.

However, the powers wanted a more "student-oriented" education, emphasising internal assessment. While much of the actual content of the new qualification is sound, the method of assessing it is so time-consuming and tedious that good teaching time has been eroded.

Many teachers have protested with their feet and walked away.

The other problem is that this system is open to abuse. Some schools, in order to appear solid in league tables, may be tempted to hand out "play way" credits.

Nor does it seem very clever to allow students frequent re-sits, except possibly in subjects with more practical components.

There comes a point, surely, where teacher and student must face the fact that failure is part of all our lives, and limitations must be accepted.

One other concern many teachers have is that the bands between excellent/merit/achieved are far too broad. A candidate who has met the minimum criteria for 'achieved' could be perceived as narrowly missing 'merit'.

For example, barely literate students can be ranked on a par with versatile and competent users of the language.

Unless there is a sound curriculum that teacher, learner, parent and employer can understand and relate to, unless we have well-qualified teachers with a command of their subject, unless we have a disciplined environment where teachers and pupils have a mutual respect for each other, the noble profession of teaching will continue to struggle to regain the status it once had.

* Tom Gerrard is the principal of Rosmini College, Takapuna.