Letters: Chief executives’ pay and a job for life; truancy spawns ‘Gen-Uneducated’; autonomy for teachers

Truancy risks creating "Gen-Uneducated". Photo / Michael Craig

Letters to the Editor

Big pay and a job for life

It is always interesting to see how much our top executives get paid.

What they never show are all the other financial benefits they are paid, which adds another substantial financial gain.

The other staggering point is that even when these executives perform badly and are forced to fall on their swords and resign, they are never required to pay back any of their huge pay packets.

In most cases, they receive a golden handshake. On top of that, they turn up later running other companies, again on big salaries.

Ah, the old boys’ network. A bit like our sacked MPs who turn up as advisers to private business.

Jock MacVicar, Hauraki.

Gen-Uneducated

I wonder how going to school became just optional?

With the Covid virus gone, or at least in remission, there should be no excuses.

This issue is just one more problem that our shiny new Government has to deal with as it was largely ignored or just added to the bulging “too-hard basket” by the previous Government.

The law states that children must attend school until the age of 15. Perhaps it will be necessary to resort to the long arm of the law to get all children back in school where they belong, otherwise, they are setting up for failure on a massive scale.

They will be known as Gen-Uneducated, or worse.

Colleen Wright, Botany Downs.

Teaching autonomy

Huw Dann’s letter (NZ Herald, April 3) advocates that “good teachers” should have autonomy to be “free to create their own curriculum, based on the needs of their students whom they themselves have assessed”.

What a load of tosh.

Here are three points to consider: how are good teachers identified? I’d like to see a proposal on that get some air.

Do teachers really have the time available to write and design a curriculum to suit their classes’ needs?

What assurance do we have that a teacher’s “assessment” of a class’ needs is correct? We have seen examples where key elements of a child’s learning have been missed because of successive teachers’ discretion.

I agree that teachers need autonomy in their approach to teaching, but the content of a particular year’s curriculum should be largely set by the ministry to ensure children are allowed access to all the key elements of a good education as they progress through the years of study.

Nick Rowe, Greenlane.

Police presence

When it comes to the “war on crime”, rhetoric often triumphs over facts.

Correspondent Johan Slabbert of Warkworth (NZ Herald, April 4), in decrying police actions he doesn’t agree with, asks “can I also have an increased police presence where I live?”

He is concerned he will have to phone “Commander Kirk” for help. If he had read his local newspaper this week he would have seen a report from the guy he could phone, Sergeant Daniel McDermott of the Warkworth police, introducing five new constables operating along with the 11 existing sworn police officers from his local police station.

Neil Anderson, Algies Bay.

League of his own

Correspondent Jock MacVicar’s suggestion (NZ Herald, April 2) that the All Blacks need to second Shaun Johnson to improve their kicking skills would be an exercise in futility.

Johnson would need to refer to and become knowledgeable of a rugby rule book that surpasses the thickness of the biggest doorstop before he could impart those skills from the simpler and more appealing game of rugby league.

His free-flowing style doesn’t belong in the staid, staggered and boringly predictable game of rugby, where oversized men deliberately slow down the game in order to catch their breath, turning it into a spectacle that nobody wants to watch any more.

Bernard Walker, Mt Maunganui.

Working from Coast

Interesting to read that a manager employed by Auckland Council actually resides on the Gold Coast (NZ Herald, April 4).

Not exactly hands-on management one would have thought. This may help explain why, for example, we have potholes in roads and so on that are never fixed.

Surely you want your workers more “on-site”, as it were, when it comes to directly addressing issues and hopefully, that manager isn’t there on a ratepayer-funded deal.

Paul Beck, West Harbour.

Congestion solution

I wonder if Mayor Wayne Brown has ever thought that in order to get rid of congestion in Auckland, he could get all the companies to vacate the city.

Like all the head offices, the only reason for them to be there is so the upper management can have their coffee breaks down by the harbour.

After all, they don’t have person-to-person stuff anymore. Everything is by computer or phone, so they could move everything to, say, Waiōuru and they would have the same c**p service.

John Davison, Manurewa.