Frank Greenall Photo/File
It is gratifying in recent years to see more subjects relating to trade skills coming on stream at secondary schools.
These give the less academically inclined better opportunities to gain NCEA and NZQA credits through such hands-on activities as construction skills, basic electrical and automotive - and even possum trapping and the like. It is a big boost to future employability.
For those who recall the old technical colleges and the manual skills departments that were a standard part of the curriculum at many mainstream colleges, this development comes with a sense of deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.
It seems it has taken a generation or two of Ministry of Education panjandrums captured by vogueish pedagogy to be finally expurgated from the system and relative sanity to prevail again.
Much lip service is given to raising the levels of literacy, but there is confusion between improving basic literacy/numeracy and tagging supposed educational progress to formal qualifications such as NCEA. Basic literacy can only be measured against tangible yardsticks that gauge functional literacy in a certain situation, otherwise it is a case of how long is a piece of string.
This is why a just a few generations ago, even though the educational qualification was artificially rigged to fail approximately half the students at Year 11 level (the old School Certificate), these supposed failures were still able to successfully enter the workforce. The literacy encountered in their employment situations was contextualised - in other words, the vocabulary and numeracy demands were related to tangible and relevant objects or events, and therefore easier to learn and retain.
Sensibly referred to as "learning on the job", it was a process successfully able to serve the needs of new employees and employers alike.
This direct and pragmatic approach was usurped by a mindset that declared NCEA success and/or all manner of tertiary training regimes necessary before the new job-seeker could even get their foot in the door - often entailing racking up extensive student debt for the dubious privilege of being able to wave the requisite industry qualification in a prospective employer's face.
All that happened, in effect, was that a cohort of students were able to demonstrate a level of learning based on formal academic proficiency.
Meantime, for those with natural ability in particular skill sets, but less able to academically learn, it meant unnecessary work-entry obstacles had been erected in their face.
A stunning example of this was the accomplishment of Brando Yelavich, the young man who not so long ago completed the first coastal circumnavigation of the country on foot.
It was a spectacular demonstration of resilience, fortitude, adaptability, survival skills and ingenuity. Yet one of the reasons he embarked on his epic journey was that, shortly before, the army had deemed him to have failed their so-called SMART entrance test - an IQ style affair.
Denied his chosen career course, he sought other ways to channel his skills and aptitude, and accomplished a feat that would have tested a hardened member of the SAS. An element of dyslexia had excluded a candidate of outstanding natural ability whom army recruiters should have been crawling over broken glass to get on board.
Certainly contemporary work situations may demand higher literacy/numeracy skills but many still do not. Or, if so, can be worked around with appropriate support.
John Britten, the revolutionary motorbike inventor and general innovator, was, to all intents and purposes, dyslexic. Opportunity must exist for the more kinaesthetic or hands-on learners to be formally recognised outside the framework of normal academic criteria.
Dyslexia is not a condition that you either have or don't have, in the manner of the flu, but a continuum along which individuals may be placed in terms of relative strengths and weaknesses. It has even been described as the "gift of dyslexia" as the very elements that make conventional text so difficult for some to decode provide cognitive circuitry that excels in less literal contexts.
The same pertains to applied skills learned in the school environment.