Let me cut to the chase. I am disturbed by recent government educational rhetoric that prioritises functionality over creativity.
Namely, going "back to basics" (reading, writing and maths) at the expense of "other" curriculum elements such as the arts and humanities.
Disingenuous or just plain daft? Others have already commented on this, and I’m sure that most teachers and parents are simply taking a grimace and carry on approach.
Here I muse further, both as an historian and as a longtime participant in New Zealand’s education system since the 1960s. I don’t expect that those in power will take much notice.
But this is a plea to all the rest of us, to value and stridently defend a public education system that can be both/and, not either/or. We should not be made to choose.
I begin with a brief encounter on a train journey in the United States in 2001 — one which has stuck with me.
Travelling to Yale University while doing my PhD, I sat beside an American student. My focus was on religious history.
My antennae twitched when I saw that he was reading a book on the medieval theologian St Thomas Aquinas. I asked if he was studying theology or maybe religious history. No. He was doing a bachelor of science.
Why the theology text? Because, he replied, all science students at his university were required to take humanities subjects as a part of their programme.
This, I learned later, was not isolated. Our New Zealand nephew, living in California, also took language and English papers while doing a degree in microbiology.
Here was an educational system defined broadly and which comfortably built into its DNA both so-called technical and creative elements. This, sadly, seems to be a point of discomfort for the current government.
One of the problems with education being swung every three years by changes of government, I suggest, is a lack of collective historical memory. We forget very easily what once was or where we have come from.
Instead, we reimagine the past as we think it might have been, not how it was, and sometimes try to erroneously recreate a perceived golden past. This is so in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Don’t get me wrong — the current decolonising journey to right past wrongs, perpetuated as much through schooling as other social institutions, is an important phase of social and civic development. That is ongoing.
However, the current technocratic government’s obsession with solving a perceived crisis is both a political posture and historically anachronistic.
The high-volume messaging about "back to basics" potentially drowns out a quieter, more historically nuanced voice.
It tells us that our education has always been thought of as holding together technical and creative elements.
For Māori, long-standing cultural and spiritual emphases have shaped how learning happened, both pre- and post-European settlement, integrating what we now call the "arts". The strength of that is witnessed, for example, through schools’ kapa haka programmes and the important Ngā Manu Kōrero high school speech competitions held each year. Literacy and creativity.
From early on after 1848, Otago’s children regularly learnt the "three Rs" alongside history, geography, book-keeping, music, languages and such gendered subjects as sewing for girls.
The 1877 Education Act, establishing compulsory primary schooling for all settler children, formalised this. It made compulsory both the coverage of literacy and numeracy subjects and those now identified as humanities and arts. None of these were optional.
Ever since, irrespective of how school curricula have changed, this both/and approach has consistently remained the status quo. Perhaps there have been cyclical emphases, when funding has particularly targeted such initiatives as art advisers for schools or the high school Shakespeare competitions.
A key plank for this wider, creative element is the New Zealand School Journal, still a nationally accessible classroom resource since it began in 1907.
Furthermore, creative learning has always been hard-wired into the kindergarten movement, from its inception in the late 19th century. It has always emphasised the integration of formal and informal learning, with play, creativity and the outdoors at its heart. Socialisation and education are inextricable, at all levels.
As a historian I’m also interested in individual memory, which might be another way to think about this. How do we remember learning? What stands out in our experience? What left its mark, that might not so easily be quantified?
Let me illustrate from my own schooling, wherein I remember the influence of visual materials and creative writing. On leaving high school I was well versed in historical literacy, but that is not what stands out.
I do remember, much earlier at primary school, proudly doing a drawing of Admiral Nelson on the quarterdeck of HMS Victory — that was how my historical imagination and passion were first lit. History also came more alive through photographs, paintings, drawings, maps and films than through words.
Likewise, I learnt to put words into context by writing creative and imaginative stories about those words. Imagination and creativity helped me to be literate alongside the linguistic technicalities.
On a wider front, school was both memorable and formative, through opportunities to be creatively active in performances and drama, through messy painting and botched handcraft experiments. In the process I learnt to fail as well as to succeed.
Despite all of that, one of my PhD examiners noted that I spelt a particular word wrong all the way through my thesis. At least, he
said, I was consistent.
Does that mean that schooling failed me? And what does that say about the so-called golden age of education in which I was
schooled, that I suspect our current government is trying to recapture?
Historical memory, both collective and individual, is a necessary corrective to the current attempts to erroneously reimagine our past and to rescript our present in non-imaginative ways.
A both/and education serves all of us well, across our diversity of communities and cultures.
Let’s keep what we have — it is worthwhile and too easily lost when the currently loudest political voices keep crying wolf and seem incapable of creative imagination.
— Hugh Morrison is an associate professor in the University of Otago College of Education, and writes on the histories of religion and of childhood/youth.
