Month: September 2010

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
13 September 2010

They invitation sounded interesting, James Tooley was coming to town to address a dinner being organised by the Maxim Institute. First thing to do was to seek more information.

“James Tooley is Professor of Education Policy at Newcastle University and is the founder of The Beautiful Tree Foundation. His work in slum and low-income areas around the world and dedication to private initiatives in education have won him worldwide acclaim and awards. He is the world’s expert on private schools for the poor in developing countries.”

And so the presentation started full of interest. Tooley had spent a good deal of time in the developing world (particularly in Zimbabwe and Hyerabad) and had noticed that in the key areas of disadvantage, the slums, there had developed a phenomenon – the growth of small schools set up privately outside the government system that in such areas struggle to meet demand.

I was surprised that he was surprised by this. The development of small schools outside the official system is a feature throughout the developing world. It happens in the Pacific and at the early childhood level in New Zealand among certain communities. These reflect the insatiable demand for education in developing countries. Education is seen as a liberating mechanism for getting a ticket out of the poverty and hardship of the slum.

This is not surprising. None of the these communities wish to live such lives, in slums with the degradation of poverty and disease, the gloomy prospects for the future evident to them every day of their lives. The very same political systems that create such areas are in fact responsible for promoting education as the way ahead, the alternative, but for a range of reasons cannot deliver on their promise and education is available in such settings to only a few. Schools spring up along the style of village schools with the trappings of a “good school” such as a uniform. They cluster around a teacher or two, work in very basic premises and have little in the way of resources other than those of resilient people.

It was at this point that the audience was asked to make some big leaps in logic. Yes, these little schools were private but not private as we know it Jim!

To make the leap from “private” in the sense that these schools were outside the government system to “private” as the term is applied to independent schools in the western education system while popular with the audience, was a little beyond credulity. And a great irony is that while he extolled the virtue of the slum schools being really independent i.e. they received no support from the government, he at the same time asked the audience to see in these schools an implicit support for private education in the wealthy west where “independent schools” receive considerable sums of government funding which in comparison to the private schools of the slums puts them in an entirely different space.

But the sudience seemed not to mind as his stories were full of interest and his presentation professional and well-illustrated. The bigger leaps of logic were yet to come!

Tooley had a photo of a teacher, a teacher in a government school he claimed, with his head on the teacher’s desk asleep. Let’s assume that this person was a teacher, was asleep and that the desk was in a government school in the interests of getting to the point he made. This showed that all teachers in government schools were lazy and by extension incompetent. This was because they were paid too much and consequently this slumbering fellow proved that government schools were a waste of resources.

Well the facts speak otherwise in India where the issues are huge. I lazily googled India and education to quickly and effortlessly learn that India had increased primary education attendance rate and expanding literacy to approximately two thirds of the population. Its education system is cited as one of the main contributors to its economic rise, the benefits of which clearly do not reach the slums. I also learned that much of the progress in education has been credited to various private institutions. But wait a minute – I learn that the private education market in India is estimated to be worth $40 billion in 2008 and will increase to $68 billion by 2012. Surely this is not referring to the private schools of the slums. India, and of course we know this, must have an elite private education system as well located well away from the slums – just like New Zealand and most other countries where there is wealth.

In India, 35% of its population is still illiterate, only 15% of Indian students reach high school, and just 7% graduate. India’s post-secondary colleges offer only enough seats for 7% of India’s college-age population. The private schools of Tooley’s talk must make a difference, especially to the little ones who go to them but the issues faced by the country are of tsunami proportion.

New Zealand can’t be complacent. Some of the issues we face are growing at a pace that requires urgent intervention. One of these could be the establishment of private schools, independent schools, in our most disadvantaged communities. Somehow I do not think that those in the audience who clearly signalled their support for Tooley’s contention that governments should not be involved in education had that in mind. I wait with interest for New Zealand’s prestigious private schools to set up shop in the areas in which I work.

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Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
3 September 2010

When I started school the teacher had a view that we should be taught to read and write. Putting aside reading for the moment, we certainly got on with writing. Around the classroom on the wall would be blackboards – I think they were about A3 in size – cheek by jowl, all thirty of them. We would have our name written indelibly at the top of our particular space (does anyone remember the old trick of soaking a stick of chalk in sugar and water to make it resist the duster?) and lines for us to write on were etched into the surface of the board.

And so we progressively learned to write each letter of the alphabet. It was printing really but each letter had a little flick at the end – oh yes they were cunning for that little flick would be needed later. This was all done in accordance with the Handbook for the Teaching of Writing.

Well, to cut a two year story into a few words, we progressed from printing into cursive handwriting, joining a letter from that flick onto the next one and learning the cursive forms of letters like K and T and H. Learning this at our blackboards was akin to an old-fashioned aerobics class – thirty little ones with arms scribing ovals when we got to the letter O and so on. We did line after line of repeated movement until we had that letter in the memory of our muscles.

Later, it might have been Standard One, I really forget, we graduated to ink and the little ceramic inkwells and the dip pens. It must have been Standard One because something tells me that was the first year we had desks with the holes for those little white ceramic pots. We continued in this vein until the end of primary school.

Arriving at intermediate school, Day 1, produced something of a crisis. We were expected to have a fountain pen! Our Mum was in hospital at the time and we were staying with our Aunty. She knew what to do and off we went to the McKenzies Department Store in Hamilton and purchased our first fountain pen, an Osmiroid with rubber bladder, squeezing levers for emptying said bladder and a cap with a slide for wearing this implement in a pocket just like grown-ups. Writing just had to be an exciting thing now!

And so it continued. Ball point pens came along and all those other sorts of pens that are available now. But my early school experience saw me fall deeply in love with the fountain pen which I continue to use to this day. My implement of second choice for writing is a pencil – it must be a 4B with nice soft lead. The joy of hand writing is partly the traction of the pen or pencil on the paper rather than the sliding and mistrustful behaviour of the ballpoint pen.

I could spin a similar story about learning to read (and probably will one day!).

But dear readers, I have been unfaithful. I have been seduced by the Apple iPad (no, I have no connection with Apple and this was a gift to me by my most-loved-and-dear). It is a whole new experience not only in writing but also in having this wonderful book, for it is no thicker nor heavier than a slim volume. It has in it everything you need. Ways of writing, information of every conceivable kind, services that are more useful than you might imagine, but more importantly, a real opportunity at last to be paperless.

The papers required for a day’s meeting are loaded in an instant and at the meeting the iPad sits on the table and is no more intrusive than a piece of paper. No longer the slightly embarrassing mini-wall that is erected by opening the laptop behind which you hide and in some cases have to hide behind in order to see the screen through the correct part of the bifocals.

But it is interesting how new technologies do not leave completely behind the experience of previous technologies. Reading a book by electronic means is a close simulation of reading the real thing. Page after page, touch the arrow to turn to the next page, place the bookmark when you realise that you have fallen asleep – it’s just like reading an old-fashioned book. In fact it is interesting that the marketing of these electronic devices often promotes the promise that it really is “just like reading a book”. Touch screens are seeing the development of better and better handwriting recognition.

We have come a long way in one lifetime – a journey which saw the apple for the teacher morph into the Apple as the teacher. What next, you might well ask?

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