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A Written Presentation of the Sixth Annual Peter Fraser Memorial Lecture

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A Written Presentation of the Sixth Annual Peter Fraser Memorial Lecture Knowledge Cultures 5(6), 2017 pp. 25–44, ISSN 2327-5731, eISSN 2375-6527 doi:10.22381/KC5620173 THE HEART OF THE MATTER: A WRITTEN PRESENTATION OF THE SIXTH ANNUAL PETER FRASER MEMORIAL LECTURE KIRSTEN LOCKE [email protected] The School of Critical Studies in Education, University of Auckland (corresponding author) RENEE GERLICH Independent Researcher MORGAN GODFERY Independent Researcher IAN FRASER Independent Researcher GRANT ROBERTSON Labour MP, Wellington Central, current Minister of Finance ANGELA ROBERTS Stratford High School, New Plymouth ABSTRACT. This article presents the transcript of the Sixth Annual Peter Fraser Memorial Lecture that was held in Wellington, New Zealand on October 4, 2016. The lecture comprised of five invited speakers broadly drawn from the education, media and union sectors with an interest in the legacy of Prime Minister Peter Fraser to New Zealand’s public education system. Using the documentary of the introduction of arts education in post-war New Zealand entitled The heART of the Matter, the speakers were asked to respond to the democratic ethos of education as a fundamental pillar to the first New Zealand Labour Party agenda of educational reform and its implications for New Zealand education today. Figures such as the American educational philosopher John Dewey and the influential New Zealand Director of Education Clarence Beeby occupy shared space alongside Peter Fraser in the following transcript. While there is a strong sense of the importance of educational and political history there is also a shared stance that laments much of what has been lost in the context of contemporary New Zealand education. The intention of this transcript is to provide the reader a collection of educational excerpts that traverse many fields and perspectives, but which can be gathered to form a clarion call for the reassessment of educational focus and aims in ways that honour and reinvigorate the importance of education to the democratic project in New Zealand and beyond. Keywords: Peter Fraser; Clarence Beeby; John Dewey; Labour Party; progressive education; arts education; democracy 25 Introduction This article is part performance piece, part archival exercise and part provocation. Arguably, it is furthest from a standard academic or historical text, yet in its own way it engages on an academic level with education and it is most certainly informed by history. When responding to the theme of this special issue on the aims and ends of education, this article presents different points of entry from varying perspectives. All entry points, however, focus on the heady notion of the purpose of mass education to a democratic society, in this case New Zealand, and the extent to which we can call on these ideals in a contemporary educational context. On October 4, 2016, the five listed authors came together at Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision Film Archive1 in New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington to present a “lecture” in honour of the former Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser. This was to be a lecture with a difference, however, in that the focus of the evening was the Luit Bieringa directed documentary entitled The heART of the Matter, a social-historical documentary that looks at the introduction of progressive education ideals and practices into New Zealand mass schooling through the arts and the indomitable Arts Advisor of the post-war era, Gordon Tovey. Each presenter was asked to formulate a presentation using the film as a platform to respond to the impact and legacy of Peter Fraser’s ideas and commitment to the arts and education in New Zealand’s public education system. We were all given a timeframe of no more than seven minutes, and each presentation formed the lecture as a whole. Considered a towering figure in the implementation of a state education system built on the premise of equal opportunity and access to all, Peter Fraser’s tenure as Prime Minister presided over a time of significant societal change in New Zealand. Peter Fraser stepped out of his role as minister of education and health to take over as Prime Minister upon the death of the first Labour Party Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, in 1940. New Zealand’s societal change was consequently shaped by Fraser’s approach to governing in which he is remembered “for the profound changes in government social priorities, and in New Zealand’s place in the world, that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s” (Bassett & King, 2000, p. 11). All the presentations in this article, whether dealing with Fraser directly or indirectly, capture aspects of this legacy. No talk of the aims and ends of education in the New Zealand context can be had without paying homage to this towering figure, and it is Peter Fraser whose articulation of the purpose of education we can return to in current debates for its force and clarity of principle. It is for these reasons that a memorial lecture given in the 21st Century can still engage with the links Fraser made between education and a more democratic form of society in ways that are relevant and contemporary. The vignettes that make up this article are often overtly political and carry an agenda, and this is not standard convention in scholarly articles. However, because of the diverse group of presenters that include young activists, writers and researchers, a teachers’ union representative, a politician, a media personality and 26 an academic, there is an interesting intersection of voices and issues that traverse contemporary educational issues and challenges that make this collective article relevant to an educational audience today. My intention in collating the transcript of this lecture is to keep the highly political flavour of the evening, and I do this unapologetically. I hope that when read by the educational scholarly community, political agendas of “left” and “right” can be put aside in favour of reading an account of a robust discussion-in-action that deals with the nature and aims of our education system and the very real challenges that are facing it. Each section is named by the author/presenter of that section and I have kept the order of the sections as they were presented on the evening. The only added section apart from this introduction is the short background section provided by Renee Gerlich who was the researcher for the documentary, and who had suggested the theme of the memorial lecture. The event was stimulating, challenging, thoughtful and informative. Education was at the very centre of the evening and each presenter and members of the audience responded and discussed and argued with passion and commitment. There was despair, there was hope, there was disillusionment. At the end of the evening it was noticed that all presenters had written their responses and it was decided that we should collate and publish these in some form. It is here that I both invite you and leave you to this most interesting of events through the written presentations of the authors to ponder the aims and ends of education as seen through different perspectives, histories and points of entry and exit. To give context to each speaker, I will provide a brief introduction and then pass over to each as they occurred on the night. Renee Gerlich: Background to the Theme of the Sixth Annual Peter Fraser Memorial Lecture When compiling the presentations for this article, I asked Renee Gerlich to write a background piece that outlined how the documentary The heART of the Matter had come to be the theme of this sixth memorial lecture on Peter Fraser. Renee was a researcher for the documentary, and was therefore well placed to see the connections between the social democratic education ideals of Peter Fraser and the documentary that dealt with the implementation of an arts-based form of education to New Zealand’s progressive education history. This section provides the contextual backdrop to the memorial lecture, and the talk she presented on the night is included further in the article in the order it was given on the night. Renee Gerlich: Each year, the Wellington Central Electorate Committee of the New Zealand Labour Party commemorates one of its first leaders, Peter Fraser, with a memorial lecture bearing his name. This year, the event was dedicated to Fraser’s legacy in education, following the timely release of the social history documentary The 27 heART of the Matter. This film explores the first Labour government’s work, led by Peter Fraser, transforming public education in New Zealand: it tells the important story of our country’s post-war departure from the Victorian rote- learning factory-line system of the nineteenth century. A central figure in this story of change is Clarence Beeby, who was appointed education director in the 1930s. Beeby’s first day of school as a six-year-old, in 1908, was memorable for all the wrong reasons: I went into a room, and there were children sitting in tiers – I suppose there’d be sixty, or more, it seemed to me 600 – and they were chanting a magical incantation I’d never heard. I now know it was twice one are two, twice two are four... I sat in the front and I [mimed] and got away with it. My arithmetic never recovered. I discovered guile and arithmetic on the same day…Well that poor woman had sixty youngsters, very different backgrounds. Her total equipment was one blackboard, one beadboard for numberwork, a box of smelly plasticine, and some paper… and we had our slates, and our pencils, and a bottle of water to clean the slates, and using spit if we didn’t. That was my first impression of a school.
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