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 MEMORIAL LECTURE

KIRSTEN LOCKE k.locke@.ac.nz The School of Critical Studies in Education, University of Auckland (corresponding author) RENEE GERLICH Independent Researcher MORGAN GODFERY Independent Researcher IAN FRASER Independent Researcher Labour MP, Central, current Minister of Finance Stratford High School, New Plymouth

ABSTRACT. This article presents the transcript of the Sixth Annual Peter Fraser Memorial Lecture that was held in Wellington, 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 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, , 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 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. (Beeby cited in Bieringa, 2016)

Beeby would come to know a very different way of “doing” education. While studying education at university, he became influenced by the educationalist John Dewey who developed a philosophy of learning that centred on the arts. Beeby drew on these ideas in his capacity as education director while working with Peter Fraser to rewrite the Education Act, and while setting up an Arts and Crafts Branch within the Department. The heART of the Matter explores the work of the Arts and Crafts Branch, following its larger-than-life national supervisor, Gordon Tovey, and his team. Historic footage, overlaid with rich interviews, makes for moving viewing. Children play hand-painted drums, strum ukuleles and read rock pool poems following trips to the ocean; they screen-print and make mobiles following science lessons taken on nature walks. They read books in sun-drenched school fields, create plays on local history, and they want to be at school. Decades on, these children still vividly animate memories eagerly recollected. The heART of the Matter was a long time in the making. When Gordon Tovey passed away in 1974, director Luit Bieringa began collecting archives from his position as Director of Manawatu Art Gallery. Tovey had held an exhibition of children's art at the Gallery not long before his passing, and Bieringa was also in contact with David Aitken, who was head of art at Teachers’ College and had trained through Tovey’s scheme. By the 1990s, Jan and Luit Bieringa were conducting oral interviews with the help of Arts Council funding. They built a closer relationship with Tovey’s daughter and biographer Carol Henderson, and became more acutely aware of the issues that were at stake. The mid-1980 neoliberal reforms in education made this story of New Zealand’s post-war transformations newly pertinent. As the 28 connections forged between the Education Department and iwi [tribe] in the mid- twentieth century also began to disintegrate, Jan and Luit became determined to make a documentary. In 2012, I joined Jan and Luit as a researcher. I had met Carol Henderson after a disenchanting experience training for a Graduate Diploma in Teaching at an education faculty, was warmed by this history, and glad to become involved. By 2015, two film editors, Annie Collins and Angela Boyd, were working toward a 2016 film release. Many thanks to Grant Robertson and Beth Houston for agreeing to dedicate the 2016 Peter Fraser memorial lecture to further exploring The heART of the Matter.

Ian Fraser: Fraser, Beeby and the Introduction of “Arts and Crafts”

A well-known figure in New Zealand media and journalism, Ian Fraser was tasked with compering the event and introducing each speaker throughout the evening. Ian Fraser’s interest (no relation to Peter Fraser, as you will see below) in the post-war educational project of Peter Fraser and the Director of Education, Clarence Beeby, was piqued by a documentary project he initiated in the 1980s that culminated in an in-depth interview with a retired but still sharply on-point Clarence Beeby. While the documentary never came to fruition and the interview remains unseen by the public, Ian Fraser’s interview with Beeby captured the nature of the collaboration between Beeby and Peter Fraser and their shared belief in the importance of an expressive and child-centred form of education for children in the post-war New Zealand era.

Ian Fraser: Peter Fraser (no relation!) was New Zealand’s 24th Prime Minister – he ruled with a will – and sometimes a whim of iron – for just under 10 years, as leader of a four- term Labour Government, New Zealand’s only four-term Labour Government. 14 years in power and ample time to leave an indelible thumbprint on the nation; which they did. But Fraser was not just a hugely influential Prime Minister, in war and peace. He was a profoundly radical, far-seeing and effective Minister of Education. He held the portfolio from the accession of the first Labour Government in 1935, and he held onto it when he became Prime Minister after the death of Savage early in 1940. I see him as the best Education Minister we ever had. In his Biography of , Keith Sinclair (1976) writes that as a leader, Fraser ruled by ability and toughness. I think, however, in his role as Education Minister, Peter Fraser demonstrated love. He had left school himself at the age of 11 but he had a deep conviction, all his life, of the importance of education. It was his credo that ostensible differences in ability had for the most part been created by economic and social conditions – and that if you ameliorated one, you fixed the

29 other. In the remarkable text of his Annual Report to Parliament, in 1939, Fraser makes this statement:

It was necessary to convert a school system, constructed originally on a basis of selection and privilege, to a truly democratic form, where it can cater for the needs of the whole population over as long a period of their lives as is found possible and desirable. (AJHR, 1939, E.-1, p. 3)

I see this statement as a belief founded in a love of mankind. Fraser’s brilliant Director General of Education, Dr Clarence Beeby, took a slightly different tack on it. He told me once that he and Fraser shared a dream. Peter Fraser stated that the education system he inherited was based on selection and privilege. As a general principle, only the academically able or the wealthy survived. A certain minimum of opportunity was provided – and if you fell by the wayside you were presumed to have failed to make the most of your opportunities, such as they were. The terrain is depressingly familiar, if you know your Dickens – particularly the Dickens of Hard Times. The times tables were strapped into pupils. They were punished for bad spelling, more often than not with little effect, or for blotting their copybooks. It was a system based on rigorous discipline and a single-minded attention to training in the fundamentals. As Mr Gradgrind observed: “Sir, you can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them” (Dickens, 1854, p. 1). In 1986, I did a very long television interview with Dr Beeby, Fraser’s muse as Director General of Education. He was in his 80s, as clear as a bell, subtle, deep and serenely confident in his value system. We talked about the changes he had worked with Fraser to introduce – changes regarded by hostile parents, politicians and businessmen as uncontrolled revolution. The manifesto for those changes was set out clearly in the famous 1939 Annual Report of the Minister of Education:

The Government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever his level of academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he is best fitted, and to the full extent of his powers. (AJHR, 1939, E.-1, pp. 2&3)

So, Fraser and Beeby and a reinvigorated teaching corps shook the shackles off. One commentator summed up the main elements of the revolution as “the provision of a better-balanced curriculum, a less passive role for children in schoolwork – with the emphasis on understanding as against rote learning, a sharpened awareness of the need to measure children’s attainment against their ability, fuller realisation of the advantage to children of keeping them with those of about their own age, and reduced tension between teachers and children” (Ewing, 1970, p. 259).

30 What that commentator missed out was the influence of arts and crafts in changing the terrain. Perhaps the most important thing Beeby did was to lay a special emphasis on the imagination and the arts. No longer was art to be a sort of frill. And the person he chose to set up the arts and crafts programme in schools was a great original – a missionary, an eccentric in some respects, a huge personality, a hard driver, and a man who had a redemptive vision of the power of a liberal education. His name was Gordon Tovey, and Luit and Jan Bieringa recently made a documentary feature film on him. Some of you may have seen the movie at the Film Festival a few weeks ago. It’s called The heART of the Matter – with the ART in Heart in capital letters. It’s about Tovey and his mission to put art, artists and Maori Artists in particular into the classroom in the years immediately after the War.

Grant Robertson: Political and Revolutionary Education

Grant Robertson is a New Zealand Labour Party Member of Parliament for Wellington Central.2 He is also the current Minister of Finance in the Sixth Labour Government of New Zealand. As someone with a keen interest in social outcomes afforded by a strong state-driven educational delivery, Robertson is more than familiar with the historical lineage of figures such as Peter Fraser and Clarence Beeby and their place in articulating the democratic potential of state education in New Zealand. Firmly anchoring this presentation in the local New Zealand context, Robertson outlines a vision for education in the twenty-first century that is firmly in step with the democratic ideals of Peter Fraser’s government in the 1940s.

Grant Robertson Tonight we are talking about an educational revolution that was developed in the 1930s and 1940s in New Zealand, and which broke every mould. That should not surprise because, although Peter Fraser was a dour Scot, and at times a political pragmatist, he was at heart a revolutionary. Together with Clarence Beeby they created the modern education system in New Zealand. It is worth noting that, while Beeby drove the reforms, Fraser had very much developed his own thinking in terms of education. He drafted the 1919 Labour manifesto on education, the succinctness of which could well be taken on board by the Party of today: “free, secular and compulsory education from kindergarten to university” (cited in Clark, 1998, p. 71). As early as 1919, he showed his preference for a modern education system. Describing a school in Wanganui, Fraser said

there you will see the system of jamming and cramming knowledge and facts into children thrown aside, and you will see instead the real function of education being put into operation—that of developing the

31 individuality and innate powers of children (cited in Clark, 1998, pp. 71 & 72).

He was of course criticised for too much attention being paid to “frill subjects” and not enough to the “3Rs”. Fraser’s own experience of education was formative. He left school in his early teens as his family was unable to afford education. He was a great user of, and advocate for, night schools. The Council for Adult Education was established on his watch and he found funding for the Workers Educational Association to thrive. He oversaw the state funding of kindergarten and kindergarten teachers, the re- admission of five year olds to primary school, the raising of the school leaving age to fifteen, free placement in post primary education until the age of nineteen, and unexpended parts of that entitlement available for use in night classes. University tuition became free for all those qualified to matriculate. It was heady stuff. He was years ahead of others in pursuing this goal, and our education system as such stayed years ahead of others. His success was demonstrable. In statistical terms in 1935 58% of boys and girls went on to post-primary education. By 1949 this had reached 92% (Clark, 1998, pp. 77 & 78). He oversaw an ambitious programme of school building, of teacher training and more resources. He understood the connections between health and education, being Minister of both and no doubt aided by the views of his wife Janet, a member of the Wellington Hospital Board among many other things. He was quoted as saying “it is useless to expect children to take advantage of the educational facilities we offer unless they are fit and healthy” (cited in Clark, 1998, p. 74). He thought outside the square. He championed the move away from external examinations, succeeding with UE accreditation but bowing to the externally examined School Certificate. In short, he was part of the birth of our modern education system. He instilled Labour values, Scottish Presbyterian pragmatism and great common sense into establishing our future. He had as profound effect as anyone on our education system. When we look from the standpoint of 2016 it is easy to want to hark back to this time. It was of course not perfect, but there are in it lessons for today. This morning, I visited one of my local schools, Karori West Normal School. It is the holidays, but there I found the Year 3 and 4 teachers, the Deputy Principal and the Principal discussing the progress of students. They were talking about each student, their particular learning needs, where they were doing well, where they need some more support, whether they were happy, what else was going on in their lives that needed to be thought about or worked on. Armed with the world-leading New Zealand Curriculum they are doing amazing things. But they are worried. They have managed to work their way around the irrelevant, distracting and potentially damaging National Standards. But now they are facing a government increasingly determined to drive an agenda of privatisation, union busting and to continue the obsession with targets and 32 assessment. A government and a philosophy that wants to reduce all that is wonderful about learning and realising potential down to a column on a spreadsheet in a portal. We must turn that on its head, and embrace an education that is life-long, that draws on the superb teaching workforce that we have and supports them to give each and every New Zealander the opportunity to understand themselves, the world and the people around them and their place in it. A broad curriculum – not just STEM but STEAM’D where Arts, Design and Humanities are as important as Science and Technology. Education that is truly free beyond secondary school and that values all types of learning and experience. Let me end, as I have done in previous Fraser Lectures, with a quote from Fraser speaking to a group of teachers in Wellington in 1938. His reputation as a somewhat dour speaker is unfair in my view. He was actually quite funny. He was criticised early in his Parliamentary career as being a seditious Scot. He replied he would rather be born a Scot than a jackass. In this speech from 1938 he ends by quoting from Abel Tasman’s log for 13 December 1642: “Towards the middle of the day we saw a great land uplifted” (Clark, 1998, p. 87). New Zealand is a great land and can be greater still.

Kirsten Locke: The Aims of Education

Representing the educational researcher perspective, Kirsten Locke is particularly interested in the history of ideas and their application to New Zealand’s education system. The following presentation outlines the philosophical coordinates of a vision that emerged in the reciprocal relationship between the positions of Clearance Beeby and Peter Fraser. In his capacity as Director of Education to Peter Fraser’s government, Beeby brought his experience and knowledge of learning theory to bare on the project of educational reform in post-war New Zealand. While renowned for a having a healthy scepticism towards academia and “intellectualism”, Peter Fraser was, however, unflinchingly committed to establishing an education system that was in concert with Beeby’s vision of child- centred learning.

Kirsten Locke: The dimension that I will talk about in response to this wonderful documentary is what the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey called Creative Democracy. This documentary captures a snapshot of a time of great optimism and hope around the role of education as contributing to a more just, and more democratic society. In 1937 when Peter Fraser closed schools for a week allowing teachers and the New Zealand public to attend the lectures organised by the New Education Fellowship Conference, the sense of incredible excitement surrounding education was palpable. People queued for hours to listen to these new modern methods of education that made explicit the radical move to place children at the very centre of 33 the educative endeavour. For the first time the general New Zealand public was informed about the theories of education espoused by Rousseau, Montessori, Pestalozzi, Froebel, the psychoanalysis of Sigmund and Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and the child-centred philosophy of education of John Dewey. Very broadly, this constellation of theories about education that saw the importance of freedom of expression, freedom of movement, equal participation and social cooperation, would feed into what would come to be known as progressive education. The ideas of John Dewey would be central to New Zealand’s uptake of a very home-grown version of progressive education. At heart in this educational approach was the centrality of the role education plays to sustaining, promoting and modelling democracy. Dewey was the philosopher to look at the way, if a modern democratic society predicated on equal and active participation was to be achieved, then it was to education we needed to look to model this approach. Dewey famously wrote, education is “a process of living and not a preparation for future living” (Dewey, 1897). This meant education needed to be built on active participation, of active learning based on inquiry, experimentation, cooperation, and communicating with others through discussion in order to become citizens who would find it natural to engage in these forms of behaviour in adult society. Key to all of this was the centrality of freedom of expression through artistic and creative engagement. The arts for Dewey were not part of an education system solely to justify future work, the economy or cognitive development. They were there as a cornerstone of an educational approach that saw the necessity to engage creatively with others, to learn the reciprocity of living together, of being amongst others, of learning to cope and be stimulated by both the vast differences and incredible similarities of what it means to be human. In the contemporary context of digital learning and technological saturation, progressive education under the labels of Modern Learning Environments and Modern Learning Pedagogies has undergone something of a resurgence. However, I will put it to you that an argument could be made that the radical democratic potential of progressive education that focussed on the relationality, communicability and reciprocity of living alongside others as espoused through the Deweyan lens of Peter Fraser is now absent. What we now have is a focus on a neoliberal reading of the “active learner” that draws on the inquiry-led ‘learning by doing’ impetus of progressive education, but is now transplanted to the competitive, entrepreneurial individual ready to leap on to the economic stage. The ends of education, so firmly stated by Peter Fraser, have been moved from notions of democracy, citizenship, and community, to notions of individualism, competition and economic readiness and viability. How far away we have moved from the statement by Dr Susan Isaacs in the 1944 Thomas Report that the purpose of modern education is

To create people who were not only self-disciplined and free in spirit, gifted in work and in enjoyment, worthy and desirable as persons, but 34 also responsible and generous in social life, able to give and take freely from others, willing to serve social ends and to lose themselves in social purposes greater than themselves. (Board of Education, 1944)

Contrast this with the now infamous statement from in 1987 that “In the technical sense used by economists, education is not in fact a ‘public good’…education shares the main characteristics of other commodities traded in the market place” (Treasury, 1987, pp. 32–33). And then again by the current education minister that “the purpose of the education system is to send kids out into the world with a qualification that's meaningful” (New Zealand, March 25, 2012). We have active learning, we have modern learning environments and pedagogies, but what we no longer have is the simple and elegant idea that communicating, actively engaging and creatively expressing ourselves in education leads to the democratic functioning of a society predicated on the pillars of equality, freedom and justice. Describing creative democracy as the “task before us” Dewey states:

Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means; as that which is capable of generating the science which is the sole dependable authority for the direction of further experience and which releases emotions, needs and desires so as to call into being the things that have not existed in the past. (Dewey, 1939, p. 4)

To call into things that have not existed in the past we have to turn to the arts in education as the area whose “effectiveness” cannot be measured and tested, but whose open ended-ness, following Dewey, provides our young people with the tools with which to navigate, participate and engage with the future. This for Dewey was creative democracy, and it is to this old idea that I think The heART of the Matter reminds us we need to return in order to re-evaluate some of the new solutions put to deal with our increasingly unequal and unjust educational and societal context.

Angela Roberts: Resistance and Equality for All

As the President of the Post Primary School’s Association (PPTA) of New Zealand at the time of the memorial lecture, Angela Roberts provided an energetic response to the memorial lecture theme by outlining some of the contemporary issues in New Zealand education. As the professional association and union for secondary3 school teachers in New Zealand, the PPTA represents these teachers through collective agreements negotiated with the government of the day as agreed terms and conditions of teacher employment. In the following presentation, Angela Roberts offers a unionist perspective of education that highlights the importance of collective action as the aims and ends of a truly democratic education.

35 Angela Roberts: The threats and opportunities before education today will require channelling both Cassandra and Pollyanna. The fact that I can say that I run an Arts Department in a rural state secondary school is because of, as you have heard tonight, the visionary, painstaking work of people like Beeby and Fraser. But that vision, to build a universal system open to all, is under threat. The key to the success of the neoliberal reforms in New Zealand was the seduction of the public by appropriating the language of progressive education: local control, parental choice, freedom and flexibility, innovation. But there was nothing progressive or benign about the reforms. The system was to be broken up. Education was turned into a marketplace; each school was to thrive or survive in a new competitive environment. The real aim of “local management” was to devolve budgets to the school level. Thatcher, Reagan and our very own Douglas,4 as monetarists, wanted to dramatically and permanently reduce expenditure in all areas of government, and passing control of school budgets to the school level would prove to be the mechanism, the masterstroke. And who would dare to criticise the concept that local boards and principals know how best to manage their resources? But it did not go a lot further than that. Unlike in the UK and the US, the worst of the neoliberal agenda somehow stalled. Until now. There is a common modus operandi adopted by education reformers around the world. I have already mentioned how they capture the language. There is also the requirement to establish as a truth that there is an education crisis. Here in New Zealand, there are cries of the system failing too many of our students. There is no acknowledgment of success. When I was at school, our norm-referenced assessment system ensured that half of us were drafted out of the system by the end of the fifth form, year 11 and a further 50% in Year 12. With just a handful of students, hoping to go off to university, surviving a full five years at high school. Now, we retain most of our students for a full five years. Some are doing university papers and some will be focused on lifting their life skills and aiming to get NCEA Level 1. Instead of acknowledging the retention of students who provide greater challenges for teachers and schools as a success (and resourcing it) the government argues: crisis! It is not all sunshine and lollipops – there are issues: with teacher supply, chronic workload, sufficient, quality access for special and alternative education and the achievement of some of our students (the poor ones usually). The overriding solution offered, as always, is structural reform. It is so sadly predictable – starve the public service of adequate funding then demonise the resultant shortcomings and voila – privatisation is justified. The neoliberal agenda is very much back on track and gaining momentum. We can, and must, now take this neoliberal agenda to our communities. Our children

36 are not a commodity to be cashed up. Our education system is not to be seen as ripe for asset stripping. Our other opportunity lies within our own communities, be they union, political, or school. We are good at having conversations at the school gate, and we are good at organising. We are good at standing together, in union, which is a good thing. And when our communities engage with the democratic process and discover that the noise that they make is considered just that by this government, noise, they must not give up, they must step up and make sure that this then becomes an election issue. It is with a sense of irony that, as a woman who studied trickle-down economics at university in the 80s, I feel the need to finish with the preamble to the 1863 constitution of the American Mineworkers Association (American Minors’ Association, 1863):

Step by Step, the longest march Can be won, can be won; Single stones will form an arch, One by one, one by one, And by union, what we will Can be all accomplished still. Drops of water turn a mill — Singly none, singly none.

Renee Gerlich: Resistance and Education

Following Angela Roberts in the memorial lecture was Renee Gerlich, who provided a personal narrative about her experiences as a teacher education student at a New Zealand university and her commitment to try and uphold the principles of Peter Fraser as she negotiated her way through this qualification.

Renee Gerlich: One of Fraser’s first moves in government was to abolish the proficiency exam that kept too many Maori out of secondary school. In 1906, only 13 Maori students were granted the proficiency certificates that gave them that access. Fraser was also a unionist and conscientious objector to the forced and of World War One. In my talk, I would like to introduce myself, while discussing how these two aspects of Fraser’s legacy as a leader – conscientious objection and education – are inseparable. First to explain the connection as I see it. Collectively, we often talk about education as the way we prepare children for an “unknown future”. I find that quite disingenuous. I think largely, we base this notion on the rapid, unpredictable technological changes we see in our lives. Yet consider how much we actually know about our children’s futures. Most of the major challenges we face have long histories and will unlikely be resolved in our children’s lifetimes. The imperialism, militarism, and capitalist abuses Fraser fought still continue, climate violence and colonisation also. Much technological

37 change is actually predicated on the escalation of these crises. Understanding learning and intervention as related, means encouraging our children to draw on their own histories and collective values to actively resist and challenge our present systems for the better. Part of the reason I am here is through my own small act of conscientious objection at an education faculty in 2011. Through a turn of events it led to my work on the film The heART of the Matter with Jan and Luit Bieringa. The first days of my teaching diploma were filled with promise. The campus itself has a marae5 and lecture halls, a big gym and pools next door, and courtyards. It is built to be an education faculty. On my first day on campus in 2011, staff took our cohort, one hundred odd students, and snaked us onto the marae. We were a big group and had to stand shoulder to shoulder and wait for a count of three before sitting in order to fit into the space. Each staff member who welcomed us though, still gave us all a hongi6 on our way out. To me that set a tone of commitment to address each and every one of us, and I felt that the year would be transformative. That was important to me, because I also began that programme with some awareness of New Zealand’s literacy gap – the disproportionate gap between the achievement of students who do well in our schooling system, and the struggles of those it is failing. The gap affects Pacific, including Maori, students hardest. In 2003 for example, only 9 per cent of Maori students gained university entrance (Caccioppoli & Cullen, 2006, p. 15). Literacy determines a young person’s life chances to a large extent. It is how we learn independently, communicate collectively, and shape our world. I did not want kids to lose out under my watch. I was acutely aware of the advantages that got me through my own schooling, and committed to building a classroom practice that would mean the kids I was responsible for would not need such advantages; in which there would be no literacy gap. I expected to be trained for that, and mobilised to mend this crisis nationally with others. Instead, I found that the values shared and espoused on campus were left to hollow to buzzwords within a dysfunctional programme. This came to a head mid-year. We had to study material on assessment, advising against graded, competitive, heavily weighted exams that examine qualitative learning in a condensed period of time, because that is not conducive to learning. We had to write about that in our exam. So this is me looking at my own small scale version of forced conscription to imperial warfare. A group of five of us, nicknamed the “Committee of Dissent”, wrote a submission that I delivered instead of sitting the exam, risking my place on the programme but allowing the faculty to choose between their principles or protocol. In short that is why I am here; to me that was a small but necessary effort in the struggle to demand a system designed to transform and not perpetuate social crisis. I want to see leaders, in education, committed to this kaupapa,7 too. Our

38 leaders are here in our schools. We just need to stop stamping them out with our broken system.

Morgan Godfery: The Ends of Education

Ending the memorial lecture is the political commentator and writer Morgan Godfery, who like Renee Gerlich before him, called on his own experiences as a law student to set the context for a presentation that calls for free universal education as an essential element of an education system that serves democratic ends.

Morgan Godfery: In a mihi8 it is customary to make certain acknowledgements at the beginning of a speech, but tonight I want to turn that on its head and start with a story. This one starts six years ago, on my first day at law school. Now, if you have watched the 2001 comedy classic, Legally Blonde, you will know law schools use what is called the Socratic Method. This is where highly educated university lecturers ask hung over university students to answer complicated questions about the law. It is like a dress rehearsal for the court room, and it always gives new students a fright. The smart students go for a seat in the backrow, just out of the lecturer’s line of sight. So I turn up 10 minutes early hoping to get the premium seats. Unfortunately 400 other students had the same idea and the only spare seat I could find was in the front row. Bad start. But on the upside: the lecturer announces there will be no Socratic Method in the first week. The tension lifts. Instead he tells the first row to stand up, “greet the person on your left and your right”, he says. The rest of the room does the same. He then adds that, by the end of the year, the person to your left and right will be gone. Cut. Only half of the class of 800 will make it through to the next term. Only half of the class of 400 in term two will make it through to second year law. The tension returns. Now, I am not telling you this anecdote to scare you off the idea of legal education, but I do think this little exercise demonstrates everything that is wrong with society’s attitude to education. We encourage students to compete rather than co-operate. We train students to engage with the world as we think it is – competitive – rather than the world we hope to create. This is not a failure of individual lecturers or individual teachers. This is how the Government structures the system. From the moment we enter primary school we are measured against each other, we are expected to meet some kind of ideal standard as proof that we are progressing. The Minister of Education calls it National Standards, but that is just the bureaucratic euphemism for competition. In the universities lecturers are encouraged to compete with others to secure funding for their institutions. The greater the research output, the greater the

39 funding. The tertiary education Minister, calls it the Performance Based Research Fund, but that is another bureaucratic euphemism for competition. Even measures like the decile system, created to help identify schools that needed the most funding, have been infected with the competition virus. Some schools with decile 10 status build a myth of exclusivity. They create this idea that you can get a head start on the competition if you attend a decile 10 school. The problem, of course, is when you put systems of competition in place people are going to act on it. This might work in a world where people’s careers look like ladders, where there is a fixed starting point, a clear direction, from bottom to top. The higher you go, the greater the promise of stability for you and your family. But we know that, today, careers are no longer ladders but more like jungle gyms. We do not just move up and down, we move to the side, we turn corners, we look both up and down and to the side. There is no fixed starting point. Each movement promises uncertainty. In this kind of world competition doesn’t work. Co-operation does. It is a terrible cliché, but education should focus on giving people a hand-up, not a head start on the competition. I suppose this is a pretty prosaic or practical view on what education is meant to achieve. It is the idea that education is just preparation for “real work.” But for Peter Fraser and the First Labour Government, their vision was far, far grander. Education was seen as one of the key components of nation-building, one of the key components of building in these islands. The Labour MP John A. Lee put it best in 1934 when he wrote that Labour’s mission was to “amplify the progressive genius that has been dormant in these past decades.” (King, 2003, p. 428) Fraser understood the role of education here, even going further and promoting the role of culture. He established the State Literary Fund and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. This is where he departed from some of his more doctrinaire colleagues who insisted that economic structures shape social and political life. But Fraser knew if you want to grow a generation of social democrats, you need more than regular wage growth and a . In one sense, I love this idea, but in today’s world it might risk missing the point. Education should not necessarily prop up governments or market economies. Nor is it necessarily a tool for righting historical wrongs or securing middle class jobs. Instead we should have education for education’s sake. Education is not preparation for life, John Dewey once said, education is life itself. I guess that begs the question: what is education for in the 21st century? Well, first, here is what we should not do: we should not, as in the old days, use education to induct a new generation into the system. We should not, as we do today, use education to teach people how to compete within the system. Instead education must give people control over their lives. I mean we do not know what the economic and social system is going to look like in this century. It will not look like what came before. But what we must do is

40 equip people with the skills and knowledge they need to keep control of their own lives and help shape the system that comes next. No one should be a bystander. At a policy level, this means shifting the cost of education from the student to society. If people are to have control over their lives education must be universal and it must be free.

Conclusion

While heavily inflected with a New Zealand flavour of educational re-form, history and political activism, this set of presentations that made up the Peter Fraser Memorial Lecture offer important insights into the aims and ends of education. Of striking similarity in each section is the convergence of opinion around the centrality of education to democracy and the need for education to model democratic ideals in policy, pedagogy and curriculum content. The arts education documentary The heART of the Matter served as the catalyst for the evening’s event, and when considering the ‘ends’ of education it is difficult to go past the need for education to be structured around freedom of expression and artistic engagement if democracy, as active participation, is to be achieved. New Zealand’s education system took a bold and decisive step to alleviate society’s ills and inequities under the stewardship of Peter Fraser’s government and Clarence Beeby’s educational agenda from the late 1930s. Under such an educative strategy New Zealand compulsory education leaped ahead of most of the developed world in the pursuit of an education system that placed equality of opportunity at the core of its political purpose (Renwick, 1999). However, the world did catch up and the second half of the twentieth century saw New Zealand’s example of equal opportunity become the international norm in developed and developing countries. Not only did the notion of equal opportunity situate education as a political activity imbued with the power to shift societal inequities, it positioned education alongside a progressive agenda that considered a broad curriculum to be the most effective political tool to instigate change and perform the and promise of transformative education. This progressive agenda shaped New Zealand education from 1935 until the decades of educational reform that were instigated first by the Fourth Labour government in 1984, and then carried through into the twentieth-first century by successive governments. Once again, New Zealand was seen as the leader of a significant societal “experiment” (Kelsey, 1997) in its committed approach to reforming its education system, only this time the legacy of the likes of John Dewey, Peter Fraser and Clarence Beeby served as the inspiration for which reformers would define the education system against. As Angela Roberts pointed out in her presentation, neoliberal reform is something New Zealand approached with particular energy, but which has been wholeheartedly embraced by the very countries who followed New Zealand’s social democratic lead in the post-war era. The descriptor of “crisis” is widespread, regardless of geographical context. As the set of 41 presentations in this article demonstrate, however, the calls to reassess the democratic potential of education are gathering in an educational context that is both more fragmented, complex and increasingly unequal. It remains to be seen if New Zealand is, once again, a leader in this democratic cause.

NOTES

1. The name of this organisation is important as it signifies the place where this lecture was given. The Māori words “nga taonga” can be translated as “the treasures”. Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision Film Archive, therefore, refers to the arhive that houses New Zealand’s audiovisual “treasures” of which many excerpts from the documentary would have been sourced. 2. Wellington is the capital city of New Zealand, and Wellington Central pertains to the electorate of the inner-city suburb of Wellington. 3. In New Zealand, secondary school education pertains from Year 9 (13 year-olds) to Year 13 (17 year-olds). A variation on this is a composite school that can begin at Year 7 (11 year-olds). 4. Roberts is referring to Roger Douglas who was the Minister of Finance for the Fourth Labour Party in 1984. Douglas was instrumental in pursuing a particularly hard-line version of monetarist policies that had an enormous impact on education and health in New Zealand. The set of neoliberal policies that were implemented throughout the period of Douglas’s reign in the 1980s is often referred to in the portmanteau of “” that joined together his first name and the word “economics” – such was his impact in the radical reformation of New Zealand’s economic and welfare structures. 5. Māori meeting house. 6. Hongi refers to the traditional Māori greeting that involves pressing noses together. 7. Kauapapa is the Māori word for a set of actions, principles and values that have been agreed on by a group as a foundation for further action. 8. Used in the sense Morgan Godfrey is referring to, mihi refers to a Māori form of greeting.

REFERENCES

Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives (AJHR). (1939). E. 1, p. 3. American Minors’ Association. (1864). Constitution and laws for the government and guidance of the American Miners’ Association. Belleville, Ill.: Printed at the “Miner” Office. Bassett, M. & King, M. (2000). Tomorrow comes the song: A life of Peter Fraser. Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin Books. Bieringa, J. (Producer), & Bieringa, L. (Director). (2016). The heART of the Matter. [documentary] New Zealand: Blair Wakefield Exhibitions. Caccioppoli, P., & Cullen, R. M. (2006). Māori education. Auckland, New Zealand: Kotahi Media Ltd. Clark, M. (1998). Peter Fraser: Master politician. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press.

42 Department of Education. (1944). Thomas report. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Department of Education. Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. Retrieved from http://dewey.pragmatism.org/ creed.htm Dewey, J. (1939). Creative Democracy – The task before us. Retrieved from http:// www.philosophie.unimuenchen.de/studium/das_fach/warum_phil_ueberhaupt/dewey_c reative_democracy.pdf Dickens, C. (1854). Hard times. , England: Bradbury and Evans. Ewing, J. L. (1970). The development of the New Zealand primary school curriculum, 1877–1970. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Kelsey, J. (1997). The New Zealand experiment: A world model for structural adjustment? Auckland, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books. King, M. (2003). The Penguin . Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin Books. PPTA National Office. (2016). PPTA – Global budget bulk funding: The basics. Retrieved from http://www.ppta.org.nz/resources/publication-list/3741-global-budget-bulk-funding Renwick, W. L. (1999). Clarence Edward Beeby. Paris, France: UNESCO International Bureau of Education. Retrieved from http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ archive/Publications/thinkerspdf/beebye.PDF Sinclair, K. (1976). Walter Nash. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press. Television New Zealand. (March 25, 2012). Q+A: Transcript of Shane Taurima interview with . Retrieved from http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news/transcript-shane- taurima-interview-hekia-parata-4795711 Treasury. (1987). Government Management: Brief to the Incoming Government 1987 (Vol. 2). Wellington, New Zealand: Government Printer.

Kirsten Locke is Senior Lecturer at the School of Critical Studies in Education, University of Auckland. As a philosopher of education, Kirsten is interested in the history of ideas and their application to education in New Zealand and international contexts. Kirsten is particularly interested in the philosophical theories that underpin mass education systems and the importance of education to issues of equality and democracy.

Renee Gerlich is a writer based in Wellington, and was the researcher for the recently released documentary The HeART of the Matter.

Morgan Godfery (Te Pahipoto (Ngāti Awa), Lalomanu (Samoa)) is a writer and trade unionist. He is the editor of The Interregnum, published by Bridget Williams Books in 2016, an election year columnist for The Spinoff and a non-fiction judge for this year’s Ockham New Zealand Books Awards. Morgan also regularly appears on radio and television as a political commentator, has authored numerous academic chapters and journal articles on politics and law and sits on the board of the Centre for Legal Issues at the Law School.

Ian Fraser was one of this country’s preeminent current affairs interviewers and presenters for more than twenty years. Beyond television, he was Chairman of Consultus, New Zealand’s largest public relations company in the 1980s. As Chief Executive and New Zealand Commissioner General, he was the driving force behind New Zealand’s presence at Expo 88 in Brisbane and Expo 92 in Seville. Between 1998 and 2002 he was Chief 43 Executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and in April 2002 he moved from that position to the role of Chief Executive of Television New Zealand, a position he quit at the end of 2005. Since then, he has been working in public relations and event promotions and working as a personal adviser and media coach to some of the leading figures in New Zealand’s business, political and sports communities.

Angela Roberts is multi-talented and cross-disciplinary secondary teacher of economics and Head of Arts at Stratford High School in New Plymouth, New Zealand. She was the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) president from 2013 to 2016.

Grant Robertson is the Labour MP for Wellington Central, a seat he has held since 2008. He is the Labour Party’s Finance and Employment Spokesperson and at the time of publication is the current Minister for Finance. Grant has a long background in education issues, including being the President of the Otago University Students Association, and Vice President and Co-President of the New Zealand University Students Association.

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