By Kelvin Smythe
We said national standards would harm
children’s learning.
They wouldn’t listen.
Or didn’t care.
John Key said let them eat national
standards.
That will be better for them than decent
wages, housing, and health.
National standards as a cure for poverty.
We’ll do nothing, or worse – meanwhile
Let them do national standards.
And now it has come to this.
Primary school education shifted on its
axis.
A great harm inflicted
League tables yellow pressed.
We knew it was coming, but of no comfort.
Something like a death.
Tolley promised no league tables.
Key promised any release, if they ever
occurred,
Would be surrounded by safeguards.
Not a skerrick prime minister.
While you Laurel and jap
A bloody slather.
None of the safeguards occurring in Australia
Mind you, not that these really matter:
But reveals the nature of you and your
heartless government.
John Hartvelt of the Dominion sets out to justify:
Led by journalists from the beginning.
He lies.
The real beginning?
The editor of course.
Prose of mouth-frothing contempt for public
schools.
On the morning after National’s re-election
The editor mocked,
Then, in effect, said bear the pain you
losers.
Hartvelt is right, though, not a business
decision,
But neither is it one of freedom
As he claims.
It
is an ideological one taken above the journalists.
Harm the teachers.
Harm public schools.
And Hartvelt’s justification for publishing:
‘We cannot lose faith in our readers so much that we feel we have to censor
them from information just because it is challenging.’
A Dominion
journalist concerned with censoring education information.
Is this a tragic, cosmic joke?
A journalist expressing trust in readers’
judgement.
God in heaven above!
Newspapers, themselves have behaved like
bloody idiots
Pigs in muck
In just the one day.
And who is taking the burden of the risk in
the trusting?
The primary school children of New Zealand
177 academic researchers declared league
tables harmful to children’s learning.
But Hartvelt declares it a matter of
freedom.
One community institution intruding exploitively
into another: the media into public schools.
If it was royal breasts, an outcry;
For public schools and children, it is freedom.
The exercise of freedom at the cost of
innocent others.
What is best for children?
Ever asked?
No – just a resort to a spurious (in the
context) abstract concept.
It was teachers he was after.
Damaging them.
The children contingent.
Will you be there to enrich the withered
curriculum?
Will you be there to prevent an education
For the less able, devoid of heart and
cognitive challenge?
Drill and kill?
Will you be there to engage the disengaged?
(A
high price for a Maori girl’s trip to Waitangi, wouldn’t you say?)
Will you be there to receive the unwanted?
Will you be there to provide hope for the
failure at six?
Will you be there to reduce the ghetto?
Will you be there to take the children in
your arms?
In publishing league tables, the medium is
the message.
Curriculum areas selected for attention.
Learning is that which is measurable.
Forget creativity, imagination, and
cognitive flexibility
Children’s learning expressed in the labelling
of children.
It doesn’t matter if the labelling is
inaccurate (which it is),
Labelling is the message.
Labelling set out for school comparison.
Relationship between teacher and child as
something rawly public.
Teacher motivation compulsion, competition,
and fear.
Power to the politicians and the
bureaucrats.
This is education for the 21st
century.
Before the reading
The key messages have already been
communicated by the medium
How noble of Hartvelt to declare trust in
the reader.
No cost to him,
Or risk of it.
In complete denial of historical experience.
Perpetrates the dreadful act,
Then tries to out the spot.
It won’t be outed: bear the shame.
Intrusion between teacher and child.
The struggling child to struggle more.
The brilliant child blighted in the act.
Alien concept
On the indigenous and beautiful.
Public education reduced
In the name of freedom.
But you won’t be there.
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