Ko Tainui te waka Ko Ngāti Raukawa ki Wharepūhunga te iwi Whetu Cormick
National President, New Zealand Principals’ Federation
Business approaches to schooling, which attack public education, all have serious flaws, as we learned when we had our own version. Whether based on testing or standards or some other measurement, they are all linked to performance and driven by narrow targets. They are about data, not learning. They are also about compliance; they create stress for teachers and students; they involve evaluations from some agency, ERO in our case and OFSTED in the UK, but the evaluations are not designed for improvement. Rather they are designed for judgement. We no longer suffer such a system. However, I know there are many young principals reading this column who know no other regime. Their brief principalships have been driven by targets and data and they have never had the joy or freedom of fully embracing a broad curriculum. Their numbers could be as high as one third of our principals. What’s more, some principals now lack the confidence to re-engage with curriculum and feel they do not have the skills to monitor children’s learning across a wide range of subjects. They are so used to a standard way of measuring a small targeted selection of curriculum subjects, namely reading, writing and maths. In this new exciting era we have been given the freedom to rethink what learning experiences we want to offer our young people. There are so many different options like outdoor education, sports, social studies, science, gardening, exploring museums, art galleries, libraries; but I am going to focus on the Arts. The Arts are a broad subject in themselves, covering poetry, writing and literature, Kapa Haka, performance, drama and music, painting and visual arts. One of the stand out speakers at our recent conference, Professor Peter O’Connor, reminded us that the arts develop the whole child. Let’s look at drama for example. O’Connor led us through a story of ‘let’s pretend’ in which children with autism went on a pretend ‘bus’ to Buckingham Palace to visit the Queen. ‘Tickets’ were handed over and the children had to push the bus out of a hole when it ran into a ‘ditch’. One little boy who chose not to be engaged was persuaded by the sheer joy of observing the game and eventually unfolded his partly crippled hand in which he had his ‘Pretend ticket’. ‘No one has to stand in silence and watch the world go past them,’ said O’Connor. ‘To know your Mother, you don’t do a Google search or worksheet,’ he said, ‘you go to your mother’s room, put on her much too big slippers and imagine how her life is.’ In drama, O’Connor told us, you use playfulness which can be lost if you focus too much on other things. ‘I want my PhD
students to use all of their senses to learn what they are learning.’ He then told us that children who play music are better at maths and those who love drama are better at writing. ‘The soft skills of the arts are also valued by today’s employers,’ he told us, ‘So it is incredibly sad that the past decade’s obsession with numeracy and literacy has all but killed the Arts.’ ‘This is all part of a sustained attack on the public school system,’ he said, ‘because when you look at private schools, they have managed to maintain their Arts programmes.’ The Arts teach that there is more to life than paid work. Children learn to appreciate beautiful things and create beauty with the stroke of a brush; they learn to wonder and to dream. They learn in and of themselves and the Arts are linked to indicators of a successful country. When we think of wellbeing, children exposed to the Arts are more empathetic, kinder and more collaborative. Their value is wide-reaching. O’Connor quoted John Dewey in saying ‘The Arts are tools by which we train the imagination. ‘Never undervalue the imagination,’ he said, ‘It is only when we imagine that we can be better, that we can really change.’ We have a lot of catching up to do if we are once again going to revive the Arts in our schools and in our Initial Training Establishments (ITE). Many teacher training institutions have closed down their music suites and sold off or donated their musical instruments to schools. Visual arts options in ITE have had their courses drastically reduced both in time and quality. Whilst some of you continue to deliver school productions and, if you can afford it, bring in performing artists, groups and visual artists, the reality for far too many is that a decade of neo-liberalism has almost suffocated the life out of the Arts. We need to rebuild. It will take courage for us to allow children to step into someone else’s shoes to create an improvised drama. It will take courage to allow children the time to move to music whether it be hip hop, Kapa Haka or a social dance and to get out the recorders and ukulele to create music. And it will take large doses of imagination to think about and develop a suitable way to convey children’s progress in Arts appreciation through our reporting systems. I can definitely see a place for restoring an Arts Advisory Service to equip the profession to give our young people the opportunities that we know the Arts will provide. We are hearing that the world is watching Aotearoa as we rebuild our battered and bruised education system. I believe the government is truly committed to nurturing and sharpening the Arts in schools; now we have to press them on how they might support our profession to realise this vision.