What happens when your home no longer offers that fundamental sensation of comfort? When a crack opens along the length of the hall and who knows what might lie beneath?
Our homes are a protective shell and when that shell cracks, we are born into another kind of being. It is not just glass and masonry that require repair but our whole sense of who we are. It is not just the structure of the home that is shaken into view, but the entire structure within which we live our lives.
THE CHRISTCHURCH QUAKES have taken place in a political context. They have happened at a particular point in this country’s history when, for around thirty years, the world’s social laboratory has been engaged in another of its experiments, this time with policies of the right rather than the left. Under successive administrations, the country has been experimenting with creating a society based on theories developed by academics in America and Europe.
We’ve been thinking — but not too much, for we don’t like thinking too much, as Métin once observed. We like to get on and do.
In our impulsive, puppyish fashion we have been busily engaged in creating a society in which the role of the state is minimised and its functions passed into private hands. Over the past thirty years, the systems that nurtured me have been unpicked, quietly and systematically, by people with a simple faith in the supremacy of the market as the greatest good. We’ve laid aside all talk of moral unity, the good and right state of society or collective responsibility for a more bare-knuckled ambition to become a country where it is good to do business. We have been living through a revolution, but a quiet one, a sneaky one.
So, off we go! The laboratory is humming, and in the great experiment, Christchurch, shaken to its core, stripped back to bare essentials, lies cracked and open in the petri dish beneath the wide arc of the Canterbury sky.
Once more, this city — its centre, its river, its suburbs — has become the site of a great exhibition demonstrating the efficacy or otherwise of political ideas.
HERE IS AN EXHIBIT. It is a building, but not a house.
It’s a school.
It is Thursday morning, iron-grey in winter 2013. A group of people are marching along one of the city’s busiest streets. They carry banners. They wave placards at the commuters in the stop/start early morning traffic. ‘WE ARE PHILLIPSTOWN.’
They are the parents, children and teachers from a school and they are walking 2.5 kilometres along this busy road to another school with which theirs is likely to be merged in the new year. The minister of education, Hekia Parata, has decided that changes must be made to the state schools of this city and here is one result: people walking along a street, trying to save their neighbourhood school. Expressing an idea.
How have they arrived here? The process has been curious and unsettling. There was an earthquake, but that did no more than provide an additional incentive for a process that had already been taking shape within the ministry. The first the school knew of it, however, was in September 2012 when, with a few days’ notice, the city’s 215 state school principals were called to a meeting at a sports arena.
On arrival, they were issued with information packs and badges of different colours. It was only as they opened their packs that they realised the colours denoted proposals for the future of their schools.
If your badge was green, your school was destined for ‘restoration’, meaning it would be repaired and remain open and operating as usual.
If your badge was orange, your school was destined for ‘consolidation’: it would undergo moderate change, which could include structural repairs, but might also extend to full closure, merging with another school or relocation to a totally different campus.
But if your badge was purple, your school was headed for ‘rejuvenation’: a kindly ministerial word for definite closure, merging or relocation.
This entire process was called ‘Shaping Education: Opportunity plus innovation to enhance education outcomes across greater Christchurch’. Mr Brownlee greeted it as ‘education renewal’ and an ‘opportunity to realign services’ across the city. Thirteen schools were proposed for closure, while eighteen were to merge or undergo significant relocation and change.
The reaction, unsurprisingly, was furious and within hours the ‘proposals’ had been renamed ‘options’. Five months later, the options became ‘interim proposals’ under which nineteen schools faced major change: closure, relocation or merger. Change was necessary, said the minister. It was not a cost-cutting measure. It was simply that rolls had dropped, families had moved because of the quakes, school buildings had been irretrievably damaged.
Her findings were immediately questioned. Schools argued that rolls were flexible things that might as easily rise as fall in this highly volatile city. The ‘liquefaction’ in the playground that sealed the doom of one school was revealed to be the school’s sandpit, photographed from the air by Google before the quakes. But, most importantly, children in the city’s schools had been exhibiting higher than national average levels of stress and disturbance and major change was neither necessary nor desirable. The Press published letters from parents and photographs of weeping children.
A school, it turns out, is not simply a business marketing literacy and numeracy to so many empty little bottles lined up to be filled and tested at regular intervals to see if they need topping up. A school is not some modern variant of a grim Dickensian academy teaching Gradgrind’s facts. A school is much more than that.
This school, for example: Phillipstown. One hundred and sixty-three pupils, over 50 per cent Maori or Pasifika, most of them living within walking distance on a small grid of streets on the eastern rim of the central city. The school is the centre of a neighbourhood of 1500 houses, 4000 residents, light industry along the margins where some of the parents are employed. There are classroom blocks around a playground of tarmac and grass scuffed by many small running feet, a hall, a brightly coloured mural, a community centre in the school’s expansive 2.2 hectare grounds where children can have breakfast before school and lunch too, if they arrive without anything from home. This is more than a school offering literacy and numeracy. It offers wraparound, whanau-style care for its pupils. Here’s a kohanga reo, an after-school programme, a holiday programme. There is also the largest concentration of workshops teaching technology in New Zealand. Children travel to Phillipstown from thirty different schools around the city to study metalwork, cookery, sewing, woodwork.
The other school in Woolston is not by any means better resourced, or more modern — in fact it’s older — nor does it have more spacious grounds. It occupies only 1.5 hectares of land that was deemed, by a Tonkin and Taylor geotechnical survey in November 2013, to be one of the areas in the city prone to flooding should sea levels rise. Their report advised against development of this site.
Yet the principal of Phillipstown received a purple badge at the meeting in September. He kept it on the shelf behind his desk as a memento. Though there was little chance of forgetting the months that followed: the submissions, the meetings, the phone calls, the discussions with insurers and loss adjustors. When I spoke to him on the day of the march, he rattled off dates effortlessly: 13 September, 7 December, 18 February, 29 May, 13 June — each a deadline, an announcement, a decision. He recalled every switch in ministerial advice.
‘To begin with they were congratulating us. After the September quake we were closed for only seventeen days and they were telling us how well we were doing. And then everything slowed down. They said they were working on repairs. They reassured us. So we waited. We were patient. Naïve, as it turned out. We were living with an illusion.’
The illusion was sustained by persistent vagueness and lack of information and by a false faith in the cohesiveness of the city’s schools. ‘Immediately after the quake,’ he says, ‘we were like this.’ He links his fingers together the way we used to for ‘Here is the church, here is the steeple’. ‘But now we are like this.’ His fingers tug apart. The people stand alone.
This is what the philosophy of ‘learning output centres’ and the consequent educational reforms of the 80s had delivered. Instead of a monolithic and powerful network of regional education boards, schools became autonomous, governed by individual boards of trustees, vying with one another for students and resources.
For a brief period following the quakes, competitiveness was forgotten and schools banded together as they had done before, to provide secure routine for children in traumatic times. But the minister’s proposals, brutal and ill timed, put an end to that. In the scramble for survival they triggered, a neighbouring school suggested in its submission that Phillipstown could close and its pupils could walk the extra 2.5 kilometres down that busy road, across multiple-lane intersections at peak hour, to re-enrol with them. Which is how we arrive at the early morning march, the balloons pinned to the school fence, the sausage sizzle and ‘WE ARE PHILLIPSTOWN’.
IT FELT BRAVE, THIS MARCH, and heartfelt. A distant echo of those marches of thousands to end a war or save a lake or stop a rugby tour. But this time, though cars tooted and people waved, the whole world was not watching. Certainly the minister was looking the other way.
A week later, she announced her decision. Thirteen schools were to close or merge, including Phillipstown. Two thousand children across the city would face major change in the new year: new schools, new routines, new playgrounds shared with new children. Two hundred and sixty teachers and staff would be affected or could lose their jobs. The Press ran a headline, ‘Tears flow as axe falls’, above a photo of a Phillipstown child, crying.
The Press, as usual, was alone in its concern. The Dominion led with a story about puppy farming, the Otago Daily Times featured an exciting fossilised whale bone and the Herald headlined a loans bonanza. ‘Short-term mortgage rates are at their lowest in New Zealand’s history’! Christchurch did appear in its main section with an article about Chu-an Tang, a Christchurch handyman who had been in Melbourne exploring work opportunities but decided to remain in the quake-ravaged city after all. ‘The quakes have given him opportunities Australia never could.’ There was a photo of Mr Tang standing by a little pile of rubble. ‘He says the Christchurch rebuild is a “pot of gold” and believes it will give him work till he decides to retire.’ School closures and weeping children were not to be part of that fairy story.
Phillipstown fought back with a request for a judicial review which, in November 2013, found that the consultation process that formed the basis of the minister’s decision had failed to meet the requirements of the Education Act. The ministry was ordered to pay the school’s court costs and for a brief spell this felt like victory. But in April 2014, the minister reiterated her decision: Phillipstown would close and merge with Woolston in the new year. The city council labelled the decision ‘daft’, given that Phillipstown was part of the city zoned for residential intensification, and attempted to intervene. The councillors, often divided, presented a unanimous request to the minister for a two-year reprieve, at least until ‘things settle down’.
In August 2014, they received her reply. There would be no reprieve. ‘When the future of a school is uncertain,’ wrote the minister, ‘there can be detrimental effects on its operations and its ability to provide high quality education.’ She was concerned for the emotional state of students and families, not wishing ‘to prolong the uncertainty that the communities of the two schools have already faced for more than 18 months’. Further delay ‘could simply create further inequities and uncertainty for students and their families’. Having created that ‘uncertainty’ in the first place, the minister supplied the cure. She was ‘focused on giving the children of Phillipstown and Woolston the very best possible educational opportunities’. The school would close.
The ministry’s plans for the site remain vague. What is certain is that the children will walk the extra kilometres to the prefabs awaiting them at their new 400-pupil school on the flood-prone site. Their teachers will look for other jobs.
And an idea shakes apart.
WHEN I ARRIVED AT TORONTO UNIVERSITY as a graduate student back in 1971, the head of department scanned my documents with approval.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘A New Zealander! Good. You’ll have had a proper education.’
And he was right. I had. From that kindergarten dress-up box to the graduate photo on the TV among the plastic gladioli, I had received the best my county could offer. Anglocentric, perhaps, but solid. And free.
At no cost, I had been granted what my parents referred to as ‘The Opportunity’, which meant that, unlike them or any of my ancestors, I would go to university. My father had not had The Opportunity. He had left school at fourteen, mother dead from emphysema, father killed in the last months of the war in France. He took jobs where he could, at the freezing works, on railway gangs, scrub cutting, till the war took him to Egypt, the wound at Alamein and the long post-war slog with ill health and a desk job at the Power Board. If he had had The Opportunity, he said, he would have gone to university. He would have done arts, which were the only true education, all else being mere technical training. He would have studied the classics: Xenophon, Seneca, Catullus and their brothers who stood shoulder to shoulder in their faded grey fatigues on the shelves behind the sofa.
My mother had not had The Opportunity either. She had become a nurse, and a good one too, by all accounts, with a fierce belief in its nobility as a vocation, a calling, rather than a mere job. But it was not The Opportunity. When I announced as a twenty-year-old that I planned to marry and head off to England with this young man I’d met, she was mystified. ‘But why?’ she said. ‘When you’ve got The Opportunity to study law and stand for Parliament?’ Her secret career, not mine.
There would be no such failing for me or my sister. We had The Opportunity, the way up via education to lives of learning and fulfilment. Exactly as Clarence Beeby and Peter Fraser planned, when they initiated the reform of the country’s education system back in 1939.
Fifty-three years later, in 1992, as other educational ideas were gaining ground, Beeby published an account of his life. In The Biography of an Idea, he traced the origins of his notion of education to a childhood in Christchurch where, as a pupil of New Brighton School, he received a blue tin train. He had arrived at school as a six-year-old with one ambition: to be able to read Grimms’ Fairy Tales himself, without having to wait for his mother to read to him. It was ‘the only time in my life when I have been completely sure of the purpose of education’.
He learned to read. He also received the train purportedly for good conduct which, so far as he could see, meant because he had sat still and said absolutely nothing. But the train and his mother’s pleasure in its award taught a lasting lesson: ‘I discovered that education was also about beating other people and “coming top”.’
It was a lesson he applied with great success for many years until a more generous vision took its place: the one that formed the basis of his work as director of education between 1940 and 1960. Among the first things abolished in the reforms he created with Peter Fraser was the Proficiency examination, which had straitjacketed teaching in primary schools to a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy and barred the way to secondary schooling for thousands of children each year. Before 1936 only 63 per cent of the country’s children went to high school. The role of education had been selection: who would go on to high school. Who would receive tertiary education. In its place, Beeby and Fraser proposed another idea: ‘equality of opportunity’.
Their reforms introduced a curriculum that would be more responsive to the needs of the individual child. They established free kindergartens to prepare children for school, universalised the teaching of art and music, set up training programmes for teachers, created schools within country districts and neighbourhoods so that education would be within easy reach of every child. Technical high schools were opened, and special education units for the disabled. Specialist units — School Publications and a National Film Lib
rary — were developed to supply materials for the classroom.
A free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers …
And what did I learn as a result of the implementation of this idea, running about in a New Zealand state school playground in the post-war glow? The usual lessons, I suppose. Who to avoid, who to trust, how you could be surprised by people. The kid, scaly with eczema, knew the names of all the dinosaurs and could write them on the board when we were still struggling with ‘See John run’. The girl who looked sweet in frills took over the jungle gym with ruthless efficiency, creating a loyal band of goons who warded off all intruders. The big, slow kid knew how to make us laugh, master of the stertorous underarm fart. Some were rich, living in the houses we called ‘doctors’ houses’, some were poor with tangled hair and scuffed shoes, but we were all in this together.
It was the same lesson Katherine Mansfield had also learnt in a New Zealand playground, the one that permeates her best story, about the dolls’ house and the little girls admitted one by one to see its wonders until only the Kelveys are left, and Kezia can bear it no longer, that exquisite pain of exclusion, and, in her first act of moral independence, lets them in to see the little lamp. The power of that story lies in its minute observation, the tiny detail that derives from first-hand experience of democratic rough and tumble.
That lesson was invisible to us, playing tiggy touchwood in the sun, as was the other lesson: the one about our value to the nation. The expansive grounds, the swimming pool, the big airy classrooms, the paints and School Journals and warm milk in little bottles were proof of our centrality in the scheme of things. We were healthier, better educated, stronger than any generation before. And our entire nation wanted us to be so.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 27
