THAT IDEA FA DED, AS IDEAS tend to do, and other ideas have taken its place. In the 80s, Treasury briefing papers argued that ‘families and tribes are not organic entities with morality, rationality, and senses’. Society was not made up of such groups, but, rather, ‘rational individual beings seeking to maximise their productive capacities’. In such a world, education was a ‘private commodity’ not a ‘common good’ and its purpose was ‘to prepare the individual for his or her economic role’.
We have had thirty years of that and now, perhaps as a natural outcome, we are trying another idea: the charter or public–private partnership (PPP) school, which draws its funding from the same tax base as the state system while being operated by a private business for its own profit.
Such schools have a history of development in the aftermath of natural disaster. In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina the public school system was largely replaced in a matter of months by charter schools. They bore aspirational names — Success Academy, Excel Academy, Arise Academy — and included several KIPP schools, as in ‘Knowledge is Power Programme’, and today they market education to around 90 per cent of the city’s school children.
The way this happened is described in Naomi Klein’s powerful analysis of disaster and corporate coup, The Shock Doctrine. When those Roman businessmen were laughing at the opportunity opened up in L’Aquila, they were doing no more than echoing Milton Friedman writing for the Wall Street Journal after Katrina: ‘Most of New Orleans’ schools are in ruins … this is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity.’
The word that so dominated my childhood, ‘Opportunity’, translated to a setting ravaged by disaster, takes on a whole new meaning. Klein describes with great clarity how crises, natural and manmade, provide the ‘clean sheet’ required by right-wing ideologues ‘to sell off pieces of the state to private players while citizens are still reeling from the shock’. In disaster, ‘people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands are blasted out of the way … democracy seems a practical impossibility’ and the way is open to profit.
Today, in the US, more than 6000 charter schools educate one in twenty American children in schools owned by companies like the Entertainment Properties Trust, which lists, in its $3 billion portfolio, ‘multiplex movie theatres and adjacent retail, public and charter schools’. The syllabus in schools like the KIPP academies is tightly focused on literacy and numeracy with frequent testing. Teachers are trained in intensive courses such as the Julian Robertson Teach for America programme, in which young graduates attend a five-week summer school by way of preparation, teach for a couple of years then go on, with the assistance of donor foundations like the Robertson Foundation, to find career employment elsewhere.
Proponents quote improved reading averages and college admission rates. Critics mention high drop-out rates, the rapid turnaround of inexperienced teachers and, most of all, the way in which charter schools drain funding from the public system. In an interview in Philanthropy New Digest, the CEO of KIPP, Richard Barth, nominated the number one challenge for his company as ‘securing government money’. In 2012, it cost $18,491 to educate a student in the KIPP programme, but $11,991 in the public system, and corporate donors could only go so far. Donors like Bill Gates, or, for that matter, New Zealand’s first honorary knight, the American billionaire Julian Robertson.
He was knighted at New Year 2009 for his gifts to the country: golf courses, luxury lodges, wineries and, in 2011, The Promised Gift, a donation of fifteen works by Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse and Dali to the Auckland Art Gallery. They are beautiful, these images of a woman and her children, of a French road with blue hills and orange-roofed houses, and since the paint first touched the canvas they have acquired, like stamps or diamonds, immense value: $150 million in one report, $250 million in another. It was a generous gift by any measure and enthusiastically received. Sir Julian described it as ‘the most appreciated thing’ he and his wife had ever done.
He also donated $5 million to the Christchurch Earthquake Relief Fund and sponsored a countrywide lecture tour by the co-founder of KIPP in support of the charter school system. In the States, his Robertson Foundation aspires ‘to utilise a proactive disciplined grant-making approach to measurably effect social change’ in four principal areas: medical research, the environment, religion and education. ‘The public school system is failing’ and reform is required, by supporting existing schools of which it approves, but also by ‘driving change by generating external pressure, encouraging competition by supporting the development of charter schools, voucher programmes and resources that enable informed parent choice’.
In conjunction with the Tindall Foundation, Sir Julian supports Teach First New Zealand, a programme modelled on Teach for America, which in six weeks prepares New Zealand graduates for the classroom. The charter school classroom, that is, for state schools in this country must employ qualified professionals, trained for one or more years in specialised colleges.
The charter schools planned by the government are exempted from this requirement. Nor do they have to adhere to a nationally agreed curriculum, nor be subject to the scrutiny of the auditor general or the ombudsman.
In Christchurch there will be no more marching down Ferry Road with placards and banners. One year after that cold morning, to the east in Aranui, the city’s first ‘superschool’ is already taking shape. It will merge Aranui High School with three separate primary schools on one campus accommodating 1800 students. It will be the New Zealand version of the charter school, a PPP, built by the same company developing a new high school with capacity for 2400 students at Rolleston, among the rapidly expanding subdivisions on the western fringes of the city, along with schools in Queenstown and Auckland.
The detail of the system is unclear, at least to someone like me, an interested citizen watching from the sidelines. How will these schools operate? Who will teach? What will be the lessons learned by the children? How will lessons learned in such a school shape their notions of themselves, their country, their role in the world? What might they learn, running about the playground, the little citizens on the edges of the empires of the education industry, the little citizens who are not really citizens at all but assets on a company spreadsheet?
The future of education in this city emerges from the rubble. Back in 1982, Friedman wrote in his influential Capitalism and Freedom, ‘When [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.’ The ideas lying around in this city in the first decade of the twenty-first century are being taken up, dusted off and put in place in the Rebuild City.
And maybe, just maybe, they will take shape on the site of Phillipstown School.
SWAMPS ARE GENERATIVE PLACES. ALL that plop and suck nurtures new life. In the horror movies, it’s distorted, grotesque, the stuff of nightmares. In actuality, it’s a multitude of the creatures with whom we share this planet. Nothing to be afraid of at all.
This city, too, is a generative place. It has given birth to new ideas and good ones too: votes for women, free and universal education. In its current state, other ideas are being tried and I am less sure of their efficacy, but I am enough of a New Zealander to be curious about the outcome.
We are, I think, tolerant of change. Perhaps it is a result of living in this landscape, with the awareness that it could so readily toss us aside. We have built our homes light and flyaway: whare of raupo, shelters of ponga logs with sail cloth for a roof, homes of Hardiplank and picture window or wooden weatherboard that can, if necessary, be sawn in half and lifted from the foundations and transported, like the little house, to some other site. We are accustomed to meeting our homes on the road, late at night when the traffic is lightest and the move can be made with least disruption. Lights approach and then the wide load sails toward us out of the dark: a whole house, or a slice of it, the patterns of private living exposed for all to see. Our houses burn readily, leaving chimney stacks like ancient temple columns in cow-pocked paddoc
ks. We perch on this jumpy place, ready to up sticks and go in an instant, knowing it is not wise to set down roots too deeply for it is almost inevitable that they will not last.
Landscapes like ours demand adaptation. A few months ago I was talking to a friend from Iceland, a country even more restless, if anything, than our own. After the quakes we became accustomed to consulting the Geonet map where the shocks registered like bubbles popping on a pond. Iceland’s Geonet equivalent is similarly animated, with the addition of occasional starbursts that are volcanic explosions. This is a country where a plume of smoke rises one morning from the ocean and when a trawler ventures close, presuming a fishing boat on fire, it is to find churning waters and a whole new volcano taking shape just beneath the surface. In a matter of months it’s an island, and there are insects and lichens and birds and seeds and all manner of creeping things …
In Iceland, the friend said, babies are rocked to sleep with a lullaby: ‘Sofdu unga asta min …’
Sleep my darling.
Outside the rain cries
But Mummy keeps your treasure
Of old bones and a chest of stones.
Bones and stones are the baby’s toys, as New Zealand children, pre-Fisher Price, played knucklebones with bones collected from the amazing skeletons of dead sheep and made dishes for their playhouses from paua shells. ‘Oft eg svartan sandinn leit,’ sings the mother.
Often the black sand
Destroys the green fields.
In the glacier are deep and deadly cracks.
Maedan kenna mun per fljott,
Medan hallar degi skjott.
Ad mennirnir elska, missa, grata oc sakna …
But till the sun reaches the horizon
Mummy will teach you
What it is that men love, lose, cry and long for …
The landscape surrounds the baby from birth, and it is not an easy one. Like the bough breaking and the baby falling with which New Zealand children are soothed to sleep, birth and death are in close conjunction.
On either side of the planet, where the crust cracks and life bubbles up, we live in landscapes in evident evolution. Beautiful, awe-inspiring landscapes. They shape the way we are at the most intimate level.
AS I MOVE AROUND THIS CITY in the process of another adaptation, I am aware of three contradictory emotions. One is a feeling identified for me by an environmental scientist I met at a reading in Wanaka.
She called it ‘solastalgia’. It’s a neologism invented by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, to describe the psychic disturbance experienced by humans when their landscape has been destroyed or altered radically by manmade or natural causes. He used it for people in the Hunter Valley whose landscape had been altered by open-cast mining and dam construction, but it is also used to define the feelings of people whose islands are being destroyed by rising sea levels and climate change: feelings of loss, powerlessness, grief and anger. It sounds like the disease for this era, just as other eras have spawned their particular maladies. Homesickness, for example, which in contemporary New Zealand is regarded as no more than a minor discomfort, was, in Napoleonic times, regarded as a serious disorder, affecting particularly Swiss army recruits sent to serve in flat countries. The symptoms included fainting, fever and death and to prevent its contagious spread, soldiers were forbidden to sing the simple melodies, the Kuhreihen, the cow-herding songs, that were thought to trigger an outbreak. In the Second World War, American army doctors took homesickness equally seriously as intensely disabling, especially among country boys. A longing for home, for what is familiar, for the past, has not always been seen as carping and moaning, but as a real and powerful sense of displacement and loss.
I know people in this city who I believe suffer from homesickness, and from its modern derivative, solastalgia. I know people who have refused to visit the central city since the demolitions began, people who feel intense grief for the loss of their homes, people who long for their former neighbourhood and the lives they lived there. Not everyone can simply lock up and leave. Not everyone sees the destruction of familiar streets and buildings as a pot of gold and a marvellous opportunity.
Part of what I feel in this city is solastalgia, not so much for buildings as for the routines I established around those buildings: the walk to visit friends in the CBD, the stroll to the cinema. It is also the loss of the narrative prompts that vanished buildings contained. This was the place where we sat on the deck overlooking the sea and the surfers bobbing about like seals, before the sad time and a friend’s lonely leap from Whitewash Head. This was the place where my daughter had her flat in full, feral student exuberance. This was the upstairs room where a granddaughter slipped into the world while the nor’wester tore at the trees.
But this is small stuff compared with the homesickness of people I know who were born here, who learned this city the way that only a child can learn a place, from the ground up, knowing all its nuances, its little hidden places. People for whom streets and buildings became crammed in early adulthood with love and sex and dispute and parties and family and all that dense accretion of personal narrative. For me, that intensity lies south of the Waitaki. When I cross that river, braided and blue between willows and broom, even though I have not lived in Otago for fifty years, there is still a visceral tug, the sensation of coming home.
Perhaps because this city is not quite my home, solastalgia is only part of my reaction. The other part is a feeling I think of as a New Zealand fondness for what is new. I drive about the city as the product of the social laboratory, insistently curious about this new experiment taking shape around me. I want to see what happens now. It’s possibly a trivial emotion, akin to that contemporary fad for unboxing in which millions upon millions of people watch online, mesmerised, as someone else’s hands unwrap a cheap toy or shopping bag, simply for the pleasure of seeing something new emerge. But I cannot help liking the way the city’s current configuration springs surprises. I like stumbling upon the lawyer’s office, the stationery shop. I like being nudged away from my usual route, driving down this road on a spring afternoon, thinking something I hadn’t thought before. I like being here.
Away from the city I find myself wanting to be back, reading the local paper, hearing the stories people tell me. I like the feeling of coming to know this place, trying to figure out what is happening here and how it has come to be the way it is. It is not easy to do when everything has fallen in pieces, fact on fact, like a pile of bricks. Day by day, other bricks dislodge and fall. To switch metaphor again, my inner map has broken into small component parts, difficult to reassemble.
And then there is the third part of that mash of feeling, and that is a kind of love. I’ve come to love this city. I didn’t think about it before the quakes: it was simply somewhere I lived. I had friends here, a house. The city contained the things I need: movies, shops, music, cafés. But in its beaten state, knocked around, I have taken a closer look and now it’s love. It’s not a feeling I’ve had before. Loving your city was for other more emotional places: places in the US where they put little red hearts on the tourist T-shirts and sing about San Francisco and go all dewy eyed over New York New York. No one in this understated country was going to sing about Palmerston North in the spring. No one was going to drift off to Invercargill with flowers in their hair.
And Christchurch, Christchurch, what the hell rhymes with Christchurch?
But now it seems fragile, vulnerable and precious in that vulnerability, as do other cities in this country, no matter how cocky they may have tried to be with their slogans and PR projection as absolutely positively the place where the show never stops … Wellington with its lovely unlikely houses tacked to steep hillsides among bush and the Ministry of Importance at its heart and the CBD on shaky former seabed. And Auckland, gleaming after rain and smelling of damp and growth and all that money and you are without a doubt in the South Pacific and all those people are coming in and coming in and everyone is making the most of
it between the volcanic cones. And Dunedin, where youth keeps the heart beating within the skin of old houses and the former structures of power and there is the wild beauty of harbour and hinterland. And all the other settlements of this country with their homes and businesses and little human routines. ‘Make the most of it,’ you want to say. ‘Enjoy your streets, however cluttered, enjoy your shops and cafés and bars, enjoy your corner dairy and the parking building and the bus stop and the walk to work and the beach. Be happy in your city.’
And I want this city, Christchurch, to go through this makeover and emerge to gasps of astonishment. Why, you’re beautiful! You’re perfect!
DURING THE TIME OF THE thousands upon thousands of aftershocks, the bench shaking as you peeled the potatoes, the office desk jolting, the bed shuddering, people began to report a new syndrome: ‘quake brain’. You were vague, forgetful. You left the car keys in the fridge. You forgot where you had parked the car. Dealing with everyday life, in addition to dealing with the requirements of insurers, repair, simply finding your way about the city, was simply too much. Your mind, it seemed, too, had broken into 100 tiny pieces.
Everything felt tenuous. Structures in which I had put my faith were stripped of their cladding and revealed to be hollow things. A democratic election could simply be overturned. An education system could be reconfigured without objection or much in the way of comment. The centre of a city could be demolished with no viable opposition.
It had been an insecure era. Financially, for example, the turn of the millennium in this country has been characterised by the serial collapse of finance companies — sixty-five of them since 2006 — taking with them the savings of hundreds of people. When I was a child, we were encouraged to open savings accounts. Each week we brought our sixpences to school where an officer of the Post Office Savings Bank received them with due solemnity and entered the deposit in a little book. It had a squirrel on the cover. ‘A squirrel saves for winter.’ That sixpence could have bought a dozen pineapple chunks, but we were being educated in the benefits of planning ahead. The cover also had pictures of what we were saving for: an academic cap with a tassel, a plane for travel, a car. I was also educated in frugality by my parents. My mother kept her post office savings book in her handbag and each night throughout her whole long life, she looked it over before bed. It was part of her routine. She examined her savings, read that day’s passage from the Bible and turned to sleep, secure in the knowledge that all was well.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 28
