Good schooling isn’t about mission statements …

It’s time I wrote about Wairio School again. It was small so I should be able to squeeze it into this space OK. It was good. We learnt how to do apostrophes and metrics and tennis and tidying the gardens on Friday afternoons.

We did art, we climbed the trees, drove giant cable drums around the playground, twisted ankles and broke bones, dried our wet socks by the pot belly fire, played softball, sniffed the heady fumes from freshly made gestetner handouts, and went on field trips to the Invercargill funeral director and even to the leather tannery in Dunedin and of course to kid-heaven Cadburys where the kindest woman in the whole world said we could eat anything we wanted.

We read journals and Dracula and did I mention that we cleaned the school and tidied the gardens every Friday afternoon? At the end of the year we had a concert in the Town Hall.

 It wasn’t all good. We did silly folk dancing – the silliest of all being the German Tap Dance in which we slapped the bottoms of our shoes. I’ve been to Germany and they only slap the bottoms of the Frauleins. I know why we had to do this. It was a taste of hell. Be good or else.

We were big on conservation of native trees, and CPR and the Red Cross and the Commonwealth Games and Cassius Clay. We had electricity but didn’t use a lot of it, there being no OHP, DVD player or smartboard. Servers were the kids who made the two teachers’ morning coffee and who served out the hot pies from the archaic little pie oven.

 We were also big on handwriting which was linked to the privilege of fountain pens all of which was linked to spelling and dictation. And the life-lesson was that although fountain pens were the pinnacle, they leaked.

We did maths with little wooden blocks and bottles of water (very Piaget) and we used clocks and click wheel things and we did long division and percentages and fractions and because calculators hadn’t been invented yet we did this all by the miracle of mental arithmetic just as Pythagoras himself had done.

The thing is, if we have to change our schools we should change them all into replicas of Wairio School. But guess what? It was bull-dozed. It’s not gone though. Terry’s still around, and Dorothy and Gavin and Michael and Lynette and Joanne and Janette. And that’s the big thing that the Ministry and ERO and NZQA seem to be missing. Good schooling isn’t about mission statements and NCEA and websites and CEO-esque salaries.

— Peter Giddens