The Weekly Rot

Making the school day longer is a brilliant idea. It’ll mean that kids can do more maths and folk-dancing and science and technology. And parents can work longer, stay at the pub longer or watch the TV news without the interruption of pesky kids wanting help with their homework, nutrition, learning manners, or attending to their personal hygiene.

Or for those parents who prefer to not work, they can watch day-time TV all through the afternoon as well as the morning.

With kids being at school longer they’ll be at home less. For many this will be a good thing.

Happy New Year readers. 2009 will be better. At the risk of sounding like a 20-cent poet, there’ll be more blue sky and less clouds this year, and on any rainy days that dare, I’ll just stay home – on weather-leave.

In 2000 I watched television reports about Robert Mugabe and the tyranny and abuse that he called government. Many others watched too. And in the years that have followed watching is still as much as we do. Now there’s cholera as well as hunger and fear – and still there’s no action.

This year, again, little NZ kids have been killed by their family members. We’ve listened to excuses such as ‘it’s our culture’ and ‘it’s our family’s tradition’.

It’s been more challenging this year – planning a summer holiday. Nepal’s still messy with rebel ratbags. The Americans are flinging missiles into Pakistan, India’s iffy and Thailand’s still a bit doubtful. Qantas doesn’t appeal and the other airlines want me to bail them out by charging silly ticket prices and then more for bags, meals, the toilet and even for disembarking.

Mea culpa. This economic crisis, it’s because of schools and teachers. It’s bad, so it must be blamed on poor education. Someone didn’t teach the financial firms’ chief executives that it’s not right to pay themselves huge salaries for sod-all work, especially when the company is doing so badly. Schools should teach values and so this failing in the market is really the fault of schools and therefore of teachers.

Friends, Romans, colleagues, lend me your eyes. I come to bury the curriculum, not to praise it. Something is rotten in the state of education. Some Ministry people kill with arrows, some with traps and some with the Ctrl-X function. What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands. “Out, damned Shakespeare”. Haven’t’st thou heard of the global credit crunch, forsooth? And anyway, what’s in a name? That which we call Shakespeare, by any other name would spell as sweet.

Cousin Rodney, the free marketeer, seems to be holding a strong position in the new regime. And that has imminent implications for schools which are soon to be renamed Learning Centres Ltd.

All school bosses will have to have MBAs or, having looked into these, the old School Cert. Accounting or Sixth Form Certificate in Business Studies will be fine. They’d then have strategic planning meetings and discuss mission statements, corporate identities and customer perceptions. And expense accounts.

If we want school to be more boy-friendly we could do worse than adding Patrick O’Brian to the curriculum. He wrote the books that inspired the movie Master & Commander. They’re a rollicking adventure spanning 20 books and most of the globe. A boy reading these books will learn more than simple world geography – where the Baltic Sea and the Indian Ocean and Patagonia and the Oresund are.

Hasn’t life become seriously grown-up these past few weeks? Global warming, elections and economic Armageddon. I’m sticking my head in the sand and thinking of dinner.

Monday is rump steak – with mashed potatoes, carrots, pumpkin and gravy. I’ll make a baked rice pudding with dried figs. It’s all a good reason to open a Central Otago merlot. There’s a pile of marking to get through after dinner so I’ll watch The Cider House Rules. It’s literary and intellectual so it’ll feel like school work.

Did someone really say that recruiting agencies are ‘trafficking’ teachers to places like Qatar? And that recruiting companies are having a ‘devastating effect on NZ education’? I smell a rat.

No really – what’s Qatar got that Auckland hasn’t? Apart from the obvious good public transport, affordable housing, professional salaries, respectful taxes, adequate health care (staffed by Kiwis by the way), attractive working conditions, well-resourced schools…