Читать книгу The Pavlova Omnibus - Austin Mitchell - Страница 13

AN OXFORD college head once assured me that all New Zealanders look alike: tall, craggy featured, nothing to say. If he was right it must be because they are produced by standdardised processes, one of the most uniform production systems in the world outside die stamping. And thorough. New Zealanders spend as much time and trouble on raising young New Zealanders as they do on sheep. They can’t spend as much money, but the people aren’t intended for export.

The family is the basic unit of production, but you have to make allowances for it. Rearing New Zealanders is too important to be left entirely to families, who could, after all, include English immigrants, Labour voters and undetected libertarians. So all the way up the line the product is processed in government plants during the day and shuttled back to the home storage units at night and weekends.

In the beginning is the hospital. Babies have to be born there so that regular feeding can programme them to wake Mum at regular intervals and she can be made to feel guilty about such anti-New Zealand habits as sleeping after six a.m. or getting too much pleasure out of a child. Dad’s exclusion from the process of birth and his grudging admission to the hospital conditions him to the view that the whole business has nothing to do with him. His job is restricted to waving rattles before unseeing eyes and going ‘Goo-goo’. Neither his role nor his ability to communicate with his children ever improves much.

After hospital the Plunket Society, a paediatric Farm Advisory Service, steps in to reinforce the lessons. Its purpose is to check the spread of permissiveness and plastic pants among children under one by propagating the principles of child rearing common in advanced circles only fifty years ago. These rules were set out by Dr Truby King in his book Scouting For Mothers. Children should be a duty not a pleasure. Mum must not be allowed to bring up children in the way she wants. Parents should be seen and not heard.

Orwell’s 1984 had a television camera in every room. New Zealand uses an inspectorate of Plunket ladies observing home practices, administering gentle correction where necessary. They are kinder to the children than to mothers. Plunket reports will surely be weighed in the scales of heaven, so they must be charitable. One day my daughter screamed continuously, bit the nurse and deposited what should have gone into the nappy in her lap. The record card commented mildly, ‘An independent wee soul’.

A former Governor-General pointed out that ‘if it were not for the success of the Plunket Society there might be no All Blacks’. There would be no Progressive Youth Movement either. The society makes New Zealanders what they are. It begins the lifelong tension between what we want to do and what we are conditioned to feel we should do. Young Everidge wants to eat when he’s hungry; he’s conditioned to nibble at four-hour intervals. He wants to play with himself; his hand gets slapped to show him sex is a dirty pleasure, suitable only for the dark. As a former Obergruppenführer of the Plunket Society once said, ‘Give me the child for seven months, with whatever donations you can afford, and I will give you the All Black.’

In case conditioning fades, there is an after-sales service from 250 kindergartens and 300 play groups. These socialise the children to play together, but only incidentally. The main purpose is to give the mums something to do. These places are an outlet for that frenzied organisational drive which is the first symptom of postpuerperal depression, a chance to trade in old gossip for new and an opportunity to keep a wary eye on everyone else’s child-rearing procedures. Is Sandra Binns’s toilet training late? Her mum will be made to feel anxious. Does Johnny Jones go in for full frontal nudity? After all, the children won’t be really happy unless they’re exactly like everyone else.

This is also the view of the Department of Education, the intellectual branch of Sir James Wattie and company. Overseas they think of education as a process, a liberation, a joyous awakening. Such emancipation hardly fits in with the New Zealand skill of regulation. It would produce a storm of protest from parents puzzled that their children should reject a life style they themselves have known from time immemorial (i.e. 1935). So this country has changed the meaning of the word. Education means a department, seeing that all plants produce to the same standard, turning a process of emancipation into a means of integration. So no one wants any.

The basic function of any government department is to keep its field of operations quiet. Education clings to this rule all the more anxiously, since its one aberration revealed the dangers of an alternative course. In 1935 Labour appointed a Minister of Education who was interested in the subject, had ideas and could push them through Cabinet—all factors which would have disqualified him for the job in normal circumstances. Peter Fraser and Dr Beeby initiated a primary school revolution. The authoritarian ethos was weakened. The insistence on the three Rs of reading, riting and rigidity was replaced by an effort to capitalise on the child’s instinct to learn. Dr Dewey came to New Zealand to be embalmed in state.

The effort was too much. The revolution exhausted itself on the primary schools before it could reach the rigidly conservative postprimary schools. Now, a slightly archaic and staid liberalism of the primary system sits in schizophrenic contrast with a postprimary system, where instruction is handed down to be duly carved on tablets of stone.

The backlog of hostility from an older generation which had not enjoyed its own schooling and was determined that no one else should, made further innovations impossible. The collapse of morals, the untidiness of state house gardens and the growing incidence of public nose-picking were all authoritatively attributed to ‘play-way’. Dr Bee by was sent off to be New Zealand ambassador to the Folies Bergère. The Department confined itself to administration. Since it is now largely manned by ex-teachers, the present system is safe and self-perpetuating. Those who can, teach; those who can’t, administer. Those who can do neither become ministers.

As a final safeguard, education is administered by a complex balance of groups, so nicely deadlocked as to make change impossible. Boards are in friction with the Department, headmasters with boards, staffs with all three, school committees and PTAs with any two at random. At the top of this house of cards sits the Minister, whose main qualifications are usually his complete inability to get anything through Cabinet and his enthusiasm for those educational techniques common in the late nineteenth century. In this way everyone in education can be left to fight everyone else so that the rest of the population can spend their money on booze, baccy and betting and the Government can go out shopping for frigates.

From the primary plant, young Kiwi-chile passes on to the intermediate school to reach puberty in decent purdah. He then enters a postprimary system divided into three parts—Catholic, Private or State. Catholic schools segregate the members of the faith and provide an inferior education suited to a minority of a seventh of the population. Private schools (the National Party at lessons) do much the same for the better-off. Most pay a nominal allegiance to a religious denomination and a more real one to the eternal values represented by the ANZ Bank. They are preparatory departments for Federated Farmers, providing boarding accommodation and reasonable restraint for country children. The more important, Christ’s, King’s and Wanganui Collegiate, are instant public schools, die-stamping little Englishmen under licence. Their female counterparts also produce some splendid chaps.

The more pretentious take English or religious names: St Margaret’s after the wife of the founder of F. W. Woolworth, Christ’s after the founder of the Church of England, Medbury Preparatory after the inventor of the hamburger. Most were founded in the mists of antiquity, like Southwell, starting in 1911 on endowment from the Sergei family, which still provides donations in the shape of a headmaster and children. Educational techniques which trained administrators for the British Empire and other Offshore Funds are applied by hand to a miscellaneous collection of offspring of farmers, lawyers and used-car salesmen (the country’s second oldest profession). This gives the well-off something to spend their money on besides overseas trips. It also guarantees that their offspring won’t be embarrassed by coeducation. All relatively harmless, since New Zealand is not an élitist society. The private schools can’t yet take in ESN children of the wealthy at one end and churn out directors for ICI (NZ) at the other.

Because the private schools use their privacy to uphold a traditional education, the state schools have to do the same so parents won’t divert their children en masse. As a new country, New Zealand is a great respecter of tradition and the schools which carry the most prestige are the most rigidly pedagogic. Places like Wellington Girls, Christchurch Boys and Waikukumukau Hermaphrodites set the tone. All the others have to try to keep back with them, so that parents don’t think their children are being deprived.

By and large, which most of our children are, Joe Soap and Julian Unilever go to the same school. This is so that they can both start with equal disadvantages in life. For the army the schools are an excellent preparation. For life, not so good. New Zealanders are a lackadaisical, easygoing people: they educate their children by formalised pedagogy. Their dress is sloppy and casual: they impose a school uniform designed to kill all sexual interest by skilfully relandscaping burgeoning teenage shapes into mobile marquees. An open, democratic society, New Zealand has an authoritarian education system. The teacher is society’s NCO, enforcing the virtues of obedience by corporal punishment or accrediting. Society is egalitarian, so the schools stream rigidly. Kiwis are a practical bunch of jokers, so the schools are obsessively academic. All this has been carefully thought out to nurture the latent schizophrenia in the Kiwi breast, programming him to feel guilty and uneasy about everything that is good. Puritan instinct demands that those who live in paradise should not enjoy it.

The doses of guilt aren’t equally shared out. Manual workers and the less intelligent build up antibodies to the system. It conditions them to a cynicism about an education so uniquely irrelevant to their life experience and about authority figures who transmit on such an alien frequency. They leave school at the earliest possible opportunity and make money on the wharves, or rather less as Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition. For the rest of their lives they are defiantly anti-intellectual. With the middle classes, the education system has deeper penetration, processing them into Boy Scouts who spend the rest of their lives looking for a movement, in such substitutes as Lions or Jaycees. Unfitted to enjoy paradise, they become deeply suspicious of those who do. The worst affected cases go on to the teachers’ colleges, the technical institutes and the universities for a really concentrated dose of educational schizophrenia.

When you think of further education, the red brick, the white tile, or the Dulux ivory towers of Britain’s universities spring to mind. Forget it. New Zealand has 4.3 universities and a number of training colleges and technical institutes which between them take, say, ten per cent of school leavers. They are all finishing schools for various professions, a job training for those who can’t get it on the job. The lower grades—primary school teachers and lesser breeds without the law—go to the educational ghettos. The rest go to the universities, and the difference between the institutions is solely one of degree. The universities embrace not only Classics (production quota as set by the Development Conference, 34.5 a year) but also Physical Education and the Home Science School (the Dean of the Home Science School is the equivalent of your Warden of All Souls; the school’s main role at the moment is to ensure that doctors’ wives can cook). Flower arrangement would also be eligible for a degree course if the Women’s Division didn’t already do it so well. Being a practical people, the New Zealanders don’t like to train intelligence at large; they have no tradition of taking philosophy graduates and putting them in charge of the Department of Marine, or appointing experts in the romance languages to run New Zealand Breweries. Studies have to be relevant to a career. Like freezing works, universities must produce visible returns in an annual crop of frozen teachers, accountants and engineers.

The universities have several advantages. Because of the tradition of going to the nearest university rather than the best, a high proportion of students live at home. Thus lots of them concentrate money on essentials, rather than lavishing it on accommodation. Universities are open to a larger proportion of the population than is the case in Britain: entry conditions are easier. Everyone has the right to fail once they’re 21 and part-time study provides a people’s democracy degree.

Unfortunately these New Zealand institutions are manned by an alien fifth column. One third of the staff come from overseas, mainly from Britain, where universities are very different creatures. The most able British academics wouldn’t dream of coming to a country they regard as an academic outer Siberia. In 1959 I would have been hard put to get a job as assistant janitor at Battersea Polytechnic. In New Zealand I was a full lecturer. Promotion is so rapid that most people finish up as Associate Professor. Unfortunately their inability to get jobs in British universities makes importees more anxious and assertive about a university status they hold so tenuously.

A high proportion of the natives have also been corrupted by postgraduate training overseas. The most able are lost, unable to stand the loneliness of the long-distance intellectual and the lack of stimulus and excitement. The only section genuinely appreciative of the country’s traditions is the small but increasing number of Americans, bomb refugees, Vietnam protesters and people unwilling to buy a secondhand America from President Nixon. Since many of them are busily building bomb shelters, lobbying for peace or supporting student revolt they are collectively dismissed as insane, politically unstable or both.

With this exception, university staffs spend their time complaining because their intellectual gifts are not recognised by the community in general and Mr Muldoon in particular, lamenting at the government’s failure to pay them as much as American and British academics, and airing their highly developed God complexes on their students. The only way in which they resemble good New Zealanders is their nine to five work habits and their quiet domesticity in the better suburbs like Cashmere, of which the University of Canterbury poet said, ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my staff’.

The students are another ground for staff dissatisfaction. They take the books out of the library, make the place look untidy, drive suspiciously close to the staff when homeward bound. The staff want to teach only the best but have to drop their artificial pearls in front of swine. The staff want students to be passionately interested in their subject; the students want a meal ticket and will put together any kit-set structure of Wisdom I, Taste and Discrimination II and Sense and Sensibility III which puts them as quickly as possible on to the labour market. The staff want excitement and discussion from students whose schooling has prepared them only to take down sacred texts. Say ‘Good morning’ to a class of British students and they’ll reply, ‘Good morning, Comrade’. Say it in New Zealand and they’ll take it down. The lecturer’s approach has to be to say what he’s going to say, say it, then recapitulate—a lesson brought home to me in my first lecture. With a naive enthusiasm for Socratic techniques, I outlined the case of those who thought the gentry rose from 1540-1640, then the counter case against the self-raising gentry, and invited them to choose. I was surrounded by an anxious group of students asking, ‘But what do you think?’ Here was the key to success and the line that would come back to me, with some deterioration in the grammar and style, in exam papers.

Staff see students as a necessary nuisance and a numerical argument for increased finance for their department. For university authorities the students are another problem. University officials want a quiet life, an undisturbed production flow of books, articles and graduates, and a happy local community which will hand over large sums of money because its clean, well scrubbed students are almost as big a tourist attraction as the botanical gardens. Unfortunately the raw material is volatile: girls get pregnant, students demonstrate instead of leaving it to lab assistants. Even the capping celebrations, whose real purpose is to give lawyers a week they can talk about for the rest of their lives, get embarrassing. The proper response is to turn the universities into custodial institutions, putting up the sign ‘Abandon home all ye who enter here’ and setting up halls of residence as an institutional chastity belt.

The staff are kept under control by the need to compete for scarce resources. Most departments are run on a slender secretarial staff, usually a brunette. They are understaffed and can’t finance research projects. Staff want new premises, sabbatical leave, or a trip to a conference in Australia. So all are controlled by the constant need to lobby, to propitiate and to please. University staff abandon ambitions of being good academics and concentrate on being petty lobbyists and empire builders. The best brains in the university are absorbed in a self-generating process of committee work, caucusing and canvassing. Having thus ensured a quiescent staff, Vice-Chancellors can get on with their real jobs: making speeches about the Muldoon threat to intellectual integrity, lobbying for appointment to the Broadcasting Corporation, deciding whether to refer the Capping Magazine to the Indecent Publications Tribunal, or applying for jobs overseas.

The universities should do four jobs. First, they need to expand and order the body of knowledge. They do this now, but achieve an output of only 0.8 articles per capita per year, and that mainly by taking overseas experiments and research and duplicating them in New Zealand. With a little more productivity and a bit more attention to New Zealand subjects, all would be well. Even the second job of communicating knowledge retail to the detainees is well enough done, though the aerosol approach is preferred to the hand polishing Oxford considers appropriate.

The third job is to turn out, not working models of professional men on to whom a little knowledge has been grafted without immediate rejection effects, but intellectuals, people whose thirst for knowledge is like an addiction. The universities don’t attempt this. The public image of students is of ignorant, drug crazed militants. In practice most are quietly conformist: in the years I was one of the trustees of the De Tocqueville Fund, to award an annual prize of $200 for the biggest insult to authority in any year, we never had one entrant, beyond a case of accidental pant wetting at a north Dunedin kindergarten. Students are drawn overwhelmingly from middle class backgrounds, with as few as a fifth from manual working homes, a proportion only double the contingent from overseas. Thus background insulates them from the infection of new ideas. Staff-student contact is minimal. Where it exists it is largely confined to the one department: in a survey only one in ten had had contact with staff from another department. Cross-sterilisation seems more appropriate than cross-fertilisation.

A last role—spreading knowledge out into the community—is scarcely attempted. Few are more academically snobbish and purist than the academically dull. Even the academic branch of show biz, so flourishing in Britain, does not exist. The University of Canterbury viewed my television appearances as if I was running a house of ill-fame on the side. New Zealand universities are inward-looking, preoccupied with themselves, isolated from a community which desperately needs the information, the ideas and the stimulus and diversity universities could provide. Unfortunately to do so might upset people.

Seriously though, these universities are the best in the world. Don’t ask the students, they’re biased. If you don’t believe me, ask the staff. You’ll find them either doing their gardens or Post Restante, c/o University of London.