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