Karl Du Fresne calls our attention to a school principal, who, it seems has engaged in an extraordinary ad hominem attack upon a colleague who had the temerity publicly to support the introduction of national testing standards.
Now it is a sad indictment upon the profession that the CEO of a New Zealand state school apparently fails to understand that ad hominem is the refuge of intellectually challenged scoundrels. Here is a summary of Du Fresne's account:
I'm surprised more hasn’t been made of the contemptible schoolyard bullying reported last week by TV3 political editor Duncan Garner. Presumably it was overtaken by the much bigger drama unfolding around David Garrett and ACT.
What made this schoolyard bullying unusual was that the perpetrators were grown men – two Northland school principals heavying a female colleague who committed the inexcusable sin of breaking ranks over national standards.
Donna Donnelly, principal of Tikipunga School, Whangarei, is a supporter of national standards. This was clearly intolerable to two fellow principals, Peter Witana and Pat Newman, who sent her intimidating emails.
TV3 News showed a composed, dignified Donnelly asking Witana to apologise. He refused.
An agitated Witana, an executive member of the Principals’ Federation, then turned on an extraordinary performance in front of Garner, gesticulating and speaking directly to the TV3 camera, saying things like “Don’t make me look terrible Duncan” and “Don’t make me dislike you.” He looked so emotionally unstable that Garner could have been excused for feeling slightly threatened himself – just as parents with children under Witana’s care might have been excused for wondering whether he needed to take stress leave.
The next night we learned that Newman, too, had waded into Donnelly, sending her an email in which he said, among other things, that her former colleagues in the Waikato regarded her as “the best export they ever made” [sic].
I couldn’t help wondering at the coincidence that both Witana and Newman are physically big men (overweight, not to put too fine a point on it) with moustaches, a not uncommon mark of the bully.
Interviewed for TV3 News, Newman (whom Kiwiblog's David Farrar reports is seeking the Labour Party nomination for Whangarei) tried to skew the issue, suggesting that principals and boards of trustees were not being allowed to question and criticise education policy.
I’m not aware of anyone trying to deny them that right. The issue here is one of intimidation and harassment of a colleague who dared dissent from the union line.
Whenever we comment upon the teaching profession in New Zealand, we always need to distinguish between those dedicated people who work extraordinarily long hours, doing a superb job, often in difficult conditions, in the face of desperate odds, on the one hand, and the educational establishment which consists of teacher and principal unions, the Ministry of Education bureaucracy, and those who staff the various teacher training academies. It is the latter establishment complex which is the true enemy of quality education in New Zealand.
There is another enemy of quality education: the government itself. "Government education" is an oxymoron. It is not the function of civil government to educate; it is a duty and task way beyond its competence, as is becoming more and more evident with each passing decade.
The foolish idiocy of our current situation where government education has become an illicit state function effectively controlled now by teacher unions--which is to say the government education system exists primarily to serve the interests of the union cadres and their more militant members--can be highlighted by a comparison with other professions. Take for example the legal profession.
Arguably the legal profession is as vital and as important to the functioning of civil society and its future as is the teaching profession. One some counts, more so. Yet we do not have a socialised legal profession. Consequently, we do not have a lawyers union either. If the state is not needed to ensure the provision of universal and "free" legal services, why is the state needed to ensure educational services? Yet we do have a high level of legal professionalism, a strong self-governing law society, excellent educational and legal training institutions, and universal legal services throughout the country. Would that the professional ethics of the Law Society applied to the privileged educational complex!
If society can organise itself to ensure a universal, high quality legal profession, why not the teaching profession? If non-socialised legal services can be produced and sustained by the private sector, why not schools and schooling? To ask the question is to expose the current socialised educational system to ridicule. Education, like legal services, is completely beyond the competence of civil government to provide: state controlled education systems have one trajectory, and one trajectory only--downward.
New Zealand's "universal, free, secular" education system is the product of Fabian socialist idiocy, which insinuated itself into our political and social culture in the late eighteen hundreds. It is another example of "socialism without doctrines", or pragmatic socialism which has dominated and damaged our country now for over a century. We, as a nation, desperately need to break its shackles and free ourselves.
But freedom is something which comes first of all from the heart of a man. New Zealanders are, as a whole, far too docile and servile to engage in shackle breaking. We are enslaved in heart. If a politician were to arise announcing "Yes you can!", outside the mosh pit, when the ardour and excitement had cooled, the antiphonal response would be "No, we can't". A people enslaved in heart to the government will always look first to the government before they look to themselves. Only widespread repentance and a returning to the Lord Jesus Christ will break that shackle of the heart--which is the real servility resides, after all.
So, the government education system will remain entrenched. Educational standards in New Zealand will continue to decline, truancy will rise, illiteracy rates--already bad--will worsen, but the teacher unions and the educational establishment will ensure that fresh billions and billions of taxpayers money will be spent upon a self-righteous, pompous, protected and arrogant educational elite. For such, to bully others is part of the "natural order". They are always right.
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