Submission to the "Tomorrow’s Schools” Review
August 2018
This is only the introduction and the conclusion. Read the full submission here
The Chairman
Tomorrow’s Schools Taskforce
Mr Bali Haque
Dear Sir
We welcome the review of tomorrow’s schools currently being undertaken.
It is clear, by any measurement one cares to employ, that despite the committed effort of teachers, principals, and support staff, our education system is not achieving the standards we would wish for.
An ever changing society is imposing greater complexities and challenges on those committed educationalists, as it is on our children.
We must design an education system that provides them with the resources to not just cope with those challenges, but to steer our children through their most formative years and deliver young adults with an ability to adapt to a society where leisure, the arts, creative thinking, and extended learning have a greater part to play in their lives than ever before as computerisation and robotics take over significant numbers of traditional jobs.
One of our tenets is “Systems should be made for people, not people for systems; any that fail to serve people should be reformed or discarded”.
Any proposal for changes to our education system should start with that premise.
We look forward to participating further as your work proceeds.
Chris Leitch
Leader
Social Credit
“Education is a peculiar good. It increases the more it is consumed”.
- Paul Samuelson
Taskforce chairman, Bali Haque, in an article for the New Zealand Herald (5th July), wrote that “we cannot actually run a schooling system like a commercial business.”
This opinion is a welcome reflection of Social Credit’s approach to the public provision of essential infrastructure and services. Hence our support for his call to “have a good rethink about what we want for our children’s education, and design a system that delivers it.”
It is most certainly time to have that “good rethink”. And we must look to Pakistani economist, Mahbulbul Haq for his insight. Haq rejected his Yale/Harvard corporate model training which viewed “humans as producers of wealth” switching to the view of “wealth as a producer of human development”.
He learned “to recognise the murderous message at the heart of the cold mathematics“ underpinning the models he was taught - which “oblige workers to produce wealth while refusing to allow them to consume it.”
He admitted that wealth “did indeed accumulate” but went into the pockets of a few wealthy families - an observation made five decades back but still all too relevant today!
Conclusion
American writer, Steven Pinker, says: “Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened.
They are less racist, xenophobic. homophobic and authoritarian.
They place a higher value on imagination, independence and free speech.
They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organisations.
They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens - a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called “social capital” which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are the chumps who will be shafted by everyone else”.
Our message is that this “precious elixir” must be safeguarded by humane and ethical financial policies as promoted by Social Credit.
Written for the Social Credit Party by Heather Marion Smith B.A.,Dip.Soc.Sci.[Econ]