Proclamations on our education system, especially its perceived failures, honk all around us just now. Well, we’re all experts on the topic; we’ve all been to school.
Among all the utterances, it’s hard to see the actual students. They’ve been turned into statistics; smothered by buzzwords: “disengaged … knowledge-based … a great curriculum and the right pedagogy” (that last pair of thumpers from new Education Minister Erica Stanford).
In the midst of the noise, the kids keep going. What strikes me most from the decades I’ve been in schools as a teacher, tutor and visiting writer is the resilience of so many students, their adaptability, their ability to plug on while politics and philosophies froth around them.
What follows is anecdotal. And historical. But