Putting the ‘suPPPer’ into super schools?

Yet another brick in the wall?

The Education Ministry’s $41 million proposed year 1-13 super school for Christchurch is set to be funded by the private sector, a document reveals.

The document, obtained by APNZ, outlines advice given to Education Minister Hekia Parata and shows she signed off on five of eight recommendations.

Ms Parata added in her handwriting that four Christchurch eastern suburb schools should close a year later, in December 2016, to allow for “considerations of public-private partnership procurement.”

The privately funded school, known as a public-private partnership (PPP) school, would be the second in New Zealand after the Hobsonville Point primary school opened this year in Auckland.

A ‘brick in the wall’ or maybe just ‘another piece of the puzzle’ of just what has driven the proposals that are part of the restructuring of Christchurch schools?

Part of that puzzle has been the timing of the restructuring  - I mean, ‘renewal’ – of the network (so soon after the earthquakes) and, then, the lengthening of the proposed times for implementation till 2016.

Well, the one year delay seemed so reasonable at the time, but now it makes far more sense: The delay from the original timeline is to give enough time to work out a public-private partnership (PPP) arrangement.

The Principal of Aranui High School and Board of Trustees Chairwoman of Wainoni Primary School were both reasonably supportive of the ‘super school‘ but seem less enchanted – and very surprised – by the ‘suPPPer school‘ possibility:

Principal of Aranui High School John Rohs supported a year 1-13 school, but said a public-private partnership would detract from the community approach the school was trying to achieve.

“We are opposed to this. The needs of our community are not conducive to the public-private partnership.”

Mr Rohs said it had come as surprise to see the minister had put forward the PPP procurement option.

And,

Chairwoman of the Wainoni Primary School board of trustees Christine Nihdam said the school supported a year 1-13 school, but had only recently heard about the public-private partnership proposal.

“We haven’t had a chance to discuss that matter yet. It was something that had not been mentioned previously. It’s was something new to us.”

It also seems that the Aranui super school’, according to a Ministry official, is not the only new Christchurch school that will be put through the PPP business case:

“A business case will be developed later this year to determine whether a PPP for Aranui and other Christchurch schools provides better value for money than a more traditional contracting method.”

Irrespective of the merits of PPP arrangements for state schools what possible justification is there for the Minister not to have made this possibility quite explicit when the original proposals were put to the schools and their communities?

This drip-feeding of more and more controversial aspects of the proposals makes a mockery of any arguments – as expressed in this Press editorial – that it is time to ‘move on’, ‘face the future’ and ‘not complain’ (all for the sake of the children, of course).

It is time now for all involved – teachers, parents, school boards, the Ministry of Education – to put the turmoil of the past few months behind them and look firmly forward to try to make the outcome as good as possible for the most important figures in the saga – the pupils affected.

…

The first announcement of the changes necessary in Christchurch could not have been more bungled, but that must not be allowed to create a lingering sense of resentment.

…

The time for recrimination is over.

Any sense of grievance certainly should not be allowed to impede the proper establishment of the new arrangements.

… now the future must be faced with fortitude and determination.

… parents and teachers owe it to their children and pupils to set an example in this.

Any setbacks that occur should not be used as an occasion for complaint.

…

Parents must also play their part in calming any fears their children may have and encouraging them on what can be seen as an exciting new opportunity.

When the ground keeps shifting under your feet, when more revelations keep emerging of the full consequences and implications of the Greater Christchurch Education ‘Renewal’, such inconsiderate exhortations just start to sound as hollow and ill-informed as they in fact are.

The very experimental ‘procurement method’ of a PPP is now in the pipeline for these same parents and pupils that The Press editor is so concerned about. It is important to emphasise that the PPP approach has, to date, only been tried on one other school in New Zealand yet, it seems, that Christchurch schools and families are thought a proper testing ground for a broader roll-out of a step towards private provision of public education.

Perhaps it was thought that the ‘procurement method’ for these schools was a topic entirely irrelevant for the decision making of the school communities involved over proposals to close and merge schools. Perhaps it was assumed that there are no conceivable connections between different ‘procurement methods’, school management responsibilities and educational outcomes.

Could that be the innocent reason why it was thought that there was no need to mention the possibility of a PPP in establishing the ‘super school’?

Was it thought quite appropriate that a possibility apparently so surprising even to those positively disposed towards the mergers should be left out of the discussions and debate?

Even if it was thought irrelevant why did the Minister not volunteer this information to the schools and their communities, given that she obviously favours consideration of such a possibility? Why did it have to emerge only after journalists somehow acquired the relevant document?

Apparently (see quote below), Ministry officials even think that PPPs are a ‘boon’ for schools and Boards of Trustees so, once again, why wasn’t it thought a good idea to inform them during the consultation about such good news?

What was there to hide about the prospect of PPPs being used?

Well, as just quoted, Aranui High’s Principal, John Rohs thinks that the needs of his community, at least, “are not conducive to the public-private partnership“.

So perhaps the perceived ‘irrational’ resistance of communities to the idea of PPPs was the reason why it was not mentioned (i) when the proposals were presented; (ii) when the interim decisions were announced; and, (iii) when the final decisions were relayed to those affected.

If that was the reasoning for the repeated failure to mention the PPP possibility, is it true that such a possibility should have no bearing on the decisions made by school communities in response to the Christchurch schools restructuring proposals?

Obviously, the question deserves a closer look.

Importantly, “a PPP extends the responsibility [of the normal use of the private sector to build a state school] to include design, build, finance and maintenance of the school over a long-term contract of up to 25 years“.

Supposedly, this frees up Boards of Trustees to focus solely on educational outcomes and not worry their heads over boring matters like building maintenance or, presumably, the physical design of their school or future building projects.

The MoE Deputy Secretary for regional operations, Katrina Casey had this to say:

“One of the main benefits for a school is that that the board of trustees and school leadership no longer have to worry about maintaining school property as this is the responsibility of the private partner,” Ms Casey said.

That also presumably means that they don’t get governance authority over that part of the funding normally allocated for building maintenance (and new building projects on site?).

But, if that is the case – that a PPP would relieve Boards of the quite irrelevant concern over responsibility for building maintenance – it is particularly strange that, currently, the Ministry of Education sees a clear link between the resources provided to Boards for their property (including maintenance) and the education and learning outcomes of students at schools.

To put it bluntly, Boards are required to exercise governance over school property just because it is believed to be commensurate with the creation of a proper educational and learning environment. That is, it is claimed that there are good, educational reasons why the Board should exercise oversight and governance of the range of property management responsibilities.

The Ministry website notes that:

Schools receive resources from the Ministry of Education in four distinct streams; operational funding, staffing, school property and transport assistance. This resourcing enables schools to deliver the New Zealand Curriculum to all students entitled to attend school.

More particularly,

School board’s role in managing school property effectively to support student learning.

Even more particularly,

The board’s role

Boards of trustees have a governance, rather than a ‘hands on’ role in property management.

This means that boards:

• ensure there is alignment between the school’s vision through the Charter and their property plan

• keep up to date with current Ministry policies and requirements

• develop a 10 year property plan (10YPP) to provide the right quantity and quality of school property to achieve the best physical environment for learning

• engage project managers to manage building projects at their schools

• oversee the day–to-day management of school property to ensure it is in good order and repair.

There is the assumption here – quite reasonably – that the physical property of the school and the process of learning are directly linked and, so, Boards must exercise governance control over the property. Yet, with a PPP the schools are being told that maintaining school property (and designing it and financing it) “is the responsibility of the private partner“.

Left unclear is who – the Board or the ‘private partner’ – has a ‘governance’ role over the property. Yet, if the Board still has that governance role within a PPP arrangement in what way, exactly, can they cease to worry about these matters?

And, even if governance remained with a Board there’s always the possibility of a de facto hijacking of the governance role by those who ‘manage’ the property. In the corporate world it is not unknown for top managers to take over, de facto, the governance role from Boards of Directors. How then might School Boards of Trustees – often populated by part-time parent volunteers and not always flush with professional expertise – resist the ‘direction’ from the, presumably more experienced, private property manager?

There are, then, so many hanging questions that remain over an experimental process that, yet again, is being trialled in Canterbury. Even the National Party 2011 election manifesto policy document “Education: 21st Century Schools” simply states on page 5 (under ‘Get better value from school property’), that the government will only “continue to investigate PPPs“:

Does ‘investigate‘ now mean ‘experiment‘? And is Christchurch now the National Party’s policy laboratory?

In all of this, Christchurch and Canterbury communities must have the sense that they are being treated like the proverbial mushrooms.

At best, they might feel that the Minister has patronisingly assumed that they don’t need to think about – or are not capable of thinking about – the practical details of what is planned for their schools, their communities and their city.

At worst, they may feel that their lives and their communities have been largely taken over and that there is little they can do – apart from ‘not complain’, of course – about the situation.

What dignity is there in any of this? What sense of autonomy and self-respect is there left for the people of Christchurch and Canterbury?

And – far more tellingly – just how much more disdainful and dismissive can those who are driving and implementing these proposals become of the people of Canterbury?

Where is the honesty, the straightforwardness, the transparency?

Unfortunately, that’s a question that is being raised in New Zealand far beyond possibilities of PPPs in the ‘education renewal’ here in Christchurch.

It is increasingly common to note that there has been a continuous drip, drip, drip of legislative and policy changes that – in isolation – are presented as innocent and pragmatic responses to ‘improve systems’, ‘increase efficiency’ and even ‘fix’ what is ‘broken’ or in ‘crisis’.

Yet, in the aggregate, these changes all seem to shift New Zealand – remarkably rapidly – in the same direction. In terms of the removal of local, democratic input and oversight, for example, this steady dripping has been likened to the mythical slow-boiling of a frog in water.

More generally still, Colin James claimed some months ago that “Ministers are privately saying they are achieving substantial right-leaning economic reform bit by bit without, so far, scaring voters.”

It is often said that ‘the devil is in the detail’. Usually, that just means that some nice-sounding grand plan may come unstuck in the practicalities of implementation.

Increasingly, in New Zealand today it is more likely to mean that the devil has actually been concealed in the detail – and, as our Prime Minister has pointed out, ‘devil beasts‘ are scary things.

The unseen face of poverty in New Zealand

The debate over various ‘food in school’ programmes is remarkably lively, especially now that the Government is seemingly covering its flank on the issue - and perhaps even attempting to outflank those on the left.

In fact, it’s now gone well beyond being ‘lively’. The furore over two cartoons by Al Nisbet (e.g., see here and here and here) has, yet again, seen New Zealand  expose its ugly underbelly for all to see.

The cartoons are of course not at all instructive about the nature or causes of material poverty in New Zealand but they say a lot about the intellectual and moral poverty of many – perhaps most – New Zealanders.

First, a bit of background about the Government’s announcement.

The Government’s latest funding for ‘food in schools’ aims to increase the current two day per week Kickstart programme of breakfasts of Weetbix and milk in a selection of decile 1 to 4 schools that is supported by Sanitarium Food Company and Fonterra, New Zealand’s largest dairy cooperative and exporter. [In addition, Fonterra is running a 'Milk for Schools' programme.]

The government will provide $1.9m per year into the programme for the next five years so that it can operate five days per week rather than the current two days. The programme involves Fonterra and Sanitarium providing the ingredients for the breakfasts which are run through voluntary ‘breakfast clubs’ in each school and staffed by community volunteers and teachers.

‘Breakfast clubs‘ are present in other countries such as the United Kingdom and, as with the New Zealand variant, are voluntary. Absent from New Zealand are any free or subsidised school lunches despite many countries having provided them, universally, for decades (e.g., Finland and Sweden have entirely free, comprehensive school lunches, in the United States school meals are provided at low cost or free in over 101,000 schools).

According to the programme sponsors, on the basis of the government funding, the Kickstart Breakfast programme will,

be extended to five days a week, with a view to gradually rolling it out to all schools that want and need the programme.

The proposal has been seen by some as the Government’s attempt to ‘inoculate’, politically, the issue of child poverty and head off the more comprehensive ‘Food in Schools’ bill sponsored by Hone Harawira, leader of the Mana Party.

That bill would provide food in schools for all pupils in decile 1 and 2 schools. The proposal, that is, is not for ‘breakfast clubs’ or some small proportion of children or schools being targeted. It is ‘universal’ within the designated school deciles.

Targeting of entitlements was a signature feature of the right-wing economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s in New Zealand, as I’ll discuss later.

That targeting is part of the institutional arrangements that encourage a population to split itself in two and turn on its own members as if they were enemies – when they are likely to be ourselves.

In the United Kingdom the current distinction is now between ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers’. It’s a poisonous and entirely illusory distinction but it is being used by the British Government for its own political purposes – the justification of ‘benefit reforms’ to slash the social security system further. (More on the UK mythology about poverty and the poor, below).

What about New Zealand?

It’s not a pleasant truth, but it remains a truth: Many New Zealanders share the illusions being pushed in Britain.

In short, they have an impoverished understanding of the nature of poverty in so-called developed societies, including New Zealand.

And, on the back of that poor understanding, many of them indulge themselves in an exceptionally cruel form of scapegoating and vilification of those New Zealanders in poverty. It’s a judgmental and impoverished morality and it has, once again, been lured into the open, this time in relation to the issue of food in schools.

These then are the varieties of poverty: material; intellectual; moral.

To try to understand why so many New Zealanders seem to react in this way to the issue of (child) poverty it’s a good idea to get a few facts straight about the history of (child) poverty in this country.

It’s also worth thinking through the common myths seemingly believed about the poor.

Only then can the cartoons and the controversy over the ‘food in schools’ programme be usefully examined.

But, first, what’s the big deal about food in schools given that, apparently, up to three quarters of New Zealanders are in favour of it?

The issue of food in schools is a sub-set of an issue that is now referred to as ‘child poverty’ but which always used to be called, simply, ‘poverty’.

Shifts in language are fascinating to watch – they rarely happen by accident, and always are suggestive of deeper shifts. The term ‘child poverty’ highlights the plight of children in poverty, of course, but it also neatly allows the division of the poor into the ‘deserving poor‘ (i.e., the children) and, potentially, the ‘undeserving poor‘ (i.e., the parents).

The term ‘child poverty’, that is, has turned out to be a new way of perpetuating an old theme. In that sense it is also quite a beautiful example of wedge politics. Initially, when the term was first forged, the ‘wedge’ may have been seen as a means to make progress on the larger issue of poverty. The inventor(s) of the term may have imagined that by focusing on the children caught in poverty society would have been moved, through a deep sense of compassion, to alleviate poverty itself.

Sadly, the term’s usurpation of the simpler notion of ‘poverty’ has actually allowed the reverse to occur. It is now possible to salve one’s conscience over the unfortunate victims of poverty (children) while admitting, as a society, no culpability for the existence of poverty itself.

That is, the ‘child poverty’ victims are not victims of an historical – and relatively recent – process of social and economic change but, instead, they can be seen as victims of feckless parents and the supposed ills of ‘welfare dependency’. Poverty becomes something inflicted upon children by parents.

If those are the rhetorical possibilities that have opened up through use of the term ‘child poverty’ what do the broad social statistics on child poverty tell us?

Child poverty in New Zealand has an interesting recent history. Whether plotted against a ‘poverty’ definition at 60% median incomes for baseline dates of 1998 or 2007, or against 60% of contemporary median income (i.e., 60% of median income each year) the story is the same.

Child poverty rates increased during the late 1980s and early 1990s and then either flattened or declined in the latter part of the 1990s and then declined through the 2000s until 2007. Since 2008 it has flattened or even started to climb a bit. [See Figure 2, below - from the above link.]

Figure 2. Proportion of Dependent Children Aged 0–17 Years Living Below the 60% Income Poverty Threshold After Housing Costs, New Zealand 1982–2011 HES Years

 Source: Perry 2012 [4], derived from Statistics NZ Household Economic Survey (HES) 1982–2011

It’s interesting to note that Figure 2 is taken after housing costs have been subtracted. The before housing cost graph shows how significant housing costs have been in producing poverty [See Figure 1, below - also from the above link].

Figure 1. Proportion of Dependent Children Aged 0–17 Years Living Below the 60% Income Poverty Threshold Before Housing Costs, New Zealand 1982–2011 HES Years

 Source: Perry 2012 [4], derived from Statistics NZ Household Economic Survey (HES)1982–2011

During exactly the same years that overall increases in child poverty were increasing (especially 1988-1992) there was a corresponding sharp rise in both the proportion of children living in poverty in sole parent families and in ‘workless’ families [see following figures].

Figure 5. Proportion of Dependent Children Aged 0–17 Years Living Below the 60% Income Poverty Threshold After Housing Costs by Household Type, New Zealand 1984−2011 HES Years

 Source: Perry 2012 [4], derived from Statistics NZ Household Economic Survey (HES) 1984–2011

Figure 6. Proportion of Dependent Children Aged 0–17 Years Living Below the 60% Income Poverty Threshold After Housing Costs, by Work Status of Adults in the Household, New Zealand 1984–2011 HES Years

 Source: Perry 2012 [4], derived from Statistics NZ Household Economic Survey (HES) 1984–2011

This abrupt shift into high levels of poverty, including child poverty, during the years associated with the Douglas reforms and the major benefit cuts under Bolger and Richardson are well known.

What is less well known is that there was also a dramatic increase in the proportion of children in sole parent families during these very same years.

A study by Blaicklock et al. (2002, section 2.1) reported figures on sole parent families overall and in Maori and Pasifika families from 1981 to 1996 that I’ve graphed here.

Those years were also the years of growing unemployment and, importantly for many Maori, the restructuring of the public sector including the corporatisation of government departments into state owned enterprises:

Top tax rates were chopped from 66 to 48 percent in 1986 and then further to 33 percent in 1988. Unsurprisingly, this then led the government to argue that:

…

In 1990 the newly elected National Government embarked on a further radical rethink of the welfare state (Boston and Dalziel, 1992; Boston, Dalziel, and St John, 1999). The labour market was deregulated, and new tests of welfare provision eliminated many of the remaining universal elements of the welfare state. Benefit levels were reduced substantially, trade unions weakened, fees for tertiary education increased dramatically, and all areas of health, housing and social service delivery restructured.

Blaicklock et al. (2002, section 2.2)

Against that historical backdrop, some 25 years later we encounter the now familiar ill-informed commentary by so many – including the Prime Minister when he made the announcement – about the causes of (child) poverty.

There’s nothing but a cavernous intellectual void where real understanding should exist. The one, limp response by way of explanation is ‘It’s the parents’ fault!’

Down the memory hole has gone the horrific social and economic dislocation of the 1980s and 1990s and how it shattered family after family after family.

Gone is our collective memory of how entire communities disintegrated as employment, often in the public sector, disappeared overnight. Whole families were left to live in caravans, garages and sheds while ‘Waiting for the Upturn‘ – the title of one of Gordon Campbell’s articles in The Listener in the early 1990s [Couldn't find it on the internet.].

And out of public discourse has vanished any attempt to understand how the wrecking ball of economic reform in New Zealand has sent chaotic repercussing waves of dysfunction out into the future through the inevitable cascade of individual, small but tragic events it has generated in the daily lives and experiences of so many New Zealanders over the past 30 years.

Instead, we hear expressions of magical thinking as a substitute for understanding. A seemingly endless stream of spittle-flecked talk of poor people’s poor ‘choices’, poor parenting and poor ‘attitude’ becomes the sickening bully pulpit pontification of workplace chattering and columnists’ commentary. Intellectual pap replaces analysis; an ignorant sledgehammer – oxymoronically called ‘common sense’ – is used, zombie-like, to batter those least able to defend themselves.

Listening to the cliched arguments about the poor and beneficiaries that seem to garner such popular support, it’s hard not to despair. How did hard-hearted cliche come to be so popular? How has this mythology about the causes of poverty arisen?

A very good place to familiarise yourself with the kinds of so-called explanations that are now commonly heard about why families are poor is the recent report in the United Kingdom by the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church, the Church of Scotland and the United Reformed Church.

Titled ‘The Lies We Tell Ourselves” it effectively demolishes arguments that are as commonly heard here as in the UK.

Any of these sound familiar?

MYTH 4 ‘They’ are on the fiddle’

Over 80% of the UK population believe that “large numbers falsely claim benefits”. Benefit fraud has decreased to historically low levels – the kind of levels that the tax system can only dream of. Less than 0.9% of the welfare budget is lost to fraud. The fact is that if everyone claimed and was paid correctly, the welfare system would cost around £18 billion more. So how did we come to see welfare claimants as fraudulent scroungers?

MYTH 5 ‘They’ have an easy life’

Over half the British public believes benefits are too high and churchgoers tend to agree. Government ministers speak of families opting for benefits as a lifestyle choice. Yet we know that benefits do not meet minimum income standards. They have halved in value relative to average incomes over the last 30 years. We know the ill and the unemployed are the people least satisfied and happy with life. Why have we come to believe that large numbers of families would choose this a lifestyle?

MYTH 6 ‘They’ caused the deficit’

The proportion of our tax bills spent on welfare has remained stable for the last 20 years. It is ridiculous to argue, as some have, that increasing welfare spending is responsible for the current deficit. Public debt is a problem but why is it being laid at the feet of the poorest?

No, it’s not a New Zealand study and, yes, it’s logically possible that all of those familiar arguments that the report finds to be mythical in the UK may be 100% true in New Zealand. But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. (The full report is well worth a close read.)

The reform of the public sector, the upending of fiscal (tax) policy and the financial deregulation of the 1980s; the massive cuts to benefits in the early 1990s, the deliberate engineering of employment relations to make employment insecure and increasingly casualised, temporary and intermittent – all of these have undercut the ability of social, familial and community processes to support and maintain some coherence and control in the lives of the poorest New Zealanders.

For some insight into the practical outcomes for children of these destructive changes listen to Patsy Henderson from the Miriam Centre in Whangarei explain what has happened over 30 years in Northland – about 2:00mins into the podcast

And then there’s these Al Nisbet cartoons.

There’s so much been said about them already, but one point seems to have evaded everyone – including the cartoonist: They make no sense.

Both cartoons depict families who see the food in schools programme as a means to have more money for the mythical fags, pokies/lotto, booze, etc. that are apparently the only purchases made by ‘bludgers’. As described by the New Zealand Herald:

One of the drawings published in the Marlborough Express appeared to show two brown-skinned adults in school uniforms taking advantage of the Breakfast in Schools programme to save money for cigarettes, alcohol and pokies. The other cartoon, printed in The Press showed a mixed Maori/Pakeha family discussing how great the free breakfast programme would be to help them ease their poverty, while sitting in front of lottery tickets, cigarettes and empty beer cans.

As Al Nisbet explained,

The cartoon was attacking “bludgers”, he said.

“I’m not talking about the average poverty people. I’m talking about the ones who say they’re poverty stricken, but they’re on welfare getting handouts – they have their tv and they have their fancy cellphones and they have their alcohol and they have their pokies and they have their smokes.”

It’s unclear whether or not Nisbet has had the help of the GCSB in discovering such details about the lives of some unstated number of beneficiaries but, either way, he has some remarkable details to share about the opulence of his target group.

But here’s an odd thing: They’re living this high life but they’re celebrating not having to buy a few weetbix and a bit of milk, which right-wingers are keen to point out don’t cost that much.

But here’s an even odder thing: If they’re going to make money from the food in schools programme – and “ease their poverty” – then that must mean that they are already providing their children with breakfast out of their own pocket. Yet, aren’t these ‘bludgers’ meant to be the ones who aren’t feeding their kids because they’re so keen on their smokes, pokies and booze? The food in schools programme wouldn’t put any money into their pockets. Yet, if they are already feeding their kids and they can afford all those smokes, pokies and Sky Tv subscriptions then shouldn’t we laud their budgeting skills?

And here’s an even odder odd thing: If they are already so neglectful that they aren’t providing their children with breakfast then how is a food in school programme supposed to be encouraging them not to give their children breakfast so that they can save money to spend on smokes, pokies and booze?

Think about it – the whole premise of the cartoons is nonsense.

So, if they’re nonsense, what led Nisbet to draw a couple of nonsensical cartoons?

I suspect that he just wanted to express a particular attitude he had towards New Zealand families in poverty – and on welfare – and this sort of looked like an opportunity to express it. The food in schools programme was just a trigger for him to express that view. He didn’t think about it – he just wanted to do a bit of random spleen-venting.

That’s not surprising. In this interview with Willie Jackson and John Tamihere on RadioLive Nisbet admits to being, politically, “more to the right than the left”. The attitudes towards people in poverty expressed in the cartoons are certainly “more to the right than the left”, so perhaps they are best seen as just ideological burps emitted from the acidic brew in Nisbet’s gut.

That ‘acidic brew’ is not to be laughed at, or ignored.

It is, itself, an expression of poverty – and just like the material poverty that means that children are now arriving at schools with empty stomachs, this kind of poverty also had its modern genesis in the so-called reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.

Yes, there are varieties of poverty in New Zealand, and they all owe a good part of their present expression to our recent history of economic and social policies.

And they all produce hollow, gnawing feelings in the innards of New Zealanders.

When will we ever learn?
(Sisyphus shows the way)

In Part I of this post I outlined the historical context of our modern education system and argued that  National Standards were a continuation of the controlling and directive imperatives of that system.

In Part II I described the nature of National Standards, their justification and how they would be implemented.

In this final part, I address the most important question – What is wrong with National Standards?

Or,

Are National Standards up to standard?

It’s pretty clear from the documentation that National Standards ‘double down’ on the directing and controlling aspects of education that have been at the heart of modern schooling since its inception.

But there’s a subtler point to be made about what this rhetoric indicates about the actual – as opposed to claimed – role of National Standards.

The role is not, in fact, to enhance learning – or the capacity to learn (‘learning how to learn’). It is about directing learning to achieve a progression within a subject area.

This may come as a surprise to many people – including, perhaps, some people in the Ministry of Education – but the two processes are not the same.

Indeed, it is claimed in the pamphlet that explains National Standards to parents that the National Standards have been developed by the Ministry of Education and “subject experts” rather than ‘learning experts’. So it might not be that surprising that the learning process hardly rates a mention – all that matters are the ‘required next steps’ in subject progression.

There’s a further, related, point that serves as the essential justification for National Standards in reading, writing and mathematics for children at such young ages.

In the same pamphlet for parents, a claim is made that is deemed so important that it has a stand-out graphic to itself:

For many parents too, the apparent realities of this world make it self-evident that children must be educated right from the start in the ‘Three Rs’ for their own good. To many – far too many – people, these are the ‘building blocks’ of learning. Therefore, only through a (gently?) coercive approach will children ultimately gain what it takes to succeed in our world, so popular opinion has it.

And, in this view, National Standards are simply one way that parents can be assured that just this process is occurring – Michael Laws, for one, seems to see it this way.

But is it true that this process is a necessity? Is it the only way to ensure that children have a good chance in life? Peter Gray (2013, p. 42), again:

When we see that children today are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we naturally assume that there must be some good, logical reason for all of this. Perhaps if we didn’t force children to go to school, or if schools operated differently, children would grow up to be incompetent in our modern world. Perhaps educational experts have figured all this out, or perhaps alternative methods of allowing children to develop have been tested and have failed.

The reality, as I will show later, is that alternative ways have been tested and have succeeded. Children’s instincts for self-directed learning can work today as well as they ever did. When provided with freedom and opportunity, children can and do educate themselves marvellously for our modern world. The schools that we see around us are not products of science and logic; they are products of history.

And this leads to the second error with the claim of the educational priority of the ‘Three Rs’: The fundamental skills for all learning are not reading, writing and maths. The most fundamental are autonomy and motivation (the latter in the form of curiosity or fascination).

Learning is, in essence, a motivational rather than a cognitive process. Autonomy – allied with motivation – allows the expression of motivated exploration and the consequent acquisition of (deep) learning.

A lack of autonomy and control over behaviour reduces motivation (or increases avoidant or resistant behaviours). It’s a wonder such basic principles of behaviour and learning need to be reiterated. But they do.

Ever since our social and economic system moved away from the knowledge- and skill-intensive life of the hunter-gatherer it has had to do battle with children and their natural ways of learning.

The enemies of our education system, unsurprisingly, are therefore just those core aspects of human nature identified by Gray (2013) as being the essential and natural means of self-education - curiosity; playfulness; and, sociability. For modern education to work, all of these must be either minimised or managed lest they interfere with children learning what is required.

Here’s how the supposed efficacy of National Standards will side-step questions of autonomy and motivation.

According to the official explanation, National Standards will allow children – as well as teachers and parents – to know what next steps are required in their learning. That is, children will possess a cognition or belief about what is needed to progress. By tracking and monitoring “achievement” and ”progress“, so the idea goes, children will understand (i.e., have cognitive clarity over) what they need to learn next and, hence, will continue to progress. As the Fact Sheet puts it,

Reporting against a standard will enable teachers, parents, and students themselves to see if a student is achieving at a level that enables them to engage in learning right now, as well as make the progress they need for success throughout schooling.

It’s a simple idea – feedback enables improvement. It’s simple and it’s rational (and, usefully, you don’t even have to mention motivation). But is it correct?

Well, there’s a lot of psychological research on this topic and the answer to the question is not straightforward – or, better, the result of monitoring and ‘feedback’ depends on the starting point of participants.

Peter Gray (2013, p. 132) describes a famous study by Michaels et al. (1982) (Full reference = Michaels, J.W., Blommel, J.M., Brocato, R.M., Linkous, R.A. and Rowe, J.S. (1982) Social facilitation and inhibition in a natural setting, Replications in Social Psychology, 2, 21-24). The researchers,

hung around a pool hall in a university student center and watched friendly games of eight ball. At first they observed unobtrusively and counted the percentage of successful shots that each player made, in order to categorize players as experts or novices. They then moved closer and began watching in a way that made it obvious to the players that they were evaluating their performances.

…

Here’s what they found: close observation caused the experts to perform better than they did without observation, but it had the opposite effect on the novices. All in all, the average success rate of the experts rose from 71 percent up to 80 percent under observation, while that for novices fell from 36 percent to 25 percent.

The findings have been replicated and generalised to a wide variety of other tasks. In particular,

When research subjects believe their performance is being observed and evaluated, those who are already skilled become better and those who are not so skilled become worse. The debilitating effects of being observed and evaluated have been found to be even greater for mental tasks, such as solving difficult math problems or generating good rebuttals to the views of classical philosophers.

[It's not part of this post, proper, but there's even an interesting confound between test motivation and IQ test scores.

As the linked study demonstrates, those of below-average baseline IQ - i.e., those who prior to the study scored low on IQ tests - under incentive conditions showed an improvement of 0.96 SD (standard deviations). That's remarkable. Those of above average baseline IQ also showed improvement under incentive conditions but only of 0.26 SD. Prior to the study, performance on IQ scores were being disproportionately constrained by low test motivation for those who gained lower IQ scores than for those who gained higher IQ scores.

IQ score, as the article also makes clear, is not the same as the latent variable 'intelligence' - in case you were wondering. Here's a short extract from the discussion:

And, from the conclusion:

I’ll let you consider what these results might mean for performance against National Standards.]

We might not expect young children to be”generating good rebuttals to the views of classical philosophers“, but National Standards certainly involve them being observed and evaluated when solving mathematics problems (and reading and writing).

And this monitoring process is not envisaged as a covert form of observation. Quite the reverse – as already discussed, the children are to be made well aware of their “progress” so that it can be made clear to them “what they need to learn next“.

Given that a good part of the justification for introducing National Standards is to do with the so-called ‘long tail’ of underachieving students, it is remarkable that those standards explicitly embody a monitoring and assessment strategy well known – from psychological research – to exacerbate initial inequalities in ‘expertise’, or ‘achievement’. ‘Novices’ will not do well under observation.

Once again, Gray (2013, p. 133) says it so much better:

with their incessant monitoring and evaluation of students’ performance, schools seem to be ideally designed to boost the performances of those who are already good and to interfere with learning. Those who have somehow already learned the school tasks, maybe at home, generally perform well in this setting, but those who haven’t tend to flounder. Evaluation drives a wedge between those who already know how and those who don’t, pushing the former up and the latter down.

It gets worse.

We are, today, almost incessantly told that creativity and innovation are the keys to success in the modern economy – whether as individuals or as nations. An interesting study of rates of creativity in succeeding generations of American children was recently reported  by Kyung Hee Kim (2011) – (see her own outline of the research here). Briefly, on all sub-measures of creativity, the evidence is that it is declining in the United States – supposedly the Western home of creativity and innovation.

There’s an interesting comment from James T. Weiner, a research colleague of Kim’s, in the comments section of that link:

I think we as Americans are lucky though.. we started in a much better place .. relatively high creativity .. so they [Asian and European societies] have a ways to go to catch up. I like the quote attributable one prominant [sic] creativity researcher: “All schools and organizations tend to crush creativity, here in the US we just tend to crush it less“. Of course that comment was made many years ago before KHK’s discovery of the declines in creativity in the US over the last 20 years.

That same point was pursued by Peter Gray in a blogpost on the website ‘Psychology Today‘:

According to Kim’s research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average Elaboration score on the TTCT [Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking], for every age group from kindergarten through 12^th grade, fell by more than 1 standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984.  Yikes.

What about the TTCT? How important is it?

The best evidence that the Torrance Tests really do measure creative potential come from longitudinal research showing strong, statistically significant correlations between childhood scores on the TTCT and subsequent real-world achievements.[4]  As the authors of one article commenting on these results put it, high scorers “tallied more books, dances, radio shows, art exhibits, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed” than did those who scored lower.[5]

Gray’s explanation of the creativity decline? It’s a bit predictable:

Well, surprise, surprise.  For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.

Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today.

Is it really true that “[c]reativity is nurtured by freedom“? Sadly, yes.

Theresa Amabile (along with often-times co-worker Beth Hennessy) is probably one of the most known names in creativity research. In 2010, for example, Hennessy and Amabile provided a review of creativity research for the pre-eminent psychological journal Annual Review of Psychology.

In a long career researching creativity, Amabile and her colleagues have demonstrated an unusual but vital fact: Any pressure to be creative, including provision of ‘incentives’, undermines creativity. As Gray (2013, p. 134), correctly, summarises her results:

In experiment after experiment, the most creative products were made by those who were in the non-incentive condition – the ones who worked under the impression that their products would not be evaluated or entered into contests and who were not offered any prizes.

As Hennessy and Amabile (2010, p. 599) concluded (as point 6 of their summary) in their review of creativity research,

6. People are most creative when they are motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself—i.e., by intrinsic motivation.

More fully – on page 581,

In short, people are more creative when they are simply ‘playing’. Being monitored and evaluated doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to creativity – and creativity predicts life success better than IQ.

(Perhaps that’s why this column recently appeared in Forbes magazine - In defense of skipping college and enrolling in the real world.)

I said ‘unusual’ because we are used to thinking that external ‘incentives’, in particular, improve performance (In fact, if you read the ‘aside’ above about intelligence testing, external incentives were just what improved IQ test performance – though performance on an IQ test is not necessarily ‘creative’.)

To be honest, there was a very heated debate in the literature over this point as to whether or not external incentives (rewards) reduced creativity. It’s a bit complicated, but revealing in relation to discussion of National Standards.

Eisenberger and Cameron (1996 in the journal American Psychologist) – two psychologists from the behaviourist tradition – claimed that rewards only undermine intrinsic motivation and creativity under very limited conditions - principally, when non-specific instructions as to ‘what is understood as creative’ by those asking for creativity are provided (i.e., ‘merely’ instructions to be creative or to ‘try your best’ without specifying just what you wanted).

This was then refuted by Hennessy and Amabile (1998) and, inevitably, Eisenberger and Cameron (1998) responded to that refutation – and those of others.

But, so far as understanding National Standards and their likely effect on creativity is concerned, here’s the ‘take-away’ from Eisenberger and Cameron (1998):

In our article (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996), we suggested that the decremental effects of reward on creativity were due to cues indicating that conventional performance was desirable; moreover, we reported that an explicit contingency between reward and creative performance increased creativity.

Participants in studies reporting a decremental effect of reward on creativity are not typically given explicit information that conventional performance is desirable, leading Hennessey and Amabile (1998, this issue) to question how conventional performance is cued. According to learned industriousness theory (Eisenberger, 1992), individuals learn the type of performance for which they are rewarded (e.g., speed, accuracy, or novelty) and generalize such learning to new tasks. Because daily experience more frequently rewards various types of conventional performance than novel responding, people who are promised a reward for nonspecific performance may fail to respond creatively. Amabile (1982), for instance, asked children to construct a collage and told them that the best collages would receive a monetary award but did not specify what aspect of collage performance would be assessed. These children constructed collages judged less creative, though better planned and organized, and more representational than the collages produced by a control group that received no promise of reward. Importantly, in the past, the children may have been rewarded more frequently at school for the organization and graphic realism of their artwork than for originality. As a result, the promise of reward for unspecified performance in Amabile’s study may have elicited conventional performance rather than creativity.

If you followed that discussion, you’ll realise that Eisenberger and Cameron (1998) were basically saying that without telling people (e.g., ‘children’) that you want something novel they’ll default to what they’ve learnt people want (e.g., from school) - conventional performance. 

Further, their point is that there’s no such thing as spontaneous creativity. If you want it, you have to explicitly request it and ‘incentivise’ it. And you have to specify what it involves (e.g., ‘novelty’). Creativity on demand.

Well, maybe in our society, with our educational system, that’s true. But that pretty much means that creativity is generally squashed by the way we educate people and treat them generally – as Kyung Hee Kim found in the US.

If you want the – pretty much – final word on this then read pages 581-582 in Hennessy and Amabile (2010). It lays it all out neatly.

External incentives only work for relatively repetitive or clear, straightforward tasks (including the request to ‘be novel’) – when they work at all. Otherwise, they interfere with spontaneous, creative solutions.

As Hennessy and Amabile (1998) Reality, intrinsic motivation and creativity argued, just following instructions – ‘be novel’ – is not what we mean by creativity, in ‘Reality’.

Creativity can never be a requirement.

By contrast, creating conditions which induce a positive mood – largely by reducing the seriousness of a task setting – generally seems to improve creativity and insightful problem solving.

This was first established in a famous study by Alice Isen. The simple manipulation of showing one group of students a five minute humorous film, a second group a serious film about mathematics and a third group no film prior to presenting them with a classic problems in creative problem solving (including the famous ‘candle test’ by Duncker) produced stunning results: Seventy five percent of the first group successfully completed the task while only 23 and 17 percent in the second and third groups, respectively, were successful.

Overall, according to Hennessy and Amabile (2010, p. 574):

Despite the good press for creativity and widespread belief that it is a ‘good thing’ in business and society as a whole, creativity in the classroom has hardly been studied, according to Hennessy and Amabile (2010):

Learning all about National Standards in Five Easy Steps

[Apologies, but this post is now in three parts, not just two - this is Part II. Part III should be up by the time you read this.]

Who’s afraid of National Standards?

In Part I of this post, I argued that National Standards are best seen in the context of the history of the modern education system. Looked at from that perspective, I claimed, National Standards are just the current manifestation of the core purpose of modern education – the attempt to control and direct the learning of children and ‘fit’ them to the economic and social system.

They are a significant further step towards the control of learning rather than its liberation.

But how valid is that claim? Are National Standards really that concerning? Aren’t they just a useful means to help children reach their potential in our society?

Certainly, if National Standards have any justification it has to be that they will help children – aged five to twelve years old – to learn.

There’s good reasons, though, to think that they’ll achieve the opposite, sometimes in perverse ways. All those reasons revolve around the directive pedagogy that sits like a great, motivation-sucking bog at the base of National Standards.

Not that you could tell that there was anything to worry about from the feel good – sometimes thickly-sweet – words that permeate the official documentation about National Standards. That sticky covering has to be removed step-by-step to understand just what the standards are likely to ‘achieve’.

To start with, then, there are quite a few questions that need asking- and answering – just to prepare the ground. Only after they’ve been answered can the standards’ educational worth be laid bare and compared to what is known about how people learn.

• What are National Standards?
• What is their claimed purpose?
• What do National Standards assume about the process of learning?
• How are teachers meant to make judgments (assessments) of children’s ‘learning’ against the standards?
• What are children meant to make of these judgments (assessments)?

A good place to start to answer those questions is (presumably) the information on National Standards from the Ministry of Education.

It’s a little bit complicated (i.e., extraordinarily complicated) to navigate around the information on the various websites so just how far down the labyrinthine rabbit hole you wish to go, I’ll leave to you. The two main sites (but by no means only ones) are the Ministry of Education website (Parents section is here) and the New Zealand Curriculum Online website.

Across these websites there’s information for parents and for ‘educators‘; there are resources for ‘training’ teachers in how to implement National Standards; there’s a series of modules for teachers on how to link the New Zealand Curriculum, National Standards and teaching practice; there are fact sheets on National Standards; there are ‘good news’ puff pieces on how ‘successful’ the whole process is (the last of these stories was in October, 2011 – coinciding with the end of the push to get schools to participate en masse – and was heroically titled ‘National Standards: A Journey of Continual Improvement‘); and there is a lot more.

So what does all of this information tell us about the answers to the questions above?

What are National Standards?

Well, Mary Chamberlain (Group Manager, Curriculum Teaching and Learning – Design) is keen to emphasise that National Standards are not norms or criteria. As she says,

Students’ learning and achievement can be assessed in relation to norms, criteria or standards. All are useful for different purposes.

Norm-referenced assessment shows how students are achieving compared to others of the same age group at a given point in time. Such tests usually provide results in percentiles or stanines.

Criterion-referenced assessment shows what students can or can’t do in relation to a list of tasks or skills. Teachers’ judgments are about whether the student has achieved each skill or task. When writing for example, a student may be able to succeed at each task or skill but still not be able to write a compelling piece which meets the needs of an audience.

Saying that ‘we’ ( the government and Ministry) have learned from overseas practice and to acknowledge criticisms about the dangers of ‘teaching to the test’ and tick-box learning is a clever move. It neatly disarms – rhetorically, rather than in practice (I’ll come back to this point) – such criticisms by claiming, simply, that National Standards are just not like that.

OK, so that’s what the standards aren’t. What are they?

Standards-referenced assessment shows what a student can do in relation to broad descriptions, supported by exemplars of expected achievement. The descriptions are broader than criteria. Each standard has a number of components that students need to bring together to achieve the standard. Teachers’ judgments are an ‘on-balance judgment’ on the work as a whole.

Basically, then, a standard is a specification of something a child is expected to be able to do (with texts or numbers) each year, progressively. What they are expected to do each year is, first, described in words and, second, illustrated with an example. (See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?). And, according to Ms Chamberlain, achieving the standard is an outcome of a holistic assessment of aptitude. Sounds good.

If you look through the standards for reading and writing and mathematics (available to download on this page) you will indeed see these “broad descriptions” and a number of “exemplars [illustrations] of expected achievement“, one for each year.

For now, it’s worth highlighting that the combination of ‘broad’ (vague?) description, illustrative examples and supposed holistic assessment shifts a considerable burden of judgment onto the teacher for implementation of the standards. (Once again, I’ll return to this point.)

If that’s what National Standards are, why have they been introduced?

What is their claimed purpose?

This is where it starts to get ‘sticky’ – and perverse.

The ‘big picture’ purpose is the ‘long tail’, the “[n]early one in five of our young people [who] leave school without the skills and qualifications they need to succeed” as Anne Tolley, then Minister of Education, pointed out in a National Standards Information for Schools pamphlet (downloadable here).

Mary Chamberlain, in the first of this series of short videos, put it even more plainly:

when we compare ourselves with the other high performing countries we have got the longest tail of underachievement and the kinds of children who are in that tail of underachievement pose some problems for us as well. They tell us that we are not serving the needs of our Māori and Pasifika students. There are numbers of those students in the high performing, but the system is not actually helping them in the same way as it’s helping all the other students, because they’re over represented in that tail. We’ve also got an issue in sheer numbers, it’s the number of Pakeha boys in that tail.

The ‘tail’ is the issue – specifically, the performance of Maori and Pasifika children, and Pakeha boys. Apparently, National Standards will improve the performance of these groups.

How?

It will do this through the fortuitous convergence of two principal processes: Through how the teachers make judgments (assessments) of children’s achievement against the standards; and, through the children realising that the standards represent what they need to know and then working out – with the teacher and using the teacher’s judgments (assessments) of ‘where they are at‘ - just what they need to do next to achieve them or to achieve the next standard.

Simple: Here’s your goal; here’s ‘where you are at’; this is what you need to do to get from ‘where you are at’ to the goal. Agree? Ready to ‘own your own learning’?

One central assumption here seems to be that it doesn’t matter at all who sets the goal. That’s telling.

Which leads to the question of what educational theory lies beneath National Standards.

What do National Standards assume about the process of learning?

Underpinning National Standards and the New Zealand Curriculum is an explicit pedagogy.

The ‘Effective Pedagogy‘ underpinning the New Zealand Curriculum is particularly revealing. That pedagogy, it is claimed, is based upon “extensive, well-documented evidence about the kinds of teaching approaches that consistently have a positive impact on student learning“.

It doesn’t specify if this evidence is based upon educational systems that are compulsory and classroom-based but presumably it is, given that it is being applied in such settings. If so, it tells us little about evidence based upon research outside of such settings where learning can happen guided only by the curiosity of the child (or adult). That is, it passes by the wealth of evidence about the everyday, autonomous, often play-based learning that children have always done as human beings.

In short, it tells us about effective instruction techniques towards pre-determined performance rather than the process of human learning.

Here’s an interesting passage from the ‘Effective Pedagogy’ document:

Enhancing the relevance of new learning

Students learn most effectively when they understand what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will be able to use their new learning. Effective teachers stimulate the curiosity of their students, require them to search for relevant information and ideas, and challenge them to use or apply what they discover in new contexts or in new ways. They look for opportunities to involve students directly in decisions relating to their own learning. This encourages them to see what they are doing as relevant and to take greater ownership of their own learning.

Read that paragraph a couple of times. When I did, I ended up bolding just about all of it (as you can see).

There’s something that is eerily absent in amongst this host of words that seem to be saying everything positive about learning.

The unacknowledged spirit floating invisibly behind this avalanche of worthy educational virtues is the hollow spectre of external control of the learning process.

Look at the first sentence in that paragraph. The one thing not mentioned about how students (i.e., children) “learn most effectively” is their autonomy and, its close relative, intrinsic motivation. This is a remarkable absence, given how the research on learning emphasises just these characteristics of effective learning.

These two vital ingredients for ‘effective’ or ‘deep’ learning – as Peter Gray (2013) calls it – cannot be mentioned for a very simple reason: ‘education’ has to happen irrespective of their (initial) presence or absence.

To be honest, they’re not completely forgotten in this pedagogy.

To fill this immense omission from the learning process, teachers are in effect called upon to substitute for it.

Hence, it is the teachers who must “stimulate the curiosity of their students“, “require them to search for relevant information“, “challenge them to use or apply what they discover in new contexts or in new ways“,  ”look for opportunities to involve students directly in decisions relating to their own learning“, “encourage them to see what they are doing as relevant” and “to take greater ownership of their own learning“. 

Once teachers have managed to enact this series of miracles on the mixed bag of reluctant, attentive, bemused, conscientious and often unmotivated children in their classes it will almost be as if autonomy and intrinsic motivation had been there all along in the ‘educational’ process.

If teachers don’t work these miracles then, clearly, it’s a problem with them and their teaching. The fact that it might actually be a problem with the fundamentally coercive pedagogy is a possibility too impolite to voice – at least in Ministry of Education documentation.

And this is where National Standards enter the picture. They formalise this coercive pedagogy into year-by-year, bite-size chunks. Like the coloured bars that get filled when installing software on a computer, National Standards supposedly tell teachers, parents and children how quickly the educational software is loading.

That might sound as if the children are passive in the process. But, apparently, this couldn’t be further from the truth. It is central to the approach that children will be active learners – at least once the pedagogy has worked its magic.

On this point, the ‘Expectations’ section of the ‘Effective Literacies‘ page on the Ministry of Education website makes for further interesting, if somewhat Orwellian, reading,

The National Standards make explicit the levels of reading and writing expertise that students are expected to reach. They are high but attainable standards based on consistent expectations for learning. The standards will enable students, as well as their teachers, families, and whānau, to develop a better understanding of the kinds of reading and writing that are required at each step of their learning pathway [entirely paved by subject experts].

This understanding will help students to become active and autonomous as they engage with texts. They will know what is required, and so they will be able to select and use texts to meet their own strengths, interests, and learning needs. Knowing what is required empowers students to make connections between what they already know and what they need to do in order to continue making progress.

It is hard to know quite what to say in the face of such rhetorical gymnastics. [That's one reason I extracted the phrase highlighted in red for the sub-title of this post.]

Students, apparently, are being helped to “become active and autonomous” by virtue of them knowing “what is required“.

Given that children are “active and autonomous” learners long before they so much as come within sniffing distance of a school, it is surprising that the thinking behind National Standards seems to assume that these are skills that are lacking and, so, must be nurtured by the educational system.

Of course, they aren’t lacking. But, by the time children have been in the educational system for a few years they may be in quite short supply – certainly for the kinds of ‘learning’ that schools, via National Standards, now require.

The kind of “active and autonomous” learning referred to here is clearly meant to be highly constrained and subordinate to the specifications of those in charge of their education – which is, obviously, not the “active and autonomous” students themselves.

Instead, educators need to track ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’, via National Standards, in order to aid students  to become autonomous learners of what is required. Assessment – regular, systematic and measured against standards not derived by the students themselves – is the means to this end.

And assessment, ‘naturally’, requires teachers to make judgments.

How are teachers meant to make judgments of children’s ‘learning’ against the standards?

The Ministry of Education has provided a pamphlet for parents about National Standards and why they are being implemented. The pamphlet highlights for parents the uses to which teachers will (or are meant to) put National Standards:

• plan and teach what your child needs to learn in reading, writing and maths across all curriculum subjects
• work out where your child is at
• work out your child’s next learning steps and set goals for learning, together with you and your child
• report clearly at least twice a year to you about your child’s progress and achievement in relation to the standards.

It’s clear from these points that the teachers’ judgments about children’s progress in relation to National Standards are seen as vital to the whole educational process. They determine the teaching that happens, the ‘next learning steps’ laid out and the content of reports to parents about their children’s learning.

So how do teachers make the judgments?

Back to Mary Chamberlain:

When a teacher makes a judgment about student progress and achievement relative to the standards they are making an overall teacher judgment (OTJ) about the quality of the work. They are making a judgment not only about the discrete knowledge and skills a student has learnt [which is the concern in assessment by criteria mentioned earlier], but about what students can do with what they have learnt [supposedly encompassed by the 'broad descriptions' in the National Standards] to successfully meet complex demands across a range of real life situations.

Teachers’ judgments are supported by:

• ongoing daily interactions with students
• how students’ work compares to exemplars (examples of the quality of work required to meet each standard)
• results from assessment tools, tasks and activities.

There’s more detail about Overall Teacher Judgments (OTJs) in this link.

As is explained there, OTJs involve processes of “confirming dependability [through triangulation of information]“, “moderation [by other teachers]” and “student participation“. [The last process - 'student participation' - is returned to in the next section].

The OTJs, ultimately, are about whether or not what the student can do aligns with the standard deemed appropriate for their year level in the system (i.e., is ‘at the standard’):

If the balance of evidence shows the student’s achievement is:

• in a year level above a National Standard, the student’s achievement will be described as above the National Standard
• predominantly meeting the expectations at a year level, the student’s achievement will be described as at the National Standard
• not achieving at a National Standard, but achieving closer to the National Standard immediately below, the student’s achievement will be described as below the National Standard
• more than one year below a National Standard, the student’s achievement will be described as well below the National Standard.

In amongst all of this holistic determination of achievement through OTJs, what is the role of tests and other ‘norm- or externally-referenced assessment tools’?

As most people know, this is a controversial point as it potentially opens National Standards to criticisms of providing an incentive for schools to ‘teach to the test’. It’s also why, as discussed above, Mary Chamberlain was keen to differentiate the standards from norm-referenced or criterion-based assessment.

But, in practice, just how different are National Standards from these other two approaches to learning and assessment?

The Fact Sheet on ‘The Role of Formal Assessment Tools‘ provides considerable insight into this question. First, it reiterates that it “is a well accepted assessment principle that no one single source of information can provide an unequivocally accurate summary of a student’s achievement“.

Second, it acknowledges that adopting a standardised assessment tool,

has the associated risk of inadvertently promoting the management of the appearance of achievement and progress, rather than promoting authentic teaching approaches which rely on a strong learner focus and quality professional judgment.

That’s reassuring. After all, no-one would want merely “the appearance of achievement and progress” (i.e., ‘teaching to the test’). Yet, there are other comments about the assessment process and use of norm-referenced tools that are less reassuring about whether or not this will be avoided in the case of National Standards.

At the bottom of the same Fact Sheet there’s a paragraph titled “Will teachers be required to use norm-referenced assessment tools?“. Within it a certain tension emerges:

Although there is no legislated requirement to use any specific assessment tools, NAG [National Administration Guidelines] 1 includes a requirement that schools, through a range of assessment practices, gather information that is sufficiently comprehensive to enable the progress and achievement of students to be evaluated.

Research in assessment indicates that assessment information should be drawn from a comprehensive range of diverse sources including at least one norm-referenced or externally-referenced tool. Such tools (tests, tasks, reading series, other scenarios such as diagnostic interviews), if used appropriately, will provide an external reference point against which teachers can weigh up their professional judgment across a range of assessment information in order to reach an overall teacher judgment (OTJ) that is valid and defensible.

‘Valid and defensible’? Suddenly, there is the strong implication that the much-lauded OTJs have to be valid and defensible in relation to an “external reference point“.

Further, there is apparently a “range of well established norm-referenced or externally-referenced” tools available in New Zealand and many schools are using them already “because they recognise the contribution these tools make to good assessment practice“.

And, the Ministry is being very helpful in “actively developing an ongoing programme to align these tools to the standards“.

Imagine this scenario: Two schools report on National Standards to the Ministry. One bases its report on the results of implementing one of these “well established norm-referenced or externally-referenced” tools, but mentions little else about how the OTJs underpinning the statistics were derived. The other mentions a range of assessment processes but explicitly states that it did not use any norm-referenced or externally-referenced tests in coming up with the OTJs.

Which report do you think the Ministry might have some ‘concerns’ over?

Perhaps I’m being unkind.

You can ‘Find a School‘ and access its 2011 National Standards report to see what they look like. Here’s two examples (here and here) of a 2011 school report on pupils’ achievement in relation to National Standards (chosen for no other reason than that they are close to my home).

What the reports show are the ‘bare facts’ of the National Standards reporting – Tables of raw numbers and percentages at each year level of pupils who are at various levels in relation to the relevant standard for that year (in writing, reading and mathematics) along with variable amounts of commentary about ‘target groups’ of pupils who need ‘support’ to achieve the standards and other monitoring processes to be adopted, etc..

Behind the fine words in the Ministry documentation about multiple sources of information, multiple processes informing the OTJs, etc. what we are left with are these raw numbers and percentages of children (divided by ethnicity or gender or ESOL or whatever) who are ‘above’, ‘at’, ‘below’ or ‘well below’ National Standards.

Even the commentaries often amount to little more than stating that ‘target groups’ of ‘at risk’ learners have been identified from the data and how further monitoring of these groups will be a priority. Sometimes implementation of certain programmes or use of ‘advisors’ to help with these groups is mentioned.

At the sad heart of these numbers are individual children, aged five to twelve, who – they and their parents have been told – are ‘below’ or ‘well below’ National Standards (in reading, writing or mathematics).

Cue parental anxiety. Cue pressure on the teacher. Cue a child feeling at the mercy of a self-styled benevolent process to ‘accelerate’ his or her ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’ towards the Holy Grail of being ‘at’ National Standards – by the end of the next year.

Which brings me to the children.

What are children meant to make of these judgments (assessments)?

Officially, children are only meant to make good things of these judgments – and it is presumably incumbent on the teachers to ensure that only such good consequences of applying National Standards will arise.

Remember, the child is very much meant to be ‘in’ on the process of making these assessments. This will enable them, ultimately, to ‘own’ their own learning – or something. The documentation is very firm on the importance of student participation in these OTJs.

The Fact Sheet on ‘Assessment for learning‘, for example, argues that “[w]hen students know what their assessment results mean, they are better able to identify their own strengths and needs, and recognise ‘Where to next?’” By doing this they can “take more control of their own learning and become more effective and independent learners“. (This is all consistent with the ‘Effective Pedagogy’ we met earlier.)

In fact, this ‘student participation’ in their own assessment (via the discussions with teachers that inform the OTJs) is so important that it is apparently necessary to follow a process of “building students’ assessment capability“. As the Fact Sheet continues,

Evidence suggests that when students are able to monitor their own work, they are more likely to make progress. To do this well, they need to understand:

• what high quality work looks like (helped by examining examples and models of quality work)
• what criteria define quality work (helped by participation in developing learning goals and assessment criteria)
• how to compare and evaluate their own work against criteria (helped by peer and self-assessment).

In other words, an important part of the learning process, so the story goes, is to learn how to assess yourself against the National Standards. This is the case because the standards just are “what high quality work looks like“.

Just like the teacher, you – the child – need to internalise the standards and guide your ‘learning’ by them.

Learning outside the framework of those standards is presumably not really learning at all and simply is a distraction from the learning that is required. Children must come to understand that real learning involves performing for others and meeting the expectations of others.

As I emphasised in the first part of this post, given the historical context of the development of the modern education system that shouldn’t be a surprise. In our society – and in many of its contemporaries and predecessors – the official, institutionalised definition of learning is compliance.

Compliance is the educational air we breathe to the point where it is – almost literally – unthinkable for most people that learning involves anything else. After all, how would anyone ever know that they have learnt anything if there is no-one to judge that they have indeed learnt something?

When compliance is the measure of learning the learner is always – necessarily – subordinated. They are subordinated to what is required of them – what they need to know.

We’ve come a long way since the notion of learning that predominated in the lives of hunter-gatherer children. Then, children learnt through self-directed encounters with the world. It was their task, largely through almost endless play, to discover and perfect the knowledge and skills useful to survive, even thrive.

They practiced those skills and absorbed that knowledge with minimal, if any, social coercion. This was possible because the everyday world of the hunter-gatherer was thoroughly permeated with strong cues (and clues) about what was ‘required’ (i.e., useful) knowledge and skills. With autonomy and curiosity as native instincts, children mastered a massive range of adaptive skills and knowledge about their world simply through interacting with it.

It’s worth reiterating that the way of life of a hunter-gatherer was, and is, skill and knowledge intensive. Compared with what was required of individuals then, today most people get by on far fewer skills and far less knowledge – and certainly a far smaller proportion of their culture’s knowledge (Gray, 2013, p. 30):

It would be a mistake to assume that because hunter-gatherer cultures are ‘simpler’ than ours, children in those cultures have less to learn than do our children. The hunting-and-gathering way of life is extra-ordinarily knowledge- and skill-intensive, and because of the relative absence of occupational specialisation, each child has to acquire essentially the whole culture, or at least that part of it appropriate to his or her gender.

One of the great ironies of modern, compulsory education is that it is because we have less to learn than did hunter-gatherers that we have to be made to comply with what is required in our learning.

It’s time to dismantle the educational worth of National Standards.

[To be continued ...]

Update: For those who were quick to read this post you will have noticed that I had ‘Part III’ included here. My intention was to split it. I have done that and so deleted that part of the post from here. It is now its own post – Part III.

Puddleglum

National Standards – just another brick in the wall?

“School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.” - Ivan Illich

There’s an interesting opinion piece by archaeologist April Nowell in a recent ‘New Scientist‘ – ‘All work and no play: Why Neanderthals were no Picasso‘ (In the print version – week of 23 February, 2013 – the title is ‘All work and no play left little time for art‘, pp. 28-29).

Nowell’s ‘Big Idea’-  as the opinion piece page is called – is basically that Neanderthals lacked a rich, symbolic experience (art, language, music, etc.) largely because they had short childhoods and, vitally, therefore little in the way of free play:

WATCHING a group of 5-year-olds chasing each other in a park it is easy to forget that child’s play is a serious business. Through play children figure out how to interact socially, practice problem-solving and learn to innovate, skills that will be indispensable to them as adults. But if experiences gained during play are so crucial for cognitive development, what would it mean if a species had a shorter childhood [as Neanderthals appeared to have]?

Play, freedom and the self-organising structure that emerges from that, according to Nowell, is part of what gave our species the creative and innovative advantage over Neanderthals – and this despite the latter’s rapid increase in brain size to the point that it was larger than an average Homo sapiens‘ brain at adulthood.

Basically, our brains evolved – were ‘designed’ – to grasp the cognitive opportunities provided by free exploration. Faculties of curiosity and inquisitive exploration, along with humans’ inherent sociability, combined as the mechanisms by which young humans autonomously - that is, in an almost entirely self-directed way – mastered the complex natural environments and social worlds they were born in to.

There was precious little deliberate instruction available even if it was desired. In fact, what is known of the hunter-gatherer parenting style leads to it often being called ‘indulgent’ or, more positively, ‘trusting’ (e.g., see this extract from Jared Diamond’s latest book ‘The World Until Yesterday‘).

Yet, that was apparently our edge over Neanderthals – the open-ended exploration of life, governed autonomously by each individual’s own curiosity. For humans, that has always been just what it is to learn. And, presumably, it worked well enough.

But then came National Standards …

To be honest, then came the origins of what we now call ‘education’, and it wasn’t a pretty sight right from its very beginnings – at least from the child’s point of view.

Of course, we’ve come a long way – civilisation and all that - since outcompeting Neanderthals with our self-directed, creative ingenuity and symbolic, cognitive acrobatics. In the interim, humans have managed to invent horticulturalism; farming; social stratification and hierarchies; empires; feudal systems; slavery; colonialism; industrialisation; urbanisation; consumerism; hi-tech; low-brow; nation states; mass media; social media – oh, yes, and democracy.

So perhaps there’s little point worrying about how hunter-gatherers learnt how to learn to solve their particular problems?

Things – and problems – are different now. Aren’t they?

The world is now more complex. Isn’t it?

We can’t expect our children to still learn the way hunter-gatherer children did. Can we?

To get to grips with these interesting questions, and to see what National Standards is really all about, this post is in two parts. In Part I (this post) a brief outline of two current approaches to education is first provided. Then, the origins and history of modern education are laid out to find out how we got to these views of education.

Only then will it make sense, in Part II of this post, to inspect the details of National Standards and how they supposedly help to ‘improve achievement’, ‘accelerate learning’ and ensure the ‘educational progress’ of children.

In the end, this analysis highlights a current tension – and dilemma – that’s right at the heart of our education system: ‘How can you ‘educate’ for creativity, independence, flexibility and self-motivated learning given that our education system has always assumed its right to specify not only educational outcomes but also the rate at which they should be achieved?’

Put another way- and using Nowell’s insights – ‘How do you get the best out of Homo sapiens from an education system that is probably more suitable for training Neanderthals?’

And sitting at the centre of this dilemma is perhaps the most disturbing – but often unacknowledged or discussed – fact of all.

It’s what Peter Gray (2013, p. 67) – an evolutionary developmental psychologist and author of the book ‘Free to Learn‘ – describes as “the big fat elephant sitting in the middle of the room, crushing the children.” Simply, “Children don’t like school because to them school is – dare I say it – prison.”

It may not be a point we would like to acknowledge – and perhaps should not say out loud ‘in front of the children’ – but what else could you call the compulsory detainment of children and the daily supervision and monitoring of their activity? It may be ‘minimum security’ but, when push comes to shove, there are serious, state-enforced sanctions against continual absence from school. Not an easy issue to face, especially in modern, liberal democracies.

This dilemma facing the modern education system is interesting in another way – it has distinct similarities with the same tension in our economy (‘how do you get workers to be maximally creative, innovative and to show initiative while, ultimately, they work at others’ behest?’). That similarity is not surprising since, as most informed people are aware, the educational process and the economic process have always been intimately entwined – each reproducing the other.

Seen in this broad context, National Standards are simply the latest means to regulate the conditioning of the next generation to fit the economy. In the great debate between education as work-readiness or education as the development of human potential, National Standards sit squarely on the former side.

Here, for example, is part of the justification for the Mathematics Standards for Years 1-8 (p. 8 – document can be downloaded from this page):

‘Education’? No, it’s still the economy … stupid.

At the end of it all, we need to decide if we primarily want to teach children what Ivan Illich called “the need to be taught” – and all that follows from that primary lesson?

Or, alternatively, do we want to let them realise that they can teach themselves – with all the sense of potency, competence and self-confidence that provides – and that we’ll help them do that as best we can?

To begin, then: What is education?

‘Educating Rita’ in Today’s World

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”  – Agatha Christie

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”  – William Butler Yeats

It’s often acknowledged that there are at least two broad approaches to education.

The first  - ‘directed instruction‘ – is about using various means to fill a child’s mind with the requisite knowledge and skills. In this approach, it is usually assumed that (a) the child doesn’t know what it needs to know (appropriate adults – educationalists and politicians – do); and, (b) the child lacks either the motivation or the skills (or both) to acquire what it needs to know.

Hence, education is a process of transmitting the knowledge or skills from those who have them to those who don’t. Unfortunately for all involved, the recipients of this type of education may not want this knowledge or these skills (right now, at least) so may, in addition, have to be taught to be ‘motivated’ to learn them.

The second approach assumes that learning – and therefore education – is primarily the result of a discovery process – so-called ‘discovery learning‘. As Winne and Nesbit (Annual Review of Psychology, 2010. 61:653–78) explained, discovery learning,

Discovery learning, to be blunt, is currently ‘sexy’. It has a considerable number of advocates and, increasingly, is seen as a ‘student-centred’ and ‘self-directed’ form of learning. It is also seen as being strong on motivating students and to allow them to ‘own’ their learning.

But, even this educational philosophy only goes so far when it comes to the autonomy of the child over his or her own education. Winne and Nesbit (2010, p. 667), for example, cite a definition of discovery learning provided by another author:

That is, even this most ‘liberal’ of mainstream educational approaches ultimately sets itself the goal of ‘filling the pail’ of the child’s mind with what is needed (or, ‘intended’). Both directed instruction and discovery learning, that is, agree on assumption (a), above: the child doesn’t know what it needs to know (appropriate adults – educationalists and politicians – do).

Significantly, discovery learning – especially when it involves no guidance or minimal guidance – has also been criticised as ineffective, in comparison with directed instruction, at least for its success at realising these ‘intended concepts’.

In a famous review of discovery learning by Mayer (2004) in the journal American Psychologist, he went so far as to describe it as being “like some zombie that keeps returning from its grave” (p. 17). Why? Well, as Winne and Nesbit (2010, p. 668) elaborated,

Once again, discovery learning is here being judged against how effective it is at achieving educational goals imposed on the child by those who know what the child needs to know. Discovery learning, that is, is being judged by how well the child discovers the ‘intended concepts’.

In the minimally (or un-) guided discovery process, it appears there is no guarantee that the child will ‘cognitively engage’ with these “educational goals“. Presumably, there’s a threat that they might either ‘cognitively engage’ with some ‘educational goal’ of their own choosing or – perhaps less worryingly – not ‘cognitively engage’ with the activity at all.

Importantly, advocates of discovery learning – in the final analysis – generally accept this framing of the process of education. Like a teacher who seems to ask an open question but has in mind a quite definite answer, ‘discovery learning’, as an educational approach, reflexively subordinates itself to the assumption that there is required – and known – knowledge with which the bucket of the child’s mind must be filled. That knowledge is called, of course, the ‘curriculum’.

I should add that most parents in our society also understand education and schooling in this way. And it is partly for that reason that modern education remains compulsory. (History, interestingly, is full of parental – and certainly child – resistance to this compulsion, not unlike the resistance by agricultural workers to the ‘offer they couldn’t refuse’ to work in factories. Today, however, it is the air we breathe and its legitimacy is rarely questioned by parents.)

The only question worth asking, then, is how did we come to these views of education? When did it all begin?

Getting ‘here’ from ‘there’

If you want a simplified (not simplistic) and insightful introduction to the origins of our compulsory education system you could do worse than read chapter 3, ‘Why Schools are what they are: A brief history of modern education‘ in Peter Gray’s book ‘Free to Learn‘.

Those origins, as Gray describes them, were at the sudden twist in our species’ evolutionary tale when we moved from the life of hunter-gatherers to an agricultural culture:

It [agriculture] altered the conditions of human life in ways that led to the decline of freedom, equality, sharing, and play.

…

The hunter-gatherer way of life was knowledge-intensive and skill-intensive, but not labor intensive. … Moreover, the work of hunting and gathering was exciting and joyful, partly because it was so knowledge-intensive and skill-intensive.

…

Agriculture gradually changed all that. With a steady food supply, people were able to have more children. Agriculture also allowed – or forced – people to live in permanent dwellings near their crops, rather than live as nomads. But these changes came at a great cost to labor. While hunter-gatherers skillfully harvested what nature had grown, farmers had to plow, plant, cultivate, tend their flocks and so on. Successful farming required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labor, much of which could be done by children.

The switch to agriculture, unsurprisingly, led to a general decline in human health (see this interesting excerpt from Professor Mark Cohen’s book ‘Health and the Rise of Civilization‘ or his chapter ‘The emergence of health and social inequalities in the archaeological record‘.  Also, here’s Jared Diamond on ‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race‘).

Height reduced, bodily wear and tear increased (presumably from repetitive labour) as did the incidence of infections (all evidenced by comparative skeletal remains of neighbouring hunter-gatherers and farmers at the time of the first agricultural settlements). Agriculture generated more people and greater protection from starvation (although only initially) but those people were also less well-nourished (more calories but nutrient deficiencies), had to do long, repetitive and strenuous physical labour and – at a guess – were less happy.

When Thomas Hobbes described the state of humanity prior to formal government he penned a far more accurate description of early agricultural life than hunter-gatherer life:

and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

[You may have heard, from Steven Pinker and others, that the 'non-violent' hunter-gatherer life is a myth. In particular, Napoleon Chagnon's (in)famous study of the Yanomami people in Brazil-Venezuela, which was subtitled 'The Fierce People', has been championed as an important piece of evidence of such war-like and violent life in pre-historic hunter-gatherer societies.

It's not part of this post but, if you're interested, you could read a broader account of violence in pre-history here, and a summary of the 'Yanomami scandal', written by the eminent anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis. In addition, the Yanomami may be a tribal people but 'hunter-gatherers'? According to Peter Gray (2013, p. 46) the Yanomami did some hunting and gathering but relied for most of their nutrition on farmed bananas and plantain: "Farming allowed their population density to grow to two or three times what a purely hunter-gatherer way of life could sustain. It also promoted the establishment of relatively permanent villages and the accumulation of property." - see next paragraph.]

According to Gray, agricultural life sowed the seeds of a social form that was more hierarchical, more unequal and more focused on status. Sedentary ways and investment of so much toil in produce meant that a concern for private property also developed (‘Belongings’ are simply a burden in the hunter-gatherer life.):

 Thus, agriculture fostered values that were negative amongst hunter-gatherers: toil, child labor, private ownership, greed, status, and competition.

But in tracing the lineage of modern education, what was important was that it was children who bore the brunt of a childhood without free, autonomous play. Rather than learning the intensive knowledge and skills necessary for hunter-gatherer life through autonomous play, they came to be trained in a small set of skills necessary for agricultural work. More importantly, children, very quickly, had to be trained to obey. As Gray put it,

Children’s lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work that was required to serve the rest of the family.

This is the central phrase in understanding the reasons for modern education – “more time spent at work that was required“.

Externally imposed requirements are not conducive to freedom, let alone the kind of self-directed, autonomous, play-based learning for which humans are ‘designed’ by their evolutionary history. Yet this has been, increasingly, the life of the child in the most recent eye-blink of our species’ time on this planet.

A famous study in the 1950s by Herbert Barry, Irvin Child and Margaret Bacon found a consistent relationship between child rearing practices and the means of subsistence in so-called primitive societies. As Peter Gray (2013, pp. 47-48) summarised the results:

The more a culture depended on agriculture and the less it depended on hunting and gathering, the more likely it was to value obedience, devalue self-assertion, and use harsh means to discipline children.

This tendency is best explained in terms of the ‘ideal’ farmer versus the ‘ideal’ hunter- gatherer. In a very interesting passage, Gray (2013, pp. 48-49) argues that success in farming depends,

on adhering to tried-and-true methods. Creativity is very risky; if a crop fails, a whole year’s food supply may be lost. Farmers, unlike hunter-gatherers, don’t regularly share food, so a family that loses its crop may starve. Moreover, farming societies are generally structured hierarchically, so obedience to those higher in wealth, rank, and power is essential to social and economic success. Thus, the ideal farmer is obedient, rule abiding, and conservative; farmers’ strict discipline of children seems designed to cultivate those traits.

In contrast, success in hunting and gathering requires continuous, creative adaptation to the ever-changing, unpredictable conditions of nature. For hunter-gatherers, each day’s food supply comes from the cumulative efforts of diverse individuals and teams, each foraging in their own chosen way and using their own best judgment. The diversity of methods coupled with the sharing of food among all members of the band creates a hedge against the possibility that anyone will starve. Moreover, social success for the hunter-gatherer depends not upon obedience to anyone higher up, but upon the ability to assert one’s thoughts and wishes effectively in the company of equals, where negotiation and compromise, not threat and submission, pave the way to agreement. Thus, the ideal hunter-gatherer is assertive, wilful, creative, and willing to take risks; hunter-gatherers’ permissive parenting served well to foster those traits.

What is interesting about this passage is the close link between how a society organises its economy and how it raises its children. This is a point well worth considering today – and one I’ll return to.

From the point of view of ‘training’, ‘instruction’ and the ‘education’ of children, things just kept getting worse once agricultural work established the basis for larger populations.

One side-effect of having to work hard at tedious tasks is the realisation that it would be good to get others to do it. Slavery, various forms of indentured servitude, paid labour and the stunningly hierarchical feudal system were all logical consequences of the shift to more and more intensive forms of agricultural production.

Industrial production further increased the pressure to produce obedient adults capable of continuous work at the behest of others. Child labour became formalised and substituted long hours working in the field for even longer hours in factories or down mines.

Meanwhile, Catholic Schools taught, explicitly, obedience to designated authority while Protestant schools emphasised the necessity for children to acquire the virtues of self-discipline – in effect, to internalise the submission to authority.

The latter generalised to the notion that not only the spiritual but also the material salvation of individuals depended upon them being schooled in matters they had little interest in. The imposed discipline from without was aimed at instilling a self-discipline necessary to ‘do what was required‘ to succeed. It required ‘breaking the will’ of children – a goal that was explicitly and enthusiastically advocated.

August Hermann Francke, for example, the founder and leader of the Pietist Schools (remarkably similar in form to today’s schools, with timetabling by the hourglass, teacher certification, and the like) had this to say about the educational priorities of schooling:

“Above all, it is necessary to break the natural willfulness of the child. While the schoolmaster who seeks to make the child more learned is to be commended for cultivating the child’s understanding, he has not done enough. He has forgotten his most important task, namely that of making the will obedient.” (cited in Gray, 2013, p. 59)

It was for this reason that Francke advocated, and followed the policy of, constant supervision of the schoolchild. As Gray (2013, p. 59) comments:

“For this reason it is a rule in this institution that a pupil never be allowed out of the presence of a supervisor. The supervisor’s presence will stifle the pupil’s inclination to sinful behaviour, and slowly weaken his wilfulness.” The words used today may be a little different, but modern educators have expressed the same idea countless times. The belief that young people are incapable of making reasonable decisions is a cornerstone of our system of compulsory, closely monitored education.

Once the state replaced the Church as the executor of education it had a very clear agenda. Despite popular myths, that agenda was not universal literacy to enable successful participation in the workplace. Literacy was already widespread (Gray, 2013, p. 60):

By the early 19th century, roughly three quarters of the population, in the United States, including slaves, were literate, and percentages in most of Europe were comparable. On both sides of the Atlantic, the percentage of literate people was far higher than was the percentage of jobs requiring literacy. The primary educational concern of leaders in government and industry was not to make people literate, but to gain control over what people read, what they thought, and how they behaved. Secular leaders in education promoted the idea that if the state controlled the schools, and if children were required by law to attend those schools, then the state could shape each new generation of citizens into ideal patriots and workers.

Edward Ross, an early founder of sociology in America, presented the argument for compulsory schooling in the honest and plainspoken words that were, then, not in the least controversial (Gray, 2013, p. 63):

Ross advocated for compulsory public schooling as a means of maintaining social order. In his words, the job of the public school is “to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board”. Ross understood that children learned from their environment, especially from the people around them, and he wanted to ensure uniformity of that environment. … He wrote, “Copy the child will, and the advantage of giving him his teacher instead of his father to imitate is that the former is a picked person, while the latter is not.” Yes, the teacher was a picked person – picked and certified by the state to teach the correct ideas and not the incorrect ones.

Time to be blunt: Free play, exploration and curiosity are the evolved means by which free, autonomous humans learn; ‘education’, whether informally administered by families in agricultural societies or formally administered by the Church or state, is the socially designed means by which un-free humans learn.

The modern education system has primarily served the purpose of producing adults who would be useful in the religious or economic realms of society. The natural inclinations of children were largely the problem that education systems were designed to solve in pursuit of this over-riding purpose.

Of course, in today’s education system there are no teachers who could (or would) proudly record – as one German teacher in a Pietist School did after 51 years of teaching – the infliction of,

“911,527 blows with a rod, 124,010 blows with a cane, 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715 blows with the hand, 10, 235 blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, and 1,118,800 blows on the head” (Gray, 2013, pp. 57-58).

Many, if not most, teachers in New Zealand care intensely about the children they teach and are concerned about the welfare and dignity of their charges. But that isn’t the point – in many ways teachers are as constrained by the educational system as are their students. As one teacher told Gray (2013, p. 83):

“I don’t choose what I teach; the state does. Teachers know wonderful things about how children learn, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it. … My ability to keep my job is based on how many of my students pass the [state mandated] test”

Since then, compulsory schooling has extended, both in terms of the school year and the age range, and has become more standardised. Women have come to play a greater role in formal schooling, softening its image – and reality – considerably. Yet, still, children do not like school.

In a major study of US youths’ everyday levels of happiness, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Jeremy Hunter (2003) found that “School activities rate below average scores in happiness, while social, active and passive leisure activities are above average.” There was also a, supposedly, ‘paradoxical’ finding that “youth who spend more time in school and social activities are happier than those who spend less.”

But there is little that is paradoxical in this finding, since they also found that “[b]eing alone rates the lowest levels of happiness, while being with friend [sic] corresponds to the highest.” It’s not the school activities that produce higher levels of happiness, it’s companionship.

Overall, hardly a big tick for the typical educational experience.

And, after this long historical (de)tour, we come to the National Standards policy.

National Standards, as most people are aware, has its critics. These critics have challenged the standards in numerous ways – they are vague; they are not standardised nationally; they are less about children’s learning than they are about monitoring and controlling schools and teachers; they encourage ‘gaming’ of student achievement by teachers and schools (most crudely, ‘teach to the test’); they assume an incorrect view of the learning and developmental processes (e.g., that they are ‘incremental’, ‘gradualist’, ‘progressive’ and linearly cumulative in each of the designated areas of reading, writing and numeracy); they promote the view that ‘acceleration’ of learning is necessarily a desirable goal; etc..

But, irrespective of the validity of any or all of these criticisms, National Standards is educationally retrograde for a much deeper reason: It is a continuation and a further cementing of the assumption that education involves, and should involve, somehow getting children to do something they are either unwilling and/or unable to do for themselves.

It is the latest in a long line of attempts to ensure that children are progressing, in an orderly way, toward a desired result over which they have little say.

That is, National Standards assumes that education is – and must be – an externally imposed and managed process of embedding pre-determined, necessary knowledge and skills into children.

For that reason alone, National Standards represent a backward step in education because it marks a step back from a freer mode of learning.

[To be continued ...]

If you’re in Christchurch, CERA thinks you’re doing really well. A media release cheerily announced that ‘Wellbeing Survey reveals positive outlook‘.

Conducted for CERA by Nielsen Research from August to October, 2012, “2,381 residents completed questionnaires [of whom] 1,156 were from Christchurch, 618 from the Selwyn district and 607 from the Waimakariri district“.

Drill down a bit further – beyond the media release – and the ‘take away’ is not quite so rosy:

Residents of Christchurch rate their quality of life less positively than residents of Selwyn and Waimakariri districts.

Higher proportions of Christchurch residents have experienced a strong negative impact on their everyday lives as a result of the earthquakes.

Nearly three-quarters of greater Christchurch residents rate their quality of life positively, and 7% believe it to be poor. However more than half believe that their quality of life has deteriorated since the earthquakes.

97% of residents have experienced stress at least some time in the past year. Nearly a quarter indicate they have been living with this type of stress for most or all of the time over the past year.

Drill down even further and things start to get very revealing.

From the ‘Executive Summary’:

Well, those “people carping and moaning” aside, isn’t it still true that, as The Press headlined its report on the survey, “Cantabrians happier, more positive “?

‘Happier’, ‘more positive’ … OK, but happier than when, exactly? This survey was the first in a series that will end in 2014 so it can’t be referring to the results of an earlier CERA Wellbeing survey of Christchurch residents.

Maybe the headline is ambiguous. Perhaps ‘Cantabrians’ are not meant to include residents of the metropolis of Christchurch? As the article itself notes early in the piece, “Selwyn and Waimakariri residents are happier than their Christchurch neighbours“.

But, surely, Christchurch residents are still ‘Cantabrians’? So what change in wellbeing has happened since the 22 February, 2011 earthquake?

As luck would have it, a ‘Quality of Life Survey‘ was carried out in 2010 – by the self-same Neilsen Research (note the extremely similar formatting) – and it included Christchurch, amongst eight New Zealand cities.

Even better, it occurred between the September 4, 2010 earthquake and the 22 February, 2011 earthquake so it neatly indicates (and can be used to discount) the effect of the first earthquake. Importantly, the 2010 survey was of Christchurch City only (not Waimakariri or Selwyn).

So, what do we find?

I have no idea where The Press got the impression that the CERA Wellbeing Survey, 2012 showed how Christchurch people were ‘happier’ and ‘more positive’ than they were (when?), or how Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker saw in the findings ”a ‘changing tide‘ in the city, where people had shaken off a very ‘tough winter’ to embrace the positive things that were happening”. Or, for that matter, how Gerry Brownlee and CERA could claim that (Greater) Christchurch people had a “positive outlook“.

Between the pre-22 February, 2011 summer and August-October 2012 rates of self-reported quality of life had plummeted in Christchurch City from 95% describing their lives as ‘extremely good’ or ‘good’ to 72% using the same terms to categorise their lives. What is more, only 12% saw it as ‘extremely good’ in 2012 compared to 30% in 2010 (after the first major earthquake).

In other words, an extra 23% – almost 1 in four – Cantabrians no longer see their quality of life positively.

And an extra 1 in 20 Cantabrians (5%) have moved into describing their quality of life as ‘poor’ with 1 in 100 desperately describing their circumstances as ‘extremely poor’ (0% previously).

This reveals many things but one thing it does not reveal is a ‘positive outlook’. What were Gerry Brownlee and CERA thinking when they framed that media release so positively two days before the second anniversary of the 22 February, 2011 earthquake?

Is it now politically incorrect to face facts? Is it seen as some sort of public duty to jolly the populace along? Does CERA now see itself as a branch office of Saatchi and Saatchi, the advertising agency that told us all during the 1990s to ‘accentuate the positive’ and ‘eliminate the negative’?

Is this all part of Peter Townsend’s suggested feel good tsunami that would “drown naysayers in positivity” (mentioned in this earlier post)?

That 72% figure is not a reason to celebrate – it is a glaring, flashing red light that says “do something!”

But do what?

Here’s a clue. In the last sentence of the abstract (full article beyond the paywall) for their study titled “The Good Life of the Powerful: The Experience of Power and Authenticity Enhances Wellbeing“, Kifer et al. (2013) conclude,

Although striving for power lowers well-being, these results demonstrate the pervasive positive psychological effects of having power, and indicate the importance of spreading power to enhance collective well-being.

“[T]he importance of spreading power to enhance collective well-being“.

Well, there’s a novel thought: If we were truly concerned about Cantabrians’ wellbeing how about giving residents of Christchurch and Canterbury greater power over their destinies (both personal and collective)?

How about giving them a say over what happens in the red zones, the TC3 land, the hills? How about returning their voice to the Regional Council and giving their City Council more of a role in the recovery? How about letting residents determine the reform of the school system? How about ‘levelling the playing field’ between insurers (EQC and private) and the insured?

Joining the dots a bit shows that the main reason Christchurch residents have a radically lower level of collective well-being stems from a lack of power and control.

Here’s part of Table 7.2 from the CERA Wellbeing Survey (p. 20) that lists the negative experiences that have had a moderate or major effect on respondents’ lives. (I’ve only included the top 11 for space reasons – and, sorry about the blurring! I need lessons ).

It goes without saying that aftershocks are beyond a person’s control – but look at the other factors: ‘Dealing’ with EQC/insurance claims; ‘Loss’ of leisure facilities; ‘surrounded’ by construction work; ‘Uncertainty’ about the future; ‘Making decisions’ about damage, repairs, relocations; ‘Additional work pressures’; ‘Additional financial burdens’; ‘Loss’ of access to natural environment; ‘Loss’ of sport and recreation facilities; ‘Living day to day’ in damaged homes.

All of these are about circumstances, environments and processes that ordinary people feel they can do little about and that they had endured, by the time of the survey, for over 18 months.

On the other side of that ‘power’ coin are the agencies that are actually making the decisions: CERA, the three Councils, and ECAN.

On pages 61-66, the CERA Wellbeing Survey 2012 Report tabulates the levels of confidence respondents had that agencies are making decisions in the best interests of ‘Greater Christchurch’ (interestingly, that isn’t quite a question about motives but it does come very close to it, I imagine, in many people’s minds).

The Survey found that 39% of Christchurch City residents had confidence (‘very confident’ or ‘confident’) that CERA was making decisions in the best interests of Greater Christchurch while 29% did not and 28% were neutral.

A stunning 41% of Christchurch residents lacked confidence that the Christchurch City Council (CCC) was making decisions in the best interests of Greater Christchurch, while 29% had confidence.

This finding actually begs the question of the decision making power of the CCC. After all, it has no say over the central city (and, hence, over its budget given the vast sums it has been or will be loaded with to make the grand plan real), over infrastructure recovery in Greater Christchurch (given that CERA is in charge of that and, further, given a secret meeting between the CCC and Minister Brownlee in December, 2012 over a “blowout” in infrastructure repair costs and, therefore, how it will be paid for) or, now, over planning for the next ten years (yet another secret – or ‘private’ – meeting between the Council and Minister Brownlee).

It may be that Tony Marryatt’s $68,000 pay rise, announced in December, 2011, was still ‘front of mind’ for many Christchurch residents.

Whatever the reasons, the levels of lack of confidence in CERA and the Council (and, ‘overall’ as mentioned earlier in this post) also represent Christchurch residents’ sense of lack of control over what is happening around them and to their city.

In a word, it reveals a pervasive sense of powerlessness.

There is one bright patch, however. In every case, the Survey findings report that there is one group that is repeatedly the most likely to express confidence that the agencies are making decisions in the best interests of Greater Christchurch. It is also the group that is more likely to express greatest confidence in those decisions ‘overall’.

]]> http://www.thepoliticalscientist.org/?feed=rss2&p=1206 9 http://www.thepoliticalscientist.org/?p=1174 http://www.thepoliticalscientist.org/?p=1174#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 06:56:55 +0000 Puddleglum http://www.thepoliticalscientist.org/?p=1174 Continue reading →]]>

The Taking of Constantinople – and then came the looting

[Warning: Very Long Post]

The strangely mis-named Christchurch and Canterbury ‘recovery’ continues to unfold in highly predictable ways.

Even Christchurch’s arsonists appear to have aligned their activity with the interests of the ‘recovery’ – or at least with the plans in the Blueprint for the central city.

The Government’s broom – with a little help from the criminal element – has now almost completely swept away the fragmented pieces and crumbs of the old ingredients – in the central city, ECAN and Christchurch schools.

And, as the new Christchurch is being mixed together and pushed into its carefully commercially-designed oven, the Government is poised to cut generous-sized pieces of this cake-in-the-baking to the favoured few left standing.

It could not have been more symbolic.

The destruction of the historic England Brothers Building in central Christchurch bya suspicious fire is “devastating”, the owners say.

The building, also known as the Billens Building, was destroyed in a blaze around 9.20pm on Friday.

The England Brothers (Billens) Building was the one bought by the Christchurch Heritage Trust, which had plans to fully restore and rebuild the heritage site. As I mentioned in this post,

 the Christchurch Heritage Trust bought the England Brothers House building on the stretch of High Street south of Tuam Street. As Trust Chairman Derek Anderson explained earlier this year:

… the trust would spend $4.4m to secure the building, rebuild the interior and strengthen its facade to 100 per cent of the earthquake code.

The trust would then lease the building to tenants.

Anderson said the building was an important part of High St’s streetscape.

“Lower High St will be the city’s heritage precinct because there’s not much left otherwise,” he said.

“We are conscious of preserving what we can now. It’s one step forward and two steps back. We’d put in a lot of work to save things, and now they are gone we’ve really got to make a good job of High St.“

Unluckily for what’s left of Christchurch’s heritage buildings, the area is now plonk in the middle of the ‘innovation precinct’.

The building was in a series of about half a dozen buildings in lower High Street yet it was specifically targeted.

The arsonist(s) was either extraordinarily lucky in their asocial choice of random target or well-read enough to realise that there was no better way to kick Christchurch’s heritage supporters (and associated ‘carpers and moaners’) right in the guts than set aflame the building upon which they had placed so much hope and, of course, so much of their precious money.

Still, as I said, at least it removes a potential obstacle to the apparently ever-so-urgent task of rebuild and ‘recovery’. Without that heritage anchor in lower High Street, opposition to it being flattened to make way for the Blueprint’s ‘innovation precinct’ will no doubt be greatly reduced.

In fact, the recently opened EPIC ‘Sanctuary’ building, poster-child for the innovation precinct, sits in all its gaudy blackness less than a stone’s-throw from the torched rear of the Billens Building. Echoing a focus on ‘economic recovery’ that we’ll meet again and again below, Minister Steven Joyce said at the opening that,

“The opening of EPIC is an important step in the economic rebuilding of Christchurch and will create a valuable focal point for ICT businesses in the city,” Mr Joyce says.

“The blueprint for the new city includes plans for an innovation precinct in this area. EPIC, which will house 16 high-tech companies who have faced challenges with premises since the earthquake, is effectively the start of this,” Mr Joyce says.

Interestingly, Stage 2 of the EPIC project - to be up and running in five years – involves five buildings where now there is only one temporary building.

It’s probably a moot point, now, just how those five buildings would have fitted around the Christchurch Heritage Trust-owned Billens Building, not to mention the other buildings on High Street.

Yes, progress towards the ‘recovery’ is gathering pace whichever way you look.

In fact, the awards to the captains of the ‘recovery’ are already being thrown about like bridal bouquets after a wedding. CERA Economic Recovery Manager, Steve Wakefield, is the first to be honoured for his contribution by having “been named the nation’s top chartered accountant” after “being nominated by an anonymous advocate“. Pivotally – for the recovery -,

He was part of the team that came up with the Christchurch Central Development Unit [CCDU] as an appropriate tool for Government intervention and said he was pleased with how the city was faring.

This award was bestowed despite resigning from the position a year earlier than he expected to rejoin Deloitte’s, presumably because his work was done – if it needed doing in the first place.

Peter Townsend, for one, is already on record about the ‘bizarre’ survival rate of Canterbury businesses and the low net loss of population which barely registered a problem (and here he also notes the bouyant export sector). Put bluntly, “Christchurch has not actually taken a backward step in business terms“.

Yet, so we are daily led to believe, there is an urgent need to ‘fix’ the economy by pushing ever onwards with the Grand Central City Plan and, of course, the ‘efficient’ operation of ECAN – that vital lynchpin of Canterbury’s ‘recovery’ from the earthquakes (more on that below).

The Central City

The CCDU Blueprint is starting to deliver the central city on a plate to the largest property owners who, prior to the earthquake, were increasingly desperate over their declining property values.

This is being achieved by ensuring that the designated retail precinct is restricted to areas that they dominate - though international competition provides a twist to that story (see below). Additionally, only large (7500sq m or greater) plans will get the nod.

Despite the predictability of it all, the details remain fascinating and, as usual, very revealing. Those details also help the rest of us to decode so much of the rhetoric we’ve heard over the last two years.

One aspect of that rhetoric has been the seemingly aspirational call not just for ‘recovery’ but for ‘enhancement’, a call thoroughly embedded in the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act. This embedding has led to its inclusion in the CERA Recovery Strategy and, consequentially, in the Directions for Education Renewal in Greater Christchurch.

From the CERA Recovery Strategy;

The CER Act defines recovery as including both restoration and enhancement. Recovery is inherently future focussed and there will be opportunities to “build back better” when repairing damage caused by the earthquakes.

Opportunities for enhancements should be considered, including where:

• they lead to increased resilience and/or functionality; or
• are cost-effective according to life-cycle analysis provided that they do not come at the expense of the repair or replacement of essential infrastructure and services elsewhere.

For the purposes of this Strategy, “recovery” does not mean returning greater Christchurch to how it was on 3 September 2010.

And, from the bureaucratic echo-chamber, we have this in the Directions for Education Renewal in Greater Christchurch (p. 6),

“Recovery” is defined as including both restoration and enhancement within the strategy, which also sees recovery as future focused and taking opportunities for enhancements. Recovery does not mean returning to the state that existed on 3 September 2010.

‘Enhancement’ is, of course, always a ‘good thing’ – for someone.

But one person’s ‘enhancement’ can be another person’s catastrophe.

There are now clear clues about just for whom the ‘enhancement’ is being primarily designed, and it’s not for the general population of Christchurch.

Any complaint about this process of ‘enhancement’ has been met with accusations of ‘naysaying’ and ‘holding up the recovery’ or other formica-thin nonsense posing as socio-political analysis. That decisions from above are actually ‘enhancing’ is apparently in need of no discussion, and certainly not debate.

There’s a further piece of rhetoric that, here in Christchurch, we have become very used to over the past two years. It’s the repeated claim that, post-quakes, it’s not possible to continue with ‘business as usual‘.

In fact, once again, the CEO of the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce, Peter Townsend, has been the one who has found it unendingly necessary to repeat this mantra.

Mostly, Townsend has used the phrase when arguing that Christchurch City Council should (or must) consider asset sales to fund the ‘enhanced’ recovery – whether to cover the “unexpected multi-million dollar bill for Port Hills land” (courtesy of a decision by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister) or, again, to ‘be brave’ in how they cover the costs of the rebuild.

But he’s been talking up non-’business as usual’ scenarios since shortly after the 22 February, 2011 earthquake. I was surprised by his comments at the time – I even commented in a previous post that he seemed to get what needed to be done when he argued the following:

Another possible scenario, one that Townsend said he would prefer to see, is property owners relinquishing control over land in exchange for a pooled ownership arrangement where they could effectively be shareholders in reconstructed subdivisions.

He said a block-by-block redevelopment (similar to what was employed in Kobe, Japan after a 1995 earthquake) would potentially be more attractive to locals and businesses that wanted to remain viable in the area.

…

“It may be better for property owners to take a share in some sort of entity that will take the city forward rather than to have a 1/4 acre of land with a tilt-slab on it that doesn’t fit into an overall plan that has little value.”

Mea culpa.

When praising Peter Townsend for his apparently extraordinary willingness to depart from basic property right principles for the ‘greater good’ I didn’t notice that very ‘business as usual’ term – “shareholder” – and its very important meaning.

I had assumed, way back then, that an argument for a ‘pooled ownership’ arrangement would be one based upon democratic participation in any ‘pooling’ (given the extraordinary circumstances) and democratic regulation of the design principles employed, on the assumption that the CCC and not the CCDU would be running the central city rebuild – using ‘Volume 2′ of the Draft Central City Plan (the volume ‘put to one side’ by Gerry Brownlee when he established the CCDU to take control of the process – as I noted here.).

Instead, it is now all too clear that what Townsend, and others, had in mind by ‘pooling’ was  ’regulation’ of the small property owners by the big property owners.

What was I thinking?

Unlike voting in a democracy, the value of a vote as a shareholder is proportional to the ‘share’ of investment in a venture. It is not ‘one property-owner, one vote’ – it’s one dollar of investment, one vote.

Serves me right for not thinking like a business person. Peter Townsend’s ‘preferred scenario’ was one that delivered the central city retail precinct to Central Christchurch’s property-owning luminaries – the Carters, Goughs and co. … or even bigger ‘boys’ from elsewhere.

Last month was the deadline for ODPs and as it turns out, most of them were single claims led by wealthy locals for areas of property they mostly own.

For example, the well-known names of Philip Carter, Peter Guthrey and the Ballantyne family have formed the BCG Alliance to jointly develop the 2.6 hectares stretching from the Lichfield St car park through to Ballantynes, the Crossing and right to High St. This alone covers over 40 per cent of the retail precinct area.

Another prominent family, the Goughs, have an ODP to develop their Oxford Tce bar area, while Nick Hunt of Lichfield Holdings is representing some landlords who occupy the next stretch from Shades Arcade to Colombo St.

Each of these plans is going to have its battles. Even with single proposers, there will still have to be negotiations over any pockets of uncontrolled land [What a fascinating phrase - 'uncontrolled', as if no-one owns it or, perhaps, the wrong people.]. Other property owners will either be bought out or persuaded to become part of the wider project [aka, an offer they can't refuse].

It should have been obvious when the CCDU/CERA imposed a 7500 sq m minimum requirement for plans in the retail precinct that the big fish, courtesy of the Blueprint, were moving in for a veritable economic feast:

[Warwick] Isaacs [CEO of the CCDU] says the old CBD was cut up into hundreds of individually owned lots, with nearly every building having a different owner. To ensure the rebuild was coherent, it was decided that under the new district plan, any redevelopment proposals had to take the form of an Outline Development Plan (ODP) covering an area of at least 7500 square metres, or about half a city block.

This meant landowners had to come up with a joint scheme which included all their neighbours. They had to show how they would produce a cohesive design when it came to parking, frontages, laneways and even trading hours, even if they wanted to rebuild only their building.

That Peter Townsend is one really psychic guy – I want him to pick my lotto numbers. Who would have thought that Peter Townsend – who no doubt had no more influence over how things turned out than either you or I – could have foreseen so many months ahead just how things would turn out. Pretty impressive stuff.

Either that or here we have one clue that, far from being the product of a 100-day ‘brainstorming’ session blossoming atop the City Council’s Share an Idea community love-in, this ‘blueprint’ has been in train for far longer than most Christchurch residents realise. Its crucial, nuts-and-bolts structural form was pre-ordained.

In fact, as a solution to a ‘crisis’ that’s been around for over a decade, it even predates Townsend’s prescient musings on his ‘preferred scenario’.

Back in September, 2008 it was all so different – yet much the same.

In response to the article’s title (in the link) – ‘Where does the Christchurch City heart beat?‘ – Richard Ballantyne, owner of the renowned department store on the corner of Colombo and Cashel Streets and, now, one of the “wealthy locals” manouvering around the juicy plum that the retail precinct now is, replied:

“Not in the Central Business District, at the moment anyway,” says Richard Ballantyne, Director and Managing Director of J Ballantyne and Co Ltd and [unsurprisingly] stalwart supporter of the central city.

Ballantynes has a vision for the central city: to be the cultural, social and commercial heart of the wider region, showcasing what is best about Canterbury to both local and visiting people.

“Imagine the centre of Christchurch, with a refurbished City Mall, if the property owners target their rentals at rates which attract new and different tenants. Entrepreneurial retailers, cafes and other service providers will say ‘this is the place for me – I have a business that is different from those represented in the malls, and I will have a chance to grow and be profitable here’.”

‘New’ and ‘different’ tenants? Sounds a little bit arty, a little bit rock-and-roll?

Wind the tape forward to late 2012 …

Today, the Blueprint – and the CCDU – is apparently approaching “crunch time” as it seeks to remodel the central city …

What has become apparent is that the true core of the blueprint is the four blocks of the retail precinct – the rectangle of land zoned for high-end shops and offices bounded by Hereford and Lichfield streets to the north and south, and the river and High St to the west and east.

As Hamish Doig enthuses as he explains:

Doig says the central city had a chicken-and-egg problem. It needed to offer a high-quality environment to bring in the high-paying tenants, but then the high- paying tenants had to be there for a high quality environment to get built. This was the conundrum the CCDU had to crack.

The blueprint does a brilliant job of that, Doig says. “Everyone thinks it’s sensational and wants to support it.” [I'll leave open the question of which particular social circles - i.e., 'everyone' - Hamish Doig moves within.]

…

The civic anchor projects will also guarantee a big step-up in quality. But Doig says the retail precinct is the real juggling act.

…

To pay for quality, Doig says, buildings need a double life. The retail precinct developments will have to be like those found in Sydney or Singapore, where at the level, the buildings are taken up by high-end shops, bars, restaurants and arcades, then the floors above are used as office space for banks, legal practices, government departments, and other high- paying tenants.

This way, the shops have a critical mass of well-heeled customers right on their doorstep. “The challenge for the central city is to have very strong retail on the ground floor with a hell of a lot of people upstairs feeding into that retail so there’s a strong lunchtime trade.”

…

Doig says it all interlocks. The more people using the city, the more attractions it can afford to offer. “You’ll see the very high-end retailers, your Guccis, Louis Vuittons, Ted Bakers and Cartiers, that you can’t get at the malls. A whole range of specialist shops.

“The trouble in Christchurch is our mall offerings are too strong, so if there’s not a point of difference to the malls, it’s not going to work.”

So, Richard Ballantyne’s hoped-for ‘new’ and ‘different’ tenants, lured into the central city through targeted rental rates, are ‘out’ and “high-end shops and offices” with “well-heeled customers” are ‘in’.

This blatant redesign of the central city in the interests of elite wealth is bad enough. That it is being sold to the people of Christchurch as a central city for them is pretty galling. As Roger Sutton so gleefully put it,

What thrills me about the Recovery Plan is it’s creating a city for the people. The Frame, Avon River Precinct, an active Square and other green spaces throughout, will make this a place that people want to work in, live in, play in and come to visit.

So that’s what all those lawns are for – the masses of Christchurch residents who won’t be able to afford a single cuff-link, let alone a wardrobe in the shops occupied by the “very high-end retailers“.

And then there’s that phrase ‘high-end’.

High-end tenants aren’t usually tenants looking for “a chance to grow and be profitable” – as Ballantyne chirruped in 2008. Instead, they tend to be established, exclusive, brand-based merchants looking for another suitable ‘high-end’ site to nest in as part of a global chain of outlets.

Richard Ballantyne’s vision of 2008, then, seemed to have in mind a particular kind of drum to which the ‘heart’ of Christchurch should beat. That drum is quite different from the one now set to drive the down town beat.

The defibrillator being applied to the central city is set to jerk its ‘heart’ out of the lives of ordinary Christchurch residents forever.

That is so sad. Before the earthquakes and, more importantly, before CERA and the CCDU, the centre of Christchurch with all its so-called messiness (as Don Miskell so anally described it) was a place that all the people of Christchurch could claim some part of as their own – and, because of that, they could feel comfortable walking around its streets. Simply, it had a very human heart, despite years of developers getting more than their way.

No longer, it seems. The centre will be, more than ever, a designer – and designed and planned – gilded cage.

As a small business-owner, previously located in Victoria Street, wrote in a Letter to the Editor (The Press, Monday, 3 December);

“As for aiming for high-end international retailers to occupy the [Cashel Street/City] mall, the planners should remember that it was the revitalised High St, with New Zealand fashion designers, which was drawing customers from the shopping malls.

I am the owner of a business previously in Victoria St and now relocated on the outskirts of the central city. It will be impossible for businesses such as mine to afford the rents proposed for the central business district.“

But, as I said above, it’s the structural arrangements that matter most – Ballantyne’s entrepreneurial ‘tenants’ were, I’m afraid, always just a means to an end. Times change – and so, therefore, have the means.

Maybe the only element in Ballantyne’s vision that has actually changed since 2008 is that need for ‘new’, ‘different’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ tenants looking for “a chance to grow and be profitable“. They are now no longer needed to gain what really matters.

Looking again at his 2008 words, it’s clear that, while such tenants have been ejected from the ‘vision’, many other elements of it – and his concerns at that time – have been incorporated into, and answered by, the Blueprint:

“We must recreate the strong heart of yesteryear in a well defined centre of Christchurch[The Frame, the well-defined 'retail precinct']- not just for our residents but to attract and keep the visitor and tourist here for a few additional days[The Convention Centre]. To achieve this we must provide features that are quite different from what they might find at the malls and other cities [Now understood as 'high-end' outlets that, whether 'local' or international, are, oddly, the homogeneous, undifferentiated trademark of so-called 'global cities']. We already have world class cultural attractions in the city – the Court Theatre, City Choir, Orchestra and Opera[The Performing Arts Precinct concentrates these] along with the Museum, Art Gallery, Art Centre, Botanic Gardens and Cathedrals. [Well, not so many cathedrals now - the Catholic Cathedral may have its walls memorialised and the fight over Christ Church Cathedral hangs in the balance]”

Back then, for Ballantyne – and no doubt the other major players in the central city – the problems of the the central city were two-fold:

“Now we have a growing commercial presence at Ferrymead, Tower Junction, Northwood and Addington, a circle of suburban malls all competing with each other and the central city. Spread eagled pockets of business have developed within the four avenues – with precincts in Victoria Street, High Street, New Regent Street and Cathedral Junction just a little too far for walking from City Mall, and the exciting new SOL (South of Lichfield) and other Lichfield Lane developments. Our major entertainment and sports centres – QEII, AMI Stadium and Westpac Stadium are spread out, away from the Town Hall, Convention Centre and our central city hotels.”

It hardly needs spelling out, but I’ll do it anyway.

What Ballantyne was voicing in 2008 was the view that the threat from the “circle of suburban malls” was exacerbated by the “[s]pread eagled pockets of business within the four avenues” and the correspondingly “spread out” nature of the sporting, recreational and entertainment, ‘all-of=Christchurch’ facilities.

From QEII in New Brighton to AMI Stadium outside the four avenues; from  the fact that, within the four avenues, “Victoria Street, High Street, New Regent Street and Cathedral Junction [are] just a little too far for walking from City Mall, and the exciting new SOL (South of Lichfield) and other Lichfield Lane developments” the problem is all about spread.

The problem with ‘spread’, of course, is that it dilutes ‘value’. Notice, for example, that Manhattan is an island. Notice, too, that The Frame creates a central city island in Christchurch.

Urban land value comes from density of amenities. Given the ‘fixed’, spread out nature of ‘all-of-Christchurch’ amenities, pre-September, 2010, the central city property owners had to hope for a more ‘entrepreneurial’, idiosyncratic and creative feel that comes best from the kind of small, start-up cafes, restaurants and service businesses that Ballantyne hoped to target back in 2008. That would provide a distinctiveness to the central city and, hopefully, draw people in.

But then the earthquakes provided an excuse for another solution to the same ‘value’ problem.

The quakes damaged many of those ‘all-of-Christchurch’ amenities – QEII, AMI Stadium, the Town Hall, the Convention Centre. They damaged many older (and newer) buildings within the four avenues and those ‘spread out’ business developments like High Street (now the target of arson), SOL Square and Poplar Lane (now demolished) that relied on them.

In effect, what the earthquakes provided was a reason to relocate the city’s amenities into a concentrated area – incidentally avoiding the need to lure into the city those ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘different’, ‘new’ tenants Richard Ballantyne was so well-disposed to four short years ago.

The Central City Blueprint is almost a word perfect rendition of what Ballantyne, and no doubt other major players, wanted for the central city – but couldn’t dare hope for.

Put simply, this plan did not come from the vision of Christchurch people, as a whole. It came from the ‘vision’ of major property owners within the four avenues.

And it’s a longstanding plan.

The Blueprint reflects the pre-earthquake desires and ambitions of this group of property-owners – while sold as a reflection of the ‘Share an Idea’ community consultation initiative.

Despite Peter Townsend’s repeated refrain – this is very much ‘business as usual’ for Christchurch, with its powerful property elite maintaining and enhancing their grip on the centre of Christchurch.

And at least one of them could barely conceal his glee at the prospect of putting those pesky small property owners in their place.

Antony Gough had this to say in praise of the 7500 sq m requirement - backed up by CERA’s compulsory purchase powers - for an Outline Development Plan (ODP):

Central city landowner Anthony Gough, whose family own about 7500 square metres of land in the precinct, welcomed the new rule.

“If you are a small land holder you will be worried as heck, but if you are a big land holder it doesn’t matter a hoot,” he said.

“People with small parcels will be worried as they can no longer hold people [which 'people' might that be?] to ransom. This is so important for Christchurch. To get the city up and running again we have to do something dramatic. It will bring smaller landholders to heel.”

Antony Gough deserves to be taken seriously. He speaks with a gravitas helped not only by his 7500 sq m holding in the central city but also by virtue of the business prominence of his close relations.

The Gough family have a reasonably widespread – and substantial – business portfolio:

The Gough Group of companies also includes Gough TWL, Gough Transpecs, Gough Palfinger, Gough Materials Handling, Gough Engineering, Gough Transport Solutions and Gough Finance. Gough Group employs 880 team members ['staff'?] across New Zealand and Australia.

…

The Gough family holdings are estimated to be valued at about $300 million but could be more depending on how it is calculated and how many members’ interests are included.

Current city councillor, Jamie Gough, is Antony’s nephew and “helps his uncle manage his property empire, Hereford Holdings, and is into his second year as a director of Gough Gough & Hamer.”

Philip Carter, too, seems unperturbed by the powers of CERA:

Some property developers have been critical of the land acquisition outlined in the blueprint, but Carter supported it.

“To implement the plan they ['we'?] need to do it on that kind of scale, so I think what it proposed is reasonable, but the devil will be in the detail.”

The plan’s designers should be congratulated, he said.

If it isn’t already obvious enough, the tell-tale signs of the real purpose of the Blueprint for delivering on that longstanding complaint from major property-holders, emerge whenever challenges to that ‘vision’ emerge.

A previous challenge – by east-side residents – was met with the decision to abandon and demolish QEII Park and rebuild a Metro Sports Hub within the four avenues.

But the most obvious recent decision that provides a minor disruption to that vision was the unanimous vote of Christchurch City Council to restore and rebuild the Town Hall in toto. The Blueprint had this to say (p. 77) about the Performing Arts Precinct it incorporated:

The precinct designation will be sufficient to provide for a range of facilities in the event that the Town Hall cannot be repaired. It will be in close proximity to the Convention Centre, Papa o Ōtākaro/Avon River Precinct, hospitality providers and hotels.

…

The location of the Performing Arts Precinct recognises the restoration of the Isaac Theatre Royal in its existing location [Which, no doubt serendipitously, is close to the planned location of the new Convention Centre and tightly hugs to the immediate north of Cathedral Square].

At the time, it was assumed that the condition on the placement of the Performing Arts Precinct was whether or not the Town Hall would be repaired on its existing site.

Minister Brownlee, however, did not immediately laud the Council’s decision to rebuild the Town Hall. He appeared to have more scepticism than he had space to voice in a few short sentences:

“My understanding was it was a very compromised building left in a pretty disastrous state and the preliminary information was that the ground [it] was sitting on was in a pretty bad state as well,”

…

He said he was not ruling out the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority overriding the council’s decision.

…

“We’ll just talk to them over the next short while to get a better understanding of why they’ve made such a big commitment to such a damaged building.”

…

Brownlee also said he believed the councillors had made the decision without all the relevant geotechnical information.

And, almost as an afterthought,

The decision would also affect the future of the performing-arts hub outlined in the central city blueprint, he said.

The problem, it seems, with the current site of the Town Hall is that it provides an ‘anchor’ too far away from the supposed centrality of City Mall (aka Cashel Mall).

It is not that far from the proposed Convention Centre – just the other side of Victoria Square, but it would represent a ‘pull’ to the north of Cathedral Square, not the south, where City Mall – and the property land-holdings of the major and most wealthy property owners – is sited.

It is as if those devising the Blueprint had started with one primary ‘anchor’ – Ballantynes/City Mall. From that literal standpoint, everything else becomes either ‘central’ or ‘spread eagled’. Even the (grand, covered) rugby stadium and QEII (now the Metro Sports Hub) must be drawn as close as possible into that tight orbit.

As mentioned above, compulsory purchase of central city sites has been signalled for a while – and smaller landowners have been left in no doubt that the guillotine will fall if they aren’t ‘realistic’:

A landowner with a site smaller than the required lot size will have to submit a development plan for the surrounding 7500 square metre block to get permission to build on their land.

Subsequent applications from landowners in the block will have to amend or comply with the plan.

The rule is designed to encourage the creation of laneways through city blocks, more public spaces and streamlined delivery vehicle access to stores to improve pedestrian safety. [Try to refrain from laughing - please remember that official justifications are to be taken very seriously.]

Some landowners fear the new rule could require complicated deals between multiple title holders and will have a negative effect on owners of smaller sites.

City centre landowner Miles Middleton, who owns three small sites in the retail precinct, fears he will not be able to develop a building on his own site independently.

“This creates a lot of uncertainty because if everyone can’t agree, Cera will step in.”

It is within this context that land purchases have begun in the central city. Fascinatingly, two of the three lots of land to be purchased are owned by none other than Antony Gough – an unlikely first volunteer to take a financial bath. Yet, here he is positively galloping along the plank:

Property developer Antony Gough became the first landowner to settle with the Crown when he signed over his Poplar Apartments site on Madras St for about half its registered valuation.

Cutting his losses early would save money over time, he said. “If I let it go through to compulsory acquisition, they’ll take my land, I’ll continue paying rates, we’ll argue the toss for two or three years, spend a lot of money on legal fees and still get the lower price,” Gough said.

He warned against banking on 2007 land valuations after being told by his valuer to “get a reality check”.

Such pragmatic nobility, no doubt being modelled solely for the benefit of all of those smaller landowners Antony Gough holds so dear, makes one pause and wonder. But, after wondering a bit, it becomes clear that ‘cutting your losses’ when an enormous pot of gold waits for you at your other central city holdings – once you consolidate your assets – might not be as pragmatically inspiring as it first seems.

Further, given the government’s central city blueprint and, we are told, its absolute importance for the economic recovery of Christchurch (despite the fact that, as noted, Peter Townsend is busy telling anyone who’ll listen that business and the economy is almost undisrupted and Steve Wakefield has already unfurled the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner), you might have thought that there is one ‘willing buyer’ for whom this land is almost priceless – the Government.

By that fact, the value of property in the central city must – according to the government’s own plans and estimates of the economic boom to eventuate – be immense. Why wouldn’t the Government therefore be willing to pay top dollar for such a sure and certain bumper harvest for the country’s economy?

More realistically, of course, the value of the land is deliberately being reduced by virtue of the fact that the government is holding the threat of compulsory purchase over landowners. Then it uses ‘recent sales’ (i.e., to people like Gough) to justify the value at which it will threaten to compulsorily purchase, should threats become necessary. In turn, that allows the wealthiest property-owners to leverage their advantage even further.

Antony Gough is simply re-organising his asset portfolio for massively greater future returns, as he knows he will be a major player in the new retail precinct and gain exceptional advantage in the market via that positioning.

Smaller property owners have no such strategic option. They will be squeezed out, to Gough’s (and others’) advantage.

And then there’s those businesses out in the areas infamously to become part of ‘The Frame’. One business-owner I’ve mentioned before is Richard Middleton, owner of The Bicycle Thief restaurant that used to lease a building that is now bulldozer fodder:

Middleton said he was at a loss to understand why the CCDU was determined to pull down a ”perfectly good ” building and destroy a strong business.

”I would challenge the [Earthquake Recovery] Minister or [Prime Minister] John Key to sit down and explain the economic rationale behind this decision,” Middleton said.

”To knock over a perfectly sound building which has a successful restaurant and bar and 100 beds for worker accommodation, how does that contribute to the rebuild of our city?“

Given that many other buildings will remain standing in ‘The Frame’ it does seem mysterious – but remember that ‘state of the art’, ‘world class’ playground that Roger Sutton enthused over (see his little bit of effervescence in this brochure)?

Well, mystery solved:

Richard Middleton was looking forward to reopening his popular Christchurch restaurant, The Bicycle Thief. That was until he realised the building that housed his business sat smack bang in the middle of what will be a park.

“This site was a real hub for the area, whereas now it’s obviously going to be a tree and we’ll lose that hub role of the business and it’ll all be grassed over,” says Mr Middleton.

Similarly, Roland Logan in the Ng building is in the way of the stadium but, being the owner of the building, he’s digging his heels right in, with public support:

Owner of NG Gallery, Roland Logan, hasn’t received a letter yet, but his building sits near the proposed stadium and he has a clear message for the Government.

“We will not sell and I’ve told Greg Wilson that we will never sell,” says Mr Logan. “And we’ve got thousands of people who are supporting us with this building because we’re quite an iconic building now. It’s one of the only historic buildings left in the city. [Now, of course, there's one fewer, what with the random choices of Christchurch's arsonists in the 'recovery' mix.]”

Some, like the writer of a recent editorial in The Press, appear to think that all that squeezing out will be worth it, on the unsupported and weak claim that:

Some of that destruction [of buildings in The Frame and other designated sites] is unfortunate, but since the outcome will be the dynamic, vibrant, attractive city the blueprint envisages, it will be worth it.

The outcome, it seems, is beyond doubt and, therefore, pushing some unwilling sellers to sell is all for the greater good. To be frank, this is either naivety or complicity, and it doesn’t matter much which it is. Such an attitude of lame acceptance of draconian measures is undignified in the extreme.

The central city is being refashioned for the few – the rest of us, apparently, have our designated roles as awestruck onlookers, ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ at all the good things being done for us. The only problem appears to be that some of us, like naughty children, just won’t keep quiet and stop fidgeting while the adults do what needs to be done.

Sadly, and despite Peter Townsend’s urgings to the contrary, all of what is going down in the central city – and that includes all the buildings and many of the small landowners, business operators and low-end tenants – represents, in the most cynical rendering of the term, ‘business as usual’ in Christchurch.

ECAN

Recently, we’ve had confirmation that the decision to extend the reign of the Commissioners at ECAN was not about sorting out any supposed inadequacies of the, then, Council – and even less about the recovery from the earthquakes.

John Key’s government has ‘shown us the money’, alright – money for agribusiness that, no doubt, will trickle, tantalisingly, drop by squeezed drop, into the parched mouths of ordinary New Zealanders adrift in the brackish waters of current economic policy:

“Water, water, every where,

And all the boards [Councils] did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

None to drink, but plenty to grow grass with:

The Government suspended democracy and restricted legal action in Canterbury to protect an agriculture boom potentially worth more than $5 billion to the national economy, documents reveal. It feared the economic boom promised by Canterbury irrigation could be in jeopardy unless Environment Canterbury (ECan) was “stable, effective and efficient”, says a Government report on August 27.

…

According to the August report, the value of production in Canterbury is predicted to increase from $1000 to $7000 a hectare once irrigation plans are implemented. The plan aims to almost double the 450,000ha irrigated in Canterbury, creating a $5 billion economic boom.

A separate Government document, disclosed to The Press under the Official Information Act, says the protection of Canterbury’s economic contribution and its future growth were a “key consideration” for suspending democracy.

I suppose when Fonterra has invested $200m in a plant at Darfield in Canterbury and will open a second plant that will “triple Darfield’s capacity” who in their right mind would leave decisions over water to Cantabrians?

And when, almost on cue, the Fonterra Shareholders Fund is launched on the NZX you wouldn’t want democracy to subdue the “frenzy of buying, as investors scrambled to get a slice of earnings from New Zealand’s biggest company“, let alone interfere with the instant profits after the units “debuted at $6.66 a unit, about 22 per cent higher than the offer price of $5.50“.

Imagine what a wet blanket elected ECAN councillors would be to the economy’s party-central – like having an elderly aunt gatecrash your 21st just as the party pills start being downed. Or something.

Then again, isn’t it about time people started to matter again in Christchurch, in Canterbury and in this country?

On the most favourable reading of the elbowing aside of democracy the Government, and those gaining from its selective interventions, display a remarkable arrogance and condescension.

As an editorial in The Press put it after the paper received documents from its Official Information Act requests about the decision to extend the rule of the ECAN Commissioners,

This is another example of a post-quake arrogance that has crept into the way some of our Cabinet ministers are operating. The public of Canterbury should not have to go through Official Information Act channels to get Adams and Carter to tell them what is going on in their own region.

It seems that they think they know that we want boom times more than control over our local resources and destiny.

They think they know that all we need to keep us passive are hand-waving pronouncements about all the future jobs that will be sprayed our way like spatters of milk flying from a baby’s Tommee Tippee.

They think they know that no matter how much a few of us might ‘moan’ and ‘whinge’ about what’s happening, within a year or two most of us will have forgotten all about it and have adjusted to the ‘new normal’.

They think they know.

Time to show them they don’t.

Time to show them we’ve noticed that all the draconian powers of CERA and of government have not been wielded in the interests of ordinary people.

CERA and the Government have not brought insurers to heel; they have not provided warm, safe and secure accommodation for those who need it; they have not threatened compulsory acquisition of land to provide that accommodation; they have not over-ridden property rights (e.g., rent controls) for the sake of alleviating human suffering.

No, that’s not what those exceptional powers have been used for.

Instead, CERA and the Government have brought ordinary Cantabrians to heel whenever necessary; they have provided a warm and safe business environment for the largest and wealthiest property owners; they have threatened compulsory acquisition of land to provide that warm and safe business environment; they have over-ridden property rights for the sake of advancing the interests of those who suffer least.

CERA and the Government have operated on the principle that ordinary people will either simply have to look after themselves or, if they are in the way of grander plans, they’ll have to be forcibly pushed aside, disenfranchised, brought into line or simply be abused (‘carpers and moaners’, ‘buggerising around on facebook all day’).

Is that too unfair or vitriolic a sentiment for me to express?

Well, let the last word belong to the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery. In an opinion piece in The Press, Lianne Dalziel, MP for Christchurch East highlighted a remarkable speech, given in Japan, by the Minister:

When he [Minister Brownlee] went to Japan recently, he spoke of “unbending leadership“. He talked about community groups coming together.

“They will often be loud and dissenting voices. They will often be contradictory of each other. They will seldom recognise the complexity of the problems being dealt with by authorities, but they are extremely important because they become the outlet for the frustrations that naturally occur for people in these situations, but they must never ever get in the road of a constant stream of decisions all focused on recovery.”

I said at the beginning of this (very long!) post that the ‘recovery’ was strangely mis-named. Brownlee’s speech explains why.

This ‘recovery’ is not the recovery of the people of Christchurch and Canterbury. It is the recovery of something else entirely.

It is the ‘recovery’ of power and dominance over people. In other words, business as usual.

I guess that’s why the CER Act and all the documents that have flowed from it stress a phrase that now has an ominous, inhuman sound:

For the purposes of this Strategy, “recovery” does not mean returning greater Christchurch to how it was on 3 September 2010.

Heaven forbid.

Another own goal – or two, or three, … it’s lucky Key’s just “mucking around”?

I did my best to resist the temptation to blog about this.

But, in the end, the temptation was too great. Partly that was because of the absurdity of it all - I even thought up a provisional title:

“Key goes ‘batshit’ on a gay Beckham bender with Home Brew”

(That sentence might be as close as I’ll ever get to writing, in words, the equivalent of a Bach fugue, with its intricate thematic patterning and interwoven connotations – I know, it’s not that close.)

But it wasn’t mainly the temptation to play around with the PM’s unsolicited verbal ejaculations in a blog post title that led to this post.

The real temptation has been to counter the claim (explicit or implied) that John Key should not be judged for jocular utterances in ‘soft’ photo-op situations (which, oddly, Key sometimes wishes to characterise as ‘private conversations’).

Have we all forgotten that joking is serious business?

The final straw that broke the back of my resolve was Key’s challenge to anyone to point out a time he had not acted seriously when his role required him to:

“I dare you to show me one example where I haven’t discharged my responsibility seriously, professionally and appropriately,” he told TV3′s Firstline.

“People have had plenty of chances to see me in action.”

Then there would be times when he was being jocular and having fun.

“I’m often at events when they’re quite light-hearted social events when people would want me to kid around.”

That challenge was one temptation too far – and targets the size of barn doors are always irresistible.

That’s especially so when Key’s smiling and joking are such crucial and, in that sense, such serious aspects of Key’s interpersonal manner. As I said, that’s what finally drew me to comment.

But first we have to follow behind Key’s seemingly unstoppable ‘mucking around‘ – like following the DB Clydesdales with a muck-bucket …

“He’s sleek, affable, has charisma and natural political instincts but lacks experience and gravitas yet has such confidence it’s both impressive and a little unnerving.”

So said Ruth Berry in  a  2006 New Zealand Herald piece on the “mystery man” known as John Key. The piece was inquisitively titled “Will the real John Key step forward[?]”

Berry was overly optimistic about the time it would take (she concluded, late 2006, that “it appears inevitable the picture on the canvas will soon begin to take shape“), and it has hardly involved John Key ‘stepping forward’ but, incident by incident, we’re getting a pretty good sense now of the ‘real’ John Key.

In the same piece, he’s quoted as saying about financial trading that,

“It’s all about pattern recognition and intuition and confidence. You need to be confident, but not cocky.”

Time to apply similar intuitive pattern recognition skills to Key’s joke-cracking ways.

A pattern is definitely there – and now for all the world to see.

John Key’s recent claim  – denials in answers to Parliamentary questions notwithstanding – that David Beckham is, apparently, as “thick as batshit” is a puzzling act of political miscalculation, despite no doubt being delivered with a grin.

How could someone with “natural political instincts” let himself say this given that there seems so much wrong with it?

First, it’s not what we expect from a Prime Minister – unprovoked, gratuitous abuse of someone outside politics.

Second, when initially backtracking from the claims, why, once again, did John Key have to imply that he may not have said something that he did? Responding to  further media enquiries,

Key yesterday tried to distance himself from his remarks as he attended a fundraising event at a Devonport bowling club in Auckland.

“I have nothing to say,” he shrugged. “It was a personal comment and I am not going to engage in talking about something that someone thought they heard me say.”

“[S]omeone thought they heard me say.”? Did he say it or not?

Well, apparently he has “categorically” denied saying it:

Mr Peters: “Yes or no, did he not say at a meeting with schoolchildren that David Beckham was as thick as bat …”

Mr Key: “Categorically I did not say that, no.

“If it helps in terms of clarification, I am reluctant to swear in Parliament but if the member is asking me whether I used the word ‘batshit’, I did not.”

…

Asked later what he did say, Mr Key said it was a private conversation and he would not repeat it. He refused to say whether he swore.

My own opinion is that the Prime Minister should stop slithering. He should own the opinions he expresses publicly as the Prime Minister. He shouldn’t duck and dive. And he should stop trying to claim that this is yet another ‘private conversation’ he’s been having while at a public event in his role as Prime Minister.

And a bit of advice: private conversations are best held in private.

Importantly, it’s also not about using the word ‘batshit’. It’s about suggesting that David Beckham is stupid, whatever turn of phrase Key may have used. It hardly matters whether he said ‘thick as pigshit’, ‘thick as a whale sandwich’, ‘several sandwiches short of a picnic’, ‘several hundred million neurons short of a cortex’, or whatever. Using an expletive is obviously secondary to the intent of the comment.

The intent, it seems, was to make an unprovoked, gratuitous insult, presumably for humorous effect. Most of us do it; but we’re not all the Prime Minister.

Third, what is it about Key that he has to show off to school children by demeaning an ‘achiever’ and ‘self-made’ success? Why does he always get seduced by the desire to “entertain” his audience? And, in this instance, it has the disappointing smell of an attempt to drop the name of a celebrity and then, dishonourably, to snicker at them.

Fourth, and worst, is the hypocrisy.

Whatever happened to the right’s condemnation of the left’s supposed “intellectual elitism” and “tall poppy syndrome“? Isn’t that supposedly confined to the lawyers and academics populating the Labour Party benches in Parliament?

It is uncontroversial and widely known that David Beckham is someone who, from pretty modest beginnings, has amassed a huge fortune along with a world-class reputation and a prominent role in charity work. (Even this short biopic gives a sense of his success, and helps humanise the constructed celebrity – complete with father Ted, the shopfitter, and mother Sandra, the hair stylist.)

Does this count for nothing in the right-wing universe of ordinary people working hard, aspiring and achieving?

Where’s the gut-level, right-wing respect for an ordinary-man-made-good that would surely head off at the pass the temptation to make a comment like this?

Apparently all Beckham’s efforts deserve is to get called a “nice guy” but “as thick as batshit” (or words to that effect). Does a condescending, reflexive elitism get any more obvious than this?

David Farrar, in a transparent attempt to run interference for John Key, finds it all very amusing – chipping in with his favourite derogatory quotations about Beckham’s intelligence.

What would Farrar have posted on his blog if it had been Helen Clark or Phil Goff who had made these comments? It’s not hard to guess.

But perhaps the whole thing is just a storm in a teacup? I’d say ‘no’, for two reasons.

First, courtesy of John Key, there are now so many storms sloshing chaotically around in teacups of various sizes at his personal Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – otherwise known as the Prime Ministerial procession through the land – that he needs an industrial strength dishwasher to clean up the mess.

Second, the Beckham comment was not just a ‘gaffe’. It was part of a pattern, and one which hinges on how John Key uses humour and the function it has in his life.

Maybe the pattern doesn’t matter if Key’s so-called ‘gaffes’ don’t get any more disturbing than calling David Beckham stupid to get a laugh.

Except that, sadly, they do.

On the same day that he derided David Beckham he was a guest on a radio show in Otago, The Farming Show. Have a watch of the Prime Minister earning his salary:

Most criticism of the entertainment on offer here by the Prime Minister focused on his comment about a “gay red top“. That choice of phrase reveals part of the pattern – the desire to appear ‘ordinary’ by breaking expectations of how a Prime Minister should talk (dropping into the jargon of schoolyard insults).

Key later said that he was just “mucking around” when he used the phrase:

Prime Minister John Key says he was just “mucking around” and having some fun when he used the word ‘gay’ to describe a radio host’s red sweatshirt last week.

Mr Key is standing by his “jocular” banter with Farming Show host Jamie Mackay and his reasoning for using the word pejoratively.

But that was not the only disturbing aspect of his session on the show. Another was the easy, reflexive and impulsive way in which he, once again, resorted to abuse in a “jocular” way. He said this of hip-hop group Home Brew:

Mr Key also took a swipe at hip hop group Home Brew for criticising him during their acceptance speech for best urban/hip hop album at the New Zealand Music Awards last week.

“These people are idiots. They turned up on the red carpet with a goat that then managed to relieve itself or whatever on the red carpet. What idiots,” he said.

In philosophy it’s called the ad hominem fallacy; in football it’s called tackling the man rather than the ball – as David Beckham may be able to remind the Prime Minister:

Abusive ad hominem (also called personal abuse or personal attacks) usually involves insulting or belittling one’s opponents in order to attack their claims or invalidate their arguments, but can also involve pointing out true character flaws or actions that are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument.

If you’re wondering what John Key was reacting to, the lead singer of Home Brew had this to say in his acceptance speech for an award:

“I’d just like to thank the Prime Minister for selling all our shit for not supporting the working class … You sell our shit John.”

He was cut off by music before he could continue.

Notice that, despite the use of expletives, there was no personal abuse aimed at John Key. If the report is correct, the comments were aimed at the asset sales policy.

Now watch the video in the previous link – which includes ‘interviews’ with members of ‘Home Brew’ – followed by the one above of Key on The Farming Show. They reveal an interesting symmetry.

In both clips there is the affectation of a self-conscious ‘I’m not what you expect, am I?’ pose, and yet a conformity to the expectations of the group they are both trying to appeal to; there’s also, in both, an over the top caricature of the self and a willingness to ham it up; both include overt and deliberate displays of arrogance (extravagant $10,000 dollar bets and extravagant cigar smoking).

The only difference was that the lead singer of Home Brew did not personally abuse Key but simply opposed his policies. By contrast, Key reiterated personal abuse – “These people are idiots“, “What idiots!“.

Disturbingly, when it comes to a comparison between a provocatively offensive hip-hop group and the Prime Minister, it’s the hip-hop group that manages to ascend to some serious political comment. The Prime Minister is left blurting out ‘What idiots!’

Even more disturbing, it’s worth remembering that John Key resorted to this abuse of New Zealand citizens (I assume they are) because they had criticised the National Government’s policies in public.

Putting aside whatever prejudices anyone may have against hip-hop groups, young people, brown people, or whatever, can this possibly be acceptable from a Prime Minister? And can it be excused as being simply part of Key’s natural ‘jocularity’?

So much for Key’s “mucking around” – but how important is ‘mucking around’ for humans?

Time for a detour to consider what humour and “mucking about” is really all about.

Human humour is fascinating. Laughter – especially when mirthful- is contagious: “There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour” (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol).

In fact, there have been literal “laughing epidemics” throughout history. In that link, Richard Provine puts laughter, and joking, into its broader perspective.

Humour is primarily a social capacity, as its contagiousness signals; it’s part of being our particular kind of social animal:

Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it? Laughter is very contagious and this suggests that it may have become a part of human behaviour because it promotes social bonding. When a group of people laughs, the message seems to be “relax, you are among friends”.

Laughter, that is, is a signal of ‘no threat’ or ‘you can trust me’ – but, like all evolved signals, the capacity to use it deceptively can also evolve.

And it has many darker sides:

In our politically correct, feel-good, be-happy time we are shielded from – and underestimate – the dark side of laughter that was better known to the ancients. If you think laughter is benign, be aware that laughter is present during the worst atrocities, from murder, rape and pillage in antiquity to the present. Laughter has been present at the entertainments of public executions and torture.  … The killers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, were laughing as they strolled through classrooms murdering their classmates. Laughter accompanies ethnic violence and insult, from Kosovo to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

When we laugh, with whom and at whom we laugh are all indelibly linked to our social nature, as Provine carefully dissects:

Laughter is a rich source of information about complex social relationships, if you know where to look. Learning to “read” laughter is particularly valuable because laughter is involuntary and hard to fake, providing an uncensored, honest account about what people really think about each other, and you.

Laughter is a decidedly social signal, not an egocentric expression of emotion.

…

Further clues about the social context of laughter came from the surreptitious observation of 1,200 instances of conversational laughter by anonymous people in public places. … Contrary to expectation, most conversational laughter was not a response to jokes or humorous stories. Fewer than 20% of pre-laugh comments were remotely joke-like or humorous. Most laughter followed banal remarks such as “Look, it’s Andre”, “Are you sure?” and “It was nice meeting you too”.

…

the average speaker laughs about 46% more often than the audience. This contrasts with the scenario of stand-up comedy in which a non-laughing speaker presents jokes to a laughing audience. Comedy performance proves an inadequate model for everyday conversational laughter.

…

Gender determines the proportion of speaker and audience laughter. Whether they are speaker or audience (in mixed-sex groups), women laugh more often than men. In our sample of 1,200 cases, female speakers laughed 127% more than their male audience.

…

On average, men are the best laugh getters. These differences are already present by the time joking first appears, around six years of age. Based on this evidence, it is no surprise that your school clown was probably a male, a worldwide pattern. Laughter is sexy. Women laughing at men are responding to more than their prowess in comedy. Women are attracted to men who make them laugh (ie, “have a good sense of humour”), and men like women who laugh in their presence.

…

Amazingly, we somehow navigate society, laughing at just the right times, while not consciously knowing what we are doing. Consider the placement of laughter in the speech stream. Laughter does not occur randomly. In our sample of 1,200 laughter episodes, the speaker and the audience seldom interrupted the phrase structure of speech with a ha-ha. Thus, a speaker may say “You are wearing that? Ha-ha,” but rarely “You are wearing… ha-ha… that?”

If that’s laughter, what of humorous behaviour itself?

Unsurprisingly there’s a number of theories of humour, including ‘superiority theory’, the theory that,

says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees [Presumably, when the two are together.].

And, again,

Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men.

In other words, who tells the jokes is an assertion of status. And men, unsurprisingly, laugh as a substitute for chest-beating when in male company. John Key ‘having a go’ at the radio announcer’s “gay red top” is no random jibe.

Key’s ability to appear ‘jokey’, ‘affable’, and even child-like may connect with many New Zealanders who like that ‘ordinary’, ‘fun-loving’ demeanour. It may endear some people to him as he meets and greets, does photo-opportunities and soft events like the Farming Show - for all the reasons discovered by the research on laughter and humour just mentioned.

And of course any politician should be allowed to be humorous and to ‘muck around’ at times. But ‘mucking around’ is as revealing of character – in fact far more so – as is the ability to read staged speeches in the aftermath of serious events or during significant policy announcements.

In fact, the latter category of Prime Ministerial responsibilities are usually so carefully managed that few politicians would even have the opportunity to present themselves as jocular joke-crackers at such times. So Key’s ‘seriousness’ at those events is irrelevant.

But what about John Key’s seriousness in relation to the issues or policies linked to such responsibilities? Does his joke cracking extend to decision making around the Cabinet table?

Key’s challenge to identify times when he has not been serious about serious issues is best refuted in his own words:

Mr Key said he was notorious for cracking jokes on topical issues and it would not be out of character if he did so about the Megaupload millionaire during his GCSB visit on February 29.

He said making such joke would not mean he had been briefed about the agency’s spying on Dotcom that day.

During a press conference at Auckland airport this afternoon, Mr Key said he made jokes about “everything from water to ACC” as well as Dotcom.

He said he would not cut back on the jokes he made.

Key may have forgotten that he has already answered his own challenge.

In responding to criticisms that he has become too (re)lax(ed) of late, John Key reminds us all that he has always been like this and that this is just who he is:

“I came in as John Key and I’m going out as John Key. The media or our opponents will try and portray that as being too casual. I don’t agree with that.

“You are not going to change me and if you do, it will look like a fraud, it will be a fraud.”

The defensiveness continues with his challenge to show him an example of where he had been required to be incredibly serious and wasn’t.

“I always am. Frankly, I work 19 hours a day pretty much and six-and-a-half days a week. Within those days is a huge range of things I’m doing, a massive range.”

I agree – and interestingly, there’s not a joke or wise-crack to be seen in the article. This is obviously one of those times that he has “been required to be incredibly serious“. An attack on his affable, jokey manner is, it seems, very serious business.

And I agree that John Key has probably always been like this. This is how he is.

But that’s not because he’s a harmless jokester. It’s because joking is the most serious part of John Key. It is his modus operandum – and always has been. It is the way he has not just learnt but has thoroughly embodied from an early age in order to achieve his personal goals, victories over opponents in competitive contests and, of course, the status they deliver.

Key has always been deadly serious about these things. Being ‘rich’ and being Prime Minister were quite obviously overwhelmingly serious goals even when he first formulated them as a child. Affability has been his chosen means to those ends.

And he is also very aware of the advantage he gains in pursuing his goals in this way:

But essentially he sees it as the media’s problem, not one that comes between him and the public. He hasn’t changed the way he behaves.

“These stories have always been there from time to time. Actually they are an example of where the media is generally out of sync with the public.

“The public talk colloquially, the public’s grammar’s not perfect. They kid around and I don’t think they overly mark me down for that. They just see me as a normal guy.

In one of the most surreal but revealing moments of self-reflection from a politician in recent years, Key’s comment that ”You are not going to change me and if you do, it will look like a fraud, it will be a fraud“ pretty much lays the truth out in plain view.

It seems that it has been through the means of almost constant joke-cracking, smiling and (pretty lame) humour that Key has made his way in the world. The self-reported nickname of the ‘smiling assassin’ he gained in financial circles testifies to the utter seriousness with which he covers his personal goals and ambitions beneath almost continuous instances of jest, shrugging appearances of relaxed indifference and boyish grins delivered in a range of emotional tones, from dismissive irritation to triumphant glee.

So he is right; should he ever shed his jokey, smiling carapace it would be a fraud. His entire way of being – and coping with the world – would cease.

We all are what we are and, to a large extent, we are not the authors of ourselves – so, fundamentally, I do not judge Key for the way he is.

It’s just that while this particular way of being may have been effective for becoming Prime Minister – and, if Key’s reading of public sentiment about him is correct,  for staying Prime Minister – it is not suitable for being Prime Minister.

Mike Moore once cited, unsurprisingly, the famous aphorism that, in politics, sincerity is everything – and once you can successfully fake that you’re made.

In Key’s case – and in the context of New Zealand politics – that aphorism needs tweaking.

In New Zealand politics, being ordinary is everything – and once you can successfully fake that, you’re made.

No-one whose ambition is for political leadership is remotely ordinary. If John Key were truly a relaxed, hokey-dokey kind of a guy he wouldn’t be where he is, and wouldn’t have succeeded in his previous career.

John Key’s constant joke-cracking, grinning and “mucking around” is his way of ‘faking’ ordinariness. It’s also why it’s hard to pin down just who he is.

Key remains New Zealand politics’ “mystery man“. What you see may well be what you get.

But here’s the rub: What you see is utterly opaque – which I imagine is often the point of “mucking around“. For John Key I suspect it has always been the point, whether he realises it or not.

It’s all very real – and very serious.

Epilogue

It’s worth reflecting on two final points.

First, when UK newspaper The Sun reported John Key’s comments about David Beckham it cited a few of his comments but also comments of two women, one of whom at least knew him well:

Even his missus Victoria told him in a 2000 telly documentary: “You make yourself sound stupid and you’re not.”

In 2004 Rebecca Loos, who alleged she had an affair with the star, insisted the former Man Utd star is brighter than people give him credit for.

She said: “He’s not as thick as people make him out to be.

“He had a different kind of upbringing and education to mine, but he’s not stupid.”

Could it be that David Beckham, like our Prime Minister, learnt early on that playing the “I’m only an ordinary guy” card had its payoff?

David Beckham may not be so inherently ‘stupid’, after all.

And John Key may not be so inherently ‘jocular’, after all.

Second, there’s an interesting, recent, evolutionary take on humour. It comes from three researchers, including the philosopher of cognitive neuroscience, Daniel Dennett:

In brief, the researchers assert that humor serves an evolutionary purpose: In comprehending the world, we sometimes commit too soon to conclusions we’ve jumped to; the humor emotion, mirth, rewards us for figuring out where we’ve made such mistakes.

If that’s true, New Zealanders may come to have the last laugh at the mistake they appear to have made in taking Key’s joke-cracking ways as just a bit of “mucking around“.

[A very short post!]

For those who paid any attention to the announcements over Christchurch schools (including my previous posts on the topic), it will come as no surprise that Trevor McIntyre was found ‘fit for purpose’ to head the “Greater Christchurch Education Renewal Programme”.

I guess if you’re going to do the ‘jobs for the boys’ thing in Christchurch you may as well look to CBHS.

The only question left hanging is whether or not he’ll claim backdated salary from the Government for his time fronting to the media during the post-announcement period, purportedly speaking on behalf of Christchurch Boys’ High School?

As one commenter on the stuff article put it:

Can we be told if he knew of this before Hekia Parata’s bombshell was dropped on other Christchurch educators? As he was one of the few voices I heard on-air at the time, that didn’t seem phased by the announcements and even then seemed like he was trying to curry favour with the powers that be…

‘Gomer Pyle’? – one of his memorable lines was:

“Surprise, surprise, surprise!”

(You had to see it for its full, cringe-worthy, utterly naive memorableness).

Human Capital Appreciation

There are moments when a few words can open up a vista on an entire worldview.

The words shoot through the air for a few days like a rapidly fading spark on Guy Fawkes night but, every so often, and just before disappearing, they can collide with a tragedy. Then, in a flash, everything becomes clear.

Or, less spectacularly but just as breathtaking, it’s like seeing the tell-tale trail of sad droplets that are left from a hardly noticeable collision in the Cloud Chamber that is the modern media.

Whatever your preferred metaphor, what is there for the taking when certain phrases enter the daily news is a deep insight into the fundamental nature of our society and the recent path it has set upon.

That’s what’s just happened – but enough of metaphors.

The words were the result of Business New Zealand appearing to be having kittens over women having babies.

To be fair, they weren’t anxious about women popping babies out – but those potatoes still need digging. And women might forget how to dig them up while they’re off work.

To be fairer still, it’s not that women might forget, it’s just that – as Business NZ’s manager of employment policy Paul McKay explained - there’s this inevitable process of “human capital depreciation“.

What a great phrase.

So off go the words out into the big, wide ether, courtesy of Paul McKay.

McKay catapulted these words on their way when Business New Zealand put its head above the parapets at a government administration select committee hearing into MP Sue Moroney’s bill to extend the paid parental leave period from 14 (currently) to 26 weeks. Paul McKay went on to say that:

international research showed extending paid parental leave could discourage employers from hiring potential parents.

He said potential parents could include women aged anywhere from 15 to 45 and men of any age.

According to Paul McKay, then, the only people employers will want to employ in the future is (post-menopausal?) women over 45 (and girls under 15).

Good news for all those ‘third age women‘, then – their time has come (or will do if Moroney’s bill passes and manages to escape Bill English’s financial veto).

Workplaces could become very interesting in the future given that the ‘third age’ for women is “a time to gather up all the love, laughter, loss and sorrow and use that harvest of wisdom and experience to realize our dearest dreams and passions” and “is an invitation to lose your inhibitions and fears, cut loose and joyfully create the time of your life“.

More seriously, Paul McKay’s throw-away line about ‘human capital depreciation’ raises a few obvious questions, the first being ‘What is human capital?’ The second follows on its heels: ‘What is human capital depreciation?’

On the second question, Business New Zealand’s submission appears to equate it with the loss of “work skills”:

Business New Zealand told the select committee on Wednesday that research shows the longer people are off work, the more likely it is they will lose work skills.

Employment policy manager Paul Mackay says this is called human capital depreciation and having to upskill workers is a cost to employers.

Ok, so being off work makes you lose your skills and losing skills is called ‘human capital depreciation’? Well, not really (as we’ll see, you can stay in work, keep your skill level and still ‘enjoy’ human capital depreciation).

It’s a bit of a story, but Paul McKay gets it just about backwards: Parental leave is actually a very good way to minimise ‘human capital depreciation’ – at least for society as a whole; and, probably, for a parent.

Back to the first question: ‘What is human capital?‘

Gary Becker’s famous work called ‘Human Capital‘ instituted the term in economic thought, although, as he acknowledges, there were interesting forebears working on the issues:

What has been called the human capital “revolution” began about three decades ago. Its pioneers include Ted Schultz, Jacob Mincer, Milton Friedman, Sherwin Rosen, and several others associated with the University of Chicago.

(p. 15 – Second Edition)

And, as with those Chicago School economists, Becker followed the assumptions of rational choice:

My discussion follows modern economics and assumes that these investments [e.g., in human capital - education, training, etc.] are rational responses to a calculus of expected costs and benefits.

(p. 17)

The point, very simply, is that economic productivity is related to the skills, traits and abilities of people – hence, those skills, traits and abilities amount to a form of ‘capital’ (just like plant in a factory). People, therefore, make rational investment decisions about producing their own human capital as they supposedly do about any other form of capital (e.g., ‘should I build a new factory?’).

Education and training are obviously themselves productive of some human capital, but there’s another source.

From the start, Becker saw as pivotal the role of the family in the generation of ‘human capital’ during pre-adulthood (including pre-school). As he mentioned in his Nobel lecture,

The human capital perspective considers how the productivity of people in market and nonmarket situations is changed by investments in education, skills, and knowledge. The economic approach to the family interprets marriage, divorce, fertility, and relations among family members through the lens of utility-maximizing, forward-looking behavior.

Further, one of the most intellectually exhausting efforts he made was on his A Treatise on the Family:

Writing A Treatise on the Family (1981) is the most difficult sustained intellectual effort I have undertaken. The family is arguably the most fundamental and oldest of institutions: some authors trace its origin to more than 40,000 years ago (Soffer 1990). The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families but those in other cultures and changes in family structure during the past several centuries.

That’s a big project. Why did he bother?

Well, one thing such a treatise enables is the extension of economic analysis, sometimes even into areas previously reserved for other social scientists:

The rational choice analysis of family behavior builds on maximizing behavior, investments in human capital, the allocation of time, and discrimination against women and other groups.

It is exactly the same basic logic that has been used by evolutionary theorists and, in particular, evolutionary psychologists to analyse the same kinds of social phenomena. The strangely disturbing feeling that many people get when they hear scientific claims such as that infanticide can be an ‘evolutionarily stable strategy’ is the same as hearing from economists like Becker that:

If children are expected to help out in old age-perhaps because of guilt or related motivations-even parents who are not very loving would invest more in the children’s human capital and save less to provide for their old age.

Despite Becker’s view from the start that human capital is also about productivity in non-market sectors such as the family, interest on the effect of the family on the production of human capital is almost always focused on whether or not productive marketable skills are inculcated in children (e.g., by which parents could get their children earning enough to support the parents in their old age).

But, in the Preface to the 2nd edition of the book (published in 1973), Becker said that “[a]lthough important studies of the effects of human capital in the market sector can be expected, I anticipate that the excitement will be generated by its effects in the non-market sector” particularly in areas like fertility, health and the “productivity of marriage“.

This move into ‘human capital’ as it relates to the ‘non-market sector’ combined with a focus on what happens in families brings back to the surface a tension at the heart of economics – that between production and reproduction.

In economics the standard terminology is production and consumption. But, as any biologist will tell you, consumption – to the extent that it is adaptive – is ultimately about reproduction. ‘Reproduction’ need not simply apply to having offspring – it includes, for example, ‘re-producing’ individual organisms (e.g., people) on a daily basis. We eat, largely, so that our continued biological existence is re-produced over time.

And it’s not just our biology that gets reproduced. We also, in the same sense, reproduce our habits, pleasures, routines, values, family life, neighbourhoods, clubs, organisations, communities, societies and our cultures.

The ‘tension’ I mentioned between production and reproduction comes down to this: It’s possible to produce ‘things’ – lots of ‘things’ –  without reproducing the particular forms and organisation of capital used to produce it.

Environmentalists are familiar with this idea: We depend on nature for all sorts of ‘services’ but it’s perfectly possible to employ those services to produce things that do not reproduce those services.

But it also can happen in the personal and social worlds.

At a personal level good novelists and songwriters know all about the same process. We can, for example, organise our ‘human capital’ (our capacities, ‘talents’, education) to produce things such as personal wealth, upward social mobility and fame but then find that, in the process, we have failed to reproduce those parts of our selves – or our personal relationships – that we valued. We change, sometimes radically, in the ‘production process’.

A society can also employ ‘capital’ (human, physical, financial and – as we’re about to see – social capital) to produce an economy that fails to reproduce the forms of ‘capital’ that produced it in the first place – and sustained it – such as strong, complex networks between people, trust, cooperation and hard work.

It may in fact be that producing one type of capital results in the ‘mining’ of (i.e., failure to reproduce) other forms of capital.

Extending the notion of ‘capital’ even beyond ‘human capital’, Robert Putnam has explored the idea of ‘social capital‘. He provides the following simple definition:

The central idea of social capital, in my view, is that networks and the associated norms of reciprocity have value. They have value for the people who are in them, and they have, at least in some instances, demonstrable externalities, so that there are both public and private faces of social capital.

Famously, he found that just about every which way you look at it, social capital – roughly, the interconnections between people –  declined in the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century after having steadily increased prior to that. ‘Social capital’ – the value inherent in “networks and the associated norms of reciprocity” – was being undermined.

That link provides a fascinating and easy to read explanation of what social capital is, the ways in which Putnam has tried to measure it and its consequences. Here’s a sample:

Someone said earlier in the conference that it is reasonable to think that social capital and institutional enforcement might be in some sense alternative ways of providing social order. Social capital does facilitate informal contract enforcement – the logic of that derives from the basic theory of social capital, that is game theory: if I have dense ties and networks of reciprocity with other people then I don’t actually have to have a contract with my neighbour; both he and I are going to rake the leaves. We just do it without a contract and I don’t sue him if he doesn’t rake his leaves. Thus, if social capital is declining in the United States, that might have implications for other forms of contract enforcement. So I thought I would look at the relative share of lawyering in the American economy as a whole and how this fraction has changed through time. In 1900, there were 41 lawyers per every 10,000 employees in the United States. In 1970, there were 39. This was a little known Putnam’s constant: historically there were about 40 lawyers, plus or minus one, for every 10,000 employees in America. This number was rock-steady over the first seventy years of this century. And then this number started to increase, just as trust and social capital started to decline, so that by now lawyers’ share in the workforce has more than doubled.

Get the picture? Norms of reciprocity – the building block of community – goes down while contractual relations between people go up. Put another way, common decency decreases and gets replaced with the economic and legal technology of market and contractual relations. Responsibility for decency gets devolved to the institutions of the economy and the law.

Great.

In reality, of course, the various forms of capital – physical, human and social – are intimately interconnected. Production of one form of capital (e.g., human capital) can affect the production of another form (e.g., physical capital).

The effect can be positive or negative. The production of social capital amongst a gang, for example, can lead to the destruction of physical capital (e.g., tagging, breaking in to parked cars, etc.).

Less obviously, production of physical or financial capital can destroy human and social capital – especially as they relate to the non-market sector. As economists might put it – though I’m not aware that they have done so – there’s a trade-off between the relative production (which is to say, reproduction) of different forms of capital. To get more of one form you have to sacrifice (re)production of another.

Which brings us back to parental leave and the supposed ‘depreciation of human capital’ it causes – according to Business New Zealand.

‘Human capital depreciation’ is measured and conceputalised in an interesting way. In fact, its value is measured – by economists – in the same way that just about everything else is valued: through its market value over time.

In other words, as Swiss researcher Sylvain Weber recently put it, human capital depreciation is “roughly defined as the decrease of a worker’s market value” (you need to download the linked article to see the quotation – on page 2).

So it’s not that a worker’s skills have necessarily deteriorated through lack of practice – demand for them may simply have changed. This is an important point, and one that Becker was on to from the start. Think about it – what skills are most likely to have rapid rates of reduction in their demand?

Here’s a clue from Becker:

One of the most influential theoretical concepts in human capital analysis is the distinction between general and specific training or knowledge (see Becker 1962; Oi 1962). By definition, firm-specific knowledge is useful only in the firms providing it, whereas general knowledge is useful also in other firms.

It turns out – at least from Weber’s Swiss study linked to above – that different types of education and training span this general versus specific distinction (Switzerland’s education system apparently makes this educational type distinction relatively easy to follow):

Following Becker’s (1964) terminology, human capital acquired through vocational studies can be considered as relatively specific, and that obtained through academic studies as more general. Hence, using Swiss data allows to test whether workers with similar education length but different education type suffer different rates of human capital depreciation.

Our empirical estimates show that human capital depreciation is significantly related to skills’ type, and not only to education length. Workers with vocational training suffer a faster depreciation than those with an academic background. Hence, academic studies (providing general skills) better protect workers against depreciation than vocational studies (providing specific skills).

Here’s part of what Weber found:

Source: Weber (2012, p. 15)

If you want to know what that graph means, compare the blue and green lines to the red and orange ones. The blue and green are the lines for specific vocational education, the red and orange for general ‘academic’ education.

The red and orange lines are steeper. What that means is that ‘human capital depreciation’ is slower for them. In fact, on average, someone in Switzerland who just went to high school (red line) will, by the time they are almost 50, be earning more than someone who in their youth slogged on to get a qualification at an applied university (green line).

As Weber concludes,

General skills protect workers more effectively against depreciation than specific skills. The depreciation rates we obtain are 0.7-0.8% for general education and 1.0% for specific education.

…

The experience-earnings profiles resulting from our estimations are steep for workers with general education and relatively flat for those with specific education.

It turns out, then, that ‘human capital depreciation’ is slower – unsurprisingly – with more generic skills, knowledge and personal capacities. It’s faster with ‘firm-specific’ skills.

No guesses as to the depreciation of which skills the businesses who make up ‘Business New Zealand’ are worried about.

Remember, too, that Becker wasn’t just interested in the ‘market sector’; he thought the most interesting part of ideas like human capital was how they allowed ‘The economic way of looking at behavior‘ to branch out into the ‘non-market sector’.

That is, human capital – and its depreciation – is not just about what is productive in the marketplace. It’s about what produces the things that people want, and prefer, in all areas of life – in their family, in their neighbourhood, in their sports club, in their society.

And what do most people want for their children? Well, let’s be generous – most people want to give their children the best start in life they can. They want to equip them with just the types of ‘general’ capital that will serve them best and longest – the type of human capital that will be most resistant to ‘depreciation’ in life.

I hope it’s obvious what I’m talking about.

While each parent may have a slightly different list of ‘must have’ forms of human capital for their children, there’ll be plenty in common.

They’ll probably want their children to get on with others; be cooperative but not a push-over; have appropriate doses of creativity and spontaneity as well as self-discipline and control; be able to persevere toward a goal but know when, and how, to relax and enjoy themselves; be generous but not a mug; be able to provide for themselves and, if they choose, provide for and raise their own family one day, etc., etc..

And, of course, every parent’s hope – that they’ll be able to be happy, whatever that might mean for them and whatever skills that might require.

These forms of ‘human capital’ are about as general as human capital gets. And, as so many pieces of folk wisdom testify, they are also the least prone to ‘depreciation’, if prone at all. They serve us all well.

In fact, they serve us so well that, as we’ll see, they also help generate ‘social capital’ – networks of interaction and associated norms of reciprocity. It’s called being human, and the path toward it starts at conception.

Enough is now known about the importance of the first few years of life in affecting the development of just these vital forms of human capital to hazard a guess that their development depends crucially on a stable, warm early relationship with one or more adult caregivers.

Not only is it ‘known’ it has also recently entered public consciousness in its neurological guise. Every man and his dog – well, in the circles I move in – pontificates on how even ‘adolescent brains aren’t fully formed, you know?’

And, the public are – roughly – right to the point where neurodevelopmental biologist Eric Keverne can conclude the following in a discussion of how the development of the brain affects later adult wellbeing (pp. 1354-1355):

Mother and infant behaviour have evolved as a unit. While the mother’s brain has been maternalized by the hormones of pregnancy generated by the foetus, the infant’s developing brain requires social stimulation from a mother committed to providing the emotional rewards of warmth and suckling. Not only do infants have to learn to sit, stand and eventually walk and talk, but they also have to learn social rules and emotional control. It is clear that the process of infant socialization benefits from this close relationship, but whether this occurs during a critical period in brain development is open to question. We know, for example, that the ability to learn language arises from a synergy between early brain development and language experience and is seriously compromised when language is not experienced early in life (Mayberry et al. 2002). It is, therefore, probably safer to think of this whole early developmental period as critical, but modifiable while the brain remains in a plastic state. The synergy between early brain development and the learning of social rules is also likely to be compromised when the developing infant–mother relationship is compromised early in life. Certainly, mother–infant separations in monkeys are known to have long-term consequences (Hinde et al. 1978) and extreme consequences for infant abuse when infants are separated from their mother and reared with peers (Harlow & Harlow 1965; Kraemer & Ebhert 1991).

He then argues that,

Humans tend to worry about the uterine environment and toxic agents or drugs, which may damage the fingers and toes of babies, but perhaps we should pay more attention to the post- partum period when the social environment exercises its effects on the developing brain and lays down the foundations for future well-being.

The “foundations for future well-being“? That reminds me – aren’t happy workers also meant to be productive workers?

If you really want to get into this research a good place to start is this UK government report by Keverne – and, wouldn’t you know it, it introduces yet another form of capital, ‘mental capital’. In it Keverne explains that,

The post-natal period is particularly sensitive to life’s experiences which can induce changes in brain development and behavioural phenotype [i.e., how we act]. Evidence from both human and animal studies demonstrates that aversive events during this period can have long-term effects on behaviour and physiology. The pioneering studies of Harlow and Harlow (1973) on maternal deprivation in monkeys revealed the importance of mother- infant interactions in normal behavioural development. With the long-term absence of mother, infant monkeys become behaviourally inhibited and more responsive to stress. More notable is the finding that, as adults, they are both socially and maternally incompetent, neglecting and abusing their own infants. Although maternal competence improves with successive births, the abusive behaviour continues (Ruppenthal et al., 1976).

As I said, it’s important to notice that these forms of ‘human capital’ emphasised by this literature are also inherently social forms of capital. They are the starting point of the social networks and connections that Putnam (above) describes as providing all those ‘externalities’ for ‘third parties’ (i.e., everyone else).

They are also the starting point for future wellbeing – and whatever we might mean by that word it has something to do with a thoroughly ‘productive’ (as opposed to ‘destructive’) human life.

Get prepared for a long quotation from Putnam – it’s worth reading:

The relationship between educational performance and social capital is much stronger, two orders of magnitude stronger than, for example – again controlling for everything else – spending on schools or teacher/pupil ratios or any of the obvious things that are more usually thought to increase educational performance. Figure 7.2 shows a composite measure of child welfare (it includes teen pregnancy, infant mortality and a variety of other measures of how well kids do) and again there is a very strong relationship showing that, in general, the welfare of children is higher where social capital is higher. Figure 7.3 shows that states where children watch less TV have higher levels of social capital, a relationship I study in much more detail in my book.

Crime is strongly negatively predicted by social capital; this is true at the state level, but it is also true at the community and neighbourhood levels. Once again the strongest predictor of the murder rate is a low level of social capital. It is stronger than poverty; it is stronger than other plausible measures. Figure 7.4 shows that murder rates are lower in states where social capital is higher, and Figure 7.5 shows that people are generally less pugnacious where social capital is high.

As Michael Woolcock and other authors have pointed out, there is very strong evidence of powerful health effects of social connectedness. The evidence is strong not only in American states, but also in Finland, Japan, and other countries. Controlling for your blood chemistry, age, gender, whether or not you jog, and for all other risk factors, your chance of dying over the course of the next year are cut in half by joining one group, and cut to a quarter by joining two groups. This is not cheating; these are prospective studies. It is not that people who are healthy become joiners, it is clear from the studies that the arrow runs in the other direction, from joining to health. These are big effects, as can been seen in Figure 7.6. Once again, these same results are confirmed by a multitude of individual-level, over-time studies.

Figure 7.7 shows that interstate variance in the percentage of tax evasion, as measured by the IRS, is strongly related to differences in social capital at the state level. No other variable does as well at explaining why states differ in tax evasion. In other words, where people are connected by dense networks of engagement and reciprocity, they are more likely to comply with the law, very probably because they are more confident that others will, too, so they will not be “suckers” in this dilemma of collective action. Figure 7.8 shows that states where people are more connected with each other are also marked by greater tolerance.

Figures 7.9 and 7.10 show that economic inequality and civic inequality are less in states with higher values of the social capital index. Here the causal arrows are likely to run in both directions, with citizens in high social capital states likely to do more to reduce inequalities, and inequalities themselves likely to be socially divisive.

Finally, I can add some preliminary new evidence to connect social capital to self- assessments of individual welfare. One of the important contributions of this conference has been to highlight the importance of considering evidence at the individual as well as the community level. Here is another example. Using a combination of the DDB replies to four questions asking individuals for a self-assessment of their own happiness, I have discovered that happiness increases with both their own and their state’s measure of social capital. By contrast, an individual’s measure of happiness rises if his or her income is higher but falls if the average state income is higher. Thus, although people value their own income more when their neighbours earn less money, people feel better off when either they or their neighbours have higher levels of social capital.

As I said earlier, physical, human and social capital are closely intertwined.

Extended parental leave is one small way that New Zealand society can invest in the most foundational forms of human (and ‘mental’) capital and the ‘human capital’ that is least likely to ‘depreciate’ over life and the most likely to generate, in turn, social capital with all its positive ‘externalities’.

Now, that might be all there is to say about ‘human capital’ and its deprecation but, sadly, there’s a much bigger picture that needs sketching.

Paul McKay’s few words shot into the media atmosphere just before another example of how our society treats – and understands – human capital exploded back into the headlines.

The Royal Commission Report on the Pike River mine tragedy was a political bombshell, as almost all commentators have pointed out.

The Minister of Labour, Kate Wilkinson, has resigned her portfolio but has still had to defend her continuation as a minister (and here).

Labour has claimed that as a result of their review of mine safety initiated in 2008 change was “on track”:

“We were on track to change the Mining Act as a result of that review,” says Labour MP Trevor Mallard. “The review was scrapped by Kate Wilkinson and that’s something that is very regrettable.”

John Key has spoken out in her defence:

Ms Wilkinson argued there was no need to review the mine inspection programme, and Mr Key backs her.

“The work was undertaken,” says Mr Key. “It started as a wider review but it was small mines, in which case, yes, the minister was right.”

But six months later, Pike exploded.

Much of the commentary has underlined how the report may have the effect of drawing a line under an era of deregulation that has continued, unabated, for over twenty years.

But deregulation is part of a much wider worldview. It’s a worldview that prioritises production of physical and financial capital over human capital and social capital.

It’s a worldview that only sees those aspects of human capital that contribute to economic production rather than those aspects that contribute to the (re)production of people, communities and society.

There’s a telling sentence in the overview ‘Snapshot’ from Volume 1 of the Royal Commission Report:

 In the drive towards coal production the directors and executive managers paid insufficient attention to health and safety and exposed the company’s workers to unacceptable risks. Mining should have stopped until the risks could be properly managed.

The “drive towards coal production” (i.e., to the production of physical capital) meant that the directors and managers “paid insufficient attention to” (i.e., did not prioritise) “health and safety” (i.e., the re-production of the men).

The Royal Commission has called for the establishment of a Crown agency to oversee health and safety in New Zealand:

On balance, the commission considers that the creation of a single-purpose Crown agency would be the best way to urgently improve New Zealand’s poor health and safety performance. The agency would work with MBIE on health and safety policy and would be accountable to the minister for health and safety administration in accordance with agreed performance measures.

And there have been calls to extend the reforms to all workplaces because of New Zealand’s poor safety record compared with other countries. Echoing the views of others, Green MP Kevin Hague has blamed the deregulatory ideology of the 1980s and 1990s:

Green MP Kevin Hague said a “wave of ideology” towards small government in the 1980s and 1990s led to the disaster.

Regulations were stripped away, and there was a catastrophic failure of government as a regulator.

The two mines inspectors had repeatedly called for greater resources to do their jobs, were not trained in systems audits and were unclear on how to interpret the standard.

“It is the failure of the regulatory regime, of the Government as a regulator, and it is the failure of deregulation that has led to a situation where this company, Pike River Coal, could take those catastrophic risks.”

But it is the failure of something much more basic and fundamental than regulation: It is the failure of our society to reproduce its human and social capital in their most crucial and important forms.

Business NZ’s concern over the “human capital depreciation” that will supposedly result from parental leave is a concern for production over reproduction in the most apt and pointed sense.

But at least it provides us with a neat and concise phrase to describe how little we, as a country, appreciate our precious human capital – and how we have increasingly mined it.

Now I think we all know what ‘human capital depreciation‘  really means.