I may be wrong but . . . .

John Key slipped at least a couple of pegs in my rating of him this week with reported comments about teachers’ attitudes to national standards. John’s been scoring reasonably well with me over the past year, with a few exceptions, but this issue is leaving me somewhat disgusted with his arrogance and cynical use of guilt tripping.

I’m basing this purely from an article in the Christchurch Press, March 12th, page A3, headlined “Key prefers to ‘work with’ rebel schools”. After noting that Key was refering to a growing number of schools throughout NZ refusing to implement the standards until they were trialled and teachers had received training, here’s what the reporter wrote:

Asked if rebellious boards of trustees would be sacked, Key said he preferred to work with the schools in the first instance.

“In the end, if they don’t, then those schools need to answer to the parents of New Zealand why they are prepared to allow one in five young New Zealanders to leave school without adequate literacy and numeracy skills.”

How pathetic! If you haven’t got a decent argument to support your policy, then you may as well go for the old ‘guilt trip’ tactic.

His response disgusts me on two fronts:

1. It shows extreme arrogance by assuming that I’m too stupid to understand any real logic. This is just a nonsense statement using an assumed statistic to overbear on any rational view of nuances and real-world teaching practice.

2. Worse, it’s using the guilt trip method by saying that anything that differs from his point of view will produce disastrous results for which the dissenters will bear ultimate blame and shame.

It’s like “if you don’t spray the weeds in your garden with the chemicals we the town council deem necessary, then you will have to explain to the everyone why the town turns into a dump and unmanageable jungle, and we’ll all blame you”.

Most teachers are resisting this forced adoption of Key/English/Tolley policy because they have the best interest of children at heart. It is the government, far more so than the teachers’ unions, that have a largely political agenda here.

Using irrational arguments to encourage parents to blame and pressure teachers is about as low as you can go. This policy is unwinding, and given this latest cynical tweak by John Key, it deserves to.

And if this is what Key means by “working with teachers”, then I would say it’s more like “a working over of teachers”. The word “with” is pure spin.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 8:56 am and is filed under Education, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.