Mike's Minute: I wish I had the Minister's positivity around teaching

I wish I had the Minister's positivity around teaching. 

As you will have heard, we are short of teachers. We aren’t training as many teachers as we used to, so increasingly, we’ll need to bring more of them into the country. 

The Minister suggested—optimistically, I think—that it's about more than just pay. It's about resources and support, which I’m sure is true. But the question remain, does it solve anything? 

Does anything solve anything? 

Is teaching simply a profession —like so many others— that is no longer what it once was? And if that's the case, why would anyone choose to be a teacher today? 

Kids can be difficult. And if they’re not, schools are riddled with social issues that no teacher should have to deal with – yet they do. 

Teachers are more like social workers than educators now. Even with all the holidays, the numbers don’t lie: people aren’t enrolling in teaching like they used to. 

The trouble is, while teacher numbers are dropping, the number of kids isn’t. In fact, student numbers are expected to peak next year. So the gap widens. 

Bringing in teachers presents a twofold issue.  

You have to find teachers in a world where everyone is looking for them. They have to want to teach here. Is New Zealand really a magnet? 

I could try to reassure you by talking about the teachers I had – but we’re going back 50 years. They were, virtually all of them, ordinary. Even with age and some maturity, as I look back at the ones I remember, not a single one was exceptional or brilliant or even really, really good. They were average. In an average school. That turned out a lot of average kids. 

Is it possible the great teachers are, and have always been, the exception? The ones with the calling, the drive? The rest have merely been okay. 

Which, of course, doesn’t solve the problem. 

We have a lot to do with it. Society is a mess these days: held back, held down by anxieties, concerns, divisions, anger, frustration. A sense of loss, bewilderment, and upheaval that occupies pretty much everywhere, globally. 

And so we send our offspring —if we send them at all— to be shaped by a miracle worker. One we pay average money to. In what might be a leaky building. With minimal resources. 

We are setting it all up for failure. It’s complex. But if the Minister is right, and she can turn it around, she deserves a medal. If not beatification. 

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