Fundamentally failing

OPINION: The Government wants all schoolchildren to sit tests. A lot of people think this is a bad idea. I think it's a good idea, so long as they set the right tests, writes Joe Bennett this week.

There are many ways to be cruel to children. These include putting a television in their bedroom, showering them with electronic gizmos, showering them with money, driving them everywhere, and making them terrified of the world beyond the front door. But just about the cruellest thing you can do to them, short of active physical abuse, is to fail to teach them to read, write and do maths.

Children are survivors. Evolution has tailored them to be resilient and, despite their parents, most kids turn out all right.

They like to live and they enjoy the world. But if they can't read, write or do maths, they are disabled. They are unfitted for civilised society because civilised society is predicated on language first and maths second. Without language and maths it's called a gorilla colony. I am fond of gorilla colonies but I do not want to live in one.

Reading, writing and maths are too important to leave to parents. That's why schools were invented.

Schools can't do as much as people think they can. They can't alter genes, or undo parental influence. But they can give a child the chance to make more of himself than he would have done if left solely to his parents. Schools give him a taste of a world beyond. All of which makes me dubious about the wisdom of involving parents in schools.

As a teacher I found that when I met mum and dad, I always forgave the child everything. But that is by the by.

I taught for 20 years. If a child arrived in my classroom illiterate, I just picked it up and handed it to remedial teachers with instructions not to return the creature until it was teachable.

My excuse is that I was a secondary teacher. Primary teachers don't have that excuse. Teaching the fundamentals is their job. If they fail in it, they fail in their duty.

And yet schools continue to turn out a few illiterate, innumerate kids.

The reasons may be many and understandable, but in the end there can be no excuse for a youngster emerging from 11 years of compulsory state schooling unable to read a charge sheet or add up the jail terms that have just been handed down to him. For jail is where many of them go. Jail then becomes their second school. Jail is a terrible school.

So it seems to me a good idea to identify illiterate and innumerate children early and sort the problem out for the good of everyone concerned. All schools should do so as a matter of course but it's clear that some do not. So national testing seems sensible.

I would propose a straightforward multi-choice literacy and numeracy test. It would occupy half an hour a year and it could be marked cheaply by a machine. Most kids would sail through it. Those who failed it would be tagged and given remedial teaching.

Schools from poor areas, who seem to be the main objectors to national testing, would benefit by a huge influx of support teachers. They ought to welcome that. It would make them better able to succeed with their difficult kids.

Because we must all do our bit for society I am hereby offering to set the first national literacy test. I ask only a nominal fee, the cost, say, of organising a Ministry of Education conference entitled "The role of the facilitator in a student-centred learning environment".

And to show I'm up to the task, here's a sample test paper.

Instructions: Read the newspaper article above and choose the best answer to the questions that follow. If you cannot read these instructions, suck your pencil and wait for the bell.1. Johnny leaves school unable to read or write. There's a good chance that he is going to:

a. heaven

b. educate himself and become Prime Minister

c. Paremoremo.2. Mary reads and writes competently. She will have:

a. no difficulty with this test

b. a nervous breakdown, poor thing, when told she has to take a test

c. her entire education disrupted by having to take one half-hour multi-choice test

d. life-long counselling as a result of having to take this test.3. A teacher at any level who inherits an illiterate child at the beginning of a school year and passes the child on still illiterate at the end of year has:

a. fostered a life-long learner

b. not paid enough attention to the learning modules in the national curriculum and in particular the core competencies section

c. done a splendid job of fostering the child's self-esteem

d. failed.

I don't know if this is the sort of test the Government has in mind. If it isn't, it should be.

» Joe Bennett is an English-born travel writer and columnist who lives in New Zealand with dogs. His columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

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