QUADRANT GETS STUCK INTO MODERN EDUCATION

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The coal shills of ‘Quadrant Online’ can work themselves up into a lather all they like about the deficiencies they see in modern education. (https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2021/03/making-notes-as-the-rot-began/) But it reminds me of the story told by Eric Earlie, who took a job as a headmaster in Papua-New Guinea some years ago to further their life experience and his own as well. When he arrived at the village he had been posted to, he was met by the Headman. After greetings and formalities he enquired about the school, and was taken to an empty site. “This is where the school will be,” he was told. “Your first job will be to build it.”

Being a very practical man, Eric soon got down to clearing the site, organising materials, and designing an then building the school; with all the kids and their parents joining in. A major part of the village’s income came from copra trading, but the local copra growers were sick of being ripped off by the local cartel of foreign copra traders who all offered the same low price for the product. So Eric and his students and their families built a copra storehouse, and offered the growers a deal, which they accepted. When all the copra was harvested and bagged up, four of his biggest and best young male students would take it down the Markham River to Lae, haggle there with the Chinese copra buyers, collect the cash, make their way back up the river to the village, pay the growers amounts out of their wildest grower dreams, and still keep a profit for the school.

But it duly came time it came for Eric to leave and return to Australia, so that his daughter could complete her secondary education and start at university. But by that stage, the school had a general purpose class room, a science laboratory, the copra store and an administrative building, and its copra business had expanded to where it was turning over (in 1970 as I recall) about A$250,000 per year.

Eric got himself a job teaching in a Canberra high school. Students there the same age as those he had been sending down to Lae to haggle with the Chinese dealers were putting up their hands and asking for permission to go to the toilet.

Eric found it all rather demoralising.

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