Tough Love: It is impossible to listen to the Fraser High School Principal, Virginia Crawford’s, speech without hearing in every word and phrase her passionate understanding of just how important education is to freeing people from the social conditions – and expectations – that imprison them.
THE PRINCIPAL OF Hamilton’s Fraser High School, Virginia
Crawford, has been roundly criticised for warning her students about the strong
correlation between truancy and failure in the world beyond high school. The
push-back against Crawford’s address culminated in a walkout by around 100 of
Fraser’s senior students on Monday 24 September 2018. But, what if she was
telling the truth?
Very few people have been willing to test Crawford’s claims
empirically. To ascertain whether the behaviours she warned her students against:
truancy, substance abuse, petty crime; are, indeed, common factors in the much
more serious social indices of functional illiteracy, long-term unemployment,
prolonged periods on social welfare, repeated incarceration, mental health
problems, sexual assault, domestic violence and, most disturbingly in relation
to young New Zealanders – suicide.
This is strange, since a great deal of work has already been
undertaken in this area by those convinced of the efficacy of the National
Party’s “social investment” initiative. The whole point of the social
investment project was to identify the “warning signs” of individual and/or
family dysfunction so that the authorities could intervene and, hopefully, forestall,
that individual’s and/or family’s decline into irremediable social pathologies.
Those warning signs were precisely the behaviours alluded to in Crawford’s
address.
“Every student who walks out of the gate to truant is
already a statistic of the worst kind, highly likely to go to prison, highly
likely to commit domestic violence or be a victim of domestic violence, be
illiterate, be a rape victim, be a suicide victim, be unemployed for the
majority of their life, have a major health problem or problems, die at an
early age, have an addiction - drugs, gambling, alcohol or smoking.
“The more you truant, the more likely you are to end up as
one or most of those statistics. I don’t want you to be one of those
statistics. Economic research confirms everything I am telling you. It’s been
proven. Some young people at Fraser today are still proving that message to be
true.”
One of the Principal’s sternest critics is Herald columnist,
Deborah Hill Cone, whose argument is best summed-up in the old aphorism: ‘Give
a dog a bad name and hang him.’ “Being told by an authority figure you are
certain to become a grim statistic is more of a danger to young people than
skipping class”, Hill Cone warned Crawford. “In some very pervasive,
unconscious and dogged ways we become what we are expected to be.”
There is something quite touching about Hill Cone’s faith in
the individual’s ability to rise above the awful impetus of social causation
and statistical correlation. “And try to remember this,” she advises the students
of Fraser High in her Monday column, “your principal, Virginia Crawford, has
absolutely no idea what your life is going to be like. None of us do. And she
has no right to tell your story.”
Many would argue, however, that Crawford not only has the
right, she has the duty, to speak plainly and forthrightly about the awful
statistics to which so many of the students attending Fraser High School are
likely to contribute in the months and years ahead of them. Telling them, as
Hill Cone would have her do, that: “It’s your soul, and your story to
construct” is all very bracing and Kiplingesque, but it is highly debateable as
to whether it will do as much good as telling them that buckling down and
working hard at school is just about the only way out of the dead-end
working-class suburbs which for so many of them constitute the boundaries of
the known world.
A number of the parents of Fraser High School students have
taken offence at Crawford’s comments and are threatening to withdraw their
offspring from the school until such time as its errant principal is replaced.
Like so many of us, they do not like to think too much about the uncanny ability
of insurance underwriters to correlate specific behaviours with specific
outcomes in the setting of their clients’ premiums. Rather than condemn
Crawford for her predictions, might it not be more helpful for their children’s
futures to ask themselves whether the behaviour they have been modelling in
their own lives bears out or refutes the Principal’s fears?
Nothing did more to shatter the rigid boundaries separating
New Zealand’s social classes than the First Labour Government’s ringing
affirmation that every New Zealander “whatever his [or her] level of academic
ability, whether he [or she] be rich or poor, whether he [or she] live in town
or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for
which he [or she] is best fitted, and to the fullest extent of his [or her]
powers.”
It is impossible to listen to Crawford’s speech without
hearing in every word and phrase her passionate understanding of just how
important education is to freeing people from the social conditions – and
expectations – that imprison them. She knows that there is a vast, beautiful,
exciting and intensely rewarding world beyond the borders of “Nawton or
Dinsdale or Western Heights” – just as she knows that the students of Fraser
High School who play truant on a regular and prolonged basis are,
statistically-speaking, the ones least likely to ever get to see it.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 25 September 2018.
