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Raising Education Standards Holding the Government to account is just one of the jobs of Opposition, and it has become an interesting job. Credibility is a valuable political asset, hard to build and easily lost. But the more important task we face is that we have to build a vision for a better New Zealand, so people know they have a viable choice in 2005. National will campaign for one standard of citizenship, and to close the economic gap with Australia. Education is part of both stories - it provides the opportunity to give every child the start deserved by a New Zealand citizen, and an appropriately educated workforce is critical to higher rates of growth In the next few weeks National will release a discussion document on education aimed at excellence in schools. I have watched our schools closely for over a decade - and I've had children in our schools for the last 10 years. I have been struck by how our schools are often slow in responding to the changing climate. These organisations should epitomise to our children a learning environment. Too often they have been dominated by complaining and resistance to change - two things we try to teach our children not to do. But my real concerns focus on two corrosive problems I want to change. The first is what has been called the soft bigotry of low expectations. A generation of politicians, bureaucrats, teachers and parents have been bombarded with statistics and philosophy that tell them some children can't succeed - that their social background, how and where they were born, and to whom, pre-determines how much they can learn and how much they can achieve. Related to this is the second corrosive belief that the teacher can't make much difference, no matter how much training, or how much money goes into our schools. The sum of these two beliefs is that we collectively believe some children will fail, from the start, and we tolerate it. The results of this attitude can be measured by international comparisons of New Zealand performance in literacy and numeracy. The day I started school we were number one for literacy. Now we are 13th. Among English speaking countries in the developed world we rank second to bottom for literacy. For numeracy the picture is not much different. More importantly, we have the largest disparity between our best performing children and our worst performing children in the developed world. Our best are among the best in the developed world, and our worst are in the third world. The top 20% of New Zealand children achieve brilliantly by any measure. Our average isn't too bad either. It's testament to an education system that works for children who know how to learn. But the best reason for state funded schools is the democracy of the intellect, the capacity to open doors for every child. It's a right of citizenship for our children, and an obligation on every taxpayer, to make sure those doors are opened.
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