I am five and I go to school: Early Years Schooling in New Zealand, 1900-2010

Published by Otago University Press

PO Box 56, Dunedin

Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street, Dunedin

F: 64 3 479 8385. E: university.press@otago.ac.nz

First published 2011

ISBN 978 1 877372 86 5 (print)

ISBN 978 1 927322 59 8 (EPUB)

ISBN 978 1 927322 60 4 (Kindle)

Copyright © Helen May 2011

Publisher: Wendy Harrex

Designer: Fiona Moffat

Indexer: Diane Lowther

Printed in Hong Kong through Condor Production Ltd.

Cover image: Children of many different cultures on their first

day at Clyde Quay School, Wellington, 1976. ATL EP-1976-0428-8A

Pages 2–3: ‘A school without an ample supply of books is a poor place’,

from Education today and tomorrow. LM Crown copyright, p. 18.

Ebook conversion 2015 by meBooks

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

1 The Youngest Children at School

2 Rethinking the Early Years, 1900s–1920s

3 Experiments and Expediency, 1910s–1930s

4 Politics of Playway, 1940s–1950s

5 Alternative Solutions, 1960s–1980s

6 The Measure of Juniors, 1980s–2000s

Appendices

Notes

Select bibliography

Index

Back Cover

To my grandchildren Matthew, Benjamin, and Laura Cook who span the preschool and junior class versions of early years education.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations in text

Abbreviations in captions

Abbreviations in notes

Acknowledgements

This book has been made possible by a wide range of assistance and support.

The University of Otago has provided study leave and financial support. My heartfelt appreciation to Professor Kwok Wing Lai, who was the Acting Dean of the College of Education for eight months.

The Institut für Quantum Optics und Quantum Information, University of Innsbruck, Austria, gave financial support to my husband Professor Crispin Gardiner and provided an apartment close to the city, underneath the mountains and looking on to the River Inn. For six months I was able to read, write, walk and think without interruption.

Family and friends were interested in the project and gave support and contributions.

The staff of libraries and museums, large and small, have sourced and searched for snippets and images about life in the primers, infants and juniors, for which I am grateful.

Teachers and colleagues in the field of education have talked with me over the years, and found materials. This has been invaluable.

Schools have opened their cupboards to see what might be found.

Adults and children have recalled their days at school.

Colleagues at the University of Otago College of Education have passed on materials, insights, and recollections.

Education organisations have been helpful when approached.

My patient students listened when I often shared the stories.

The students at the Wanganui outpost of Wellington College of Education joined in the excitement of my trawling the city archives concerning the Whanganui stories.

Joneen Walker showed me some Dunedin junior classes and took photographs.

Wendy Harrex of the Otago University Press liked the idea of publishing the book and realised it with the help of designer Fiona Moffat.

John Smith read the chapters, provided thoughtful comments and more anecdotes.

The late Hugh Price allowed access to his collection of reading books.

Organisations have hosted conferences and seminars where I have presented work in progress. My appreciation also to friends such as Sue Middleton, Kerry Bethell, Kay Morris-Matthews and Larry Prochner, who share similar passions for the history of education.

And always there has been the love and support of Crispin Gardiner.

Story book cover and pages by Campbell Gilbert, aged five years, Arthur Street School, Dunedin, 1980. Nola Wyber Collection

Miss Wyber’s Room One class, Arthur Street School, 1980. Campbell Gilbert is first on left, back row. Nola Wyber Collection

1 The Youngest Children at School

On 7 March 1980, Campbell Gilbert walked to school with his mother, younger sister and the family dog. It was his first day at Arthur Street School in Dunedin. In the morning he was given a new unlined exercise book and on the first page he traced over a story printed by his teacher, Miss Nola Wyber, which read, ‘I am five and I go to school’.¹

Campbell Gilbert

Miss Wyber, who retired in 1988, kept Campbell’s book of stories along with other memorabilia, records and resources from her long teaching career. Kindly lent to the author, these have been a useful resource. Miss Wyber remembered Campbell as ‘a lovely wee boy.’ His neat book is full of charming pictures. On his first day he drew a picture of his dog, three balloons, and a birthday cake – with four candles!

Like most New Zealand children, Campbell started school on his fifth birthday and this was celebrated with a party. His next story has a drawing of himself and his teacher has written ‘I live in Michie St’ (actually it was Lawson Street). Campbell clearly has his own story in mind in a picture of a brown dog and ‘My dog chews my slippers.’ He is rewarded with a stamp of a dog for this story, as he has copied the teacher’s printing. This is fast progress.

A few days later, Campbell again prints underneath Miss Wyber’s printing to say, ‘Every day I go to school.’ He draws a picture of himself, three children and the school. We do not know the extent to which Campbell determined the content of his first stories, nor do we know whether this story reflects his pleasure in going to school ‘every day’ or concern that he has to go ‘every day’! The smiling child suggests that he is happy to be going to school.

Campbell’s story on his first day at school appealed to me as a title for this book. Miss Wyber could recall her past pupils and in 2010 traced Campbell, who was working as an investment banker in London. His first book was returned to the safe-keeping of his family.

‘I am five and I go to school’ is the twentieth-century sequel to School beginnings: A nineteenth-century colonial story (2005). Together, these books provide a window into the history of schooling in New Zealand from the perspectives of the youngest children and their teachers, in the variously called preparatory, primer, infant or junior classes in primary schools, and a few infant schools. This book is about the ‘new education’ ideas that emerged around 1900, at the start of the new century, which slowly transformed the work and play of life in the classroom for young children at school. The story concludes in 2010.

Turn-of-the-century classrooms: Infants 3 and 4 girls, North East Valley School, Dunedin, 1913. HC S09234g.

Infant boys, North East Valley School, Dunedin 1913. HC S09-234f.

Clyde Quay School infants, Wellington. ANZ/w AAFL 691 4.4ab.

Te Aro School, Wellington, 1909. ANZ/w ABHO W3371.

Turn-of-the-century realities

In 1900, few of the 51,492 five, six and seven-year-old children in public and native schools would have discerned, and even fewer recalled, any change in the daily realities of their classroom life. In his recollection of starting school in Amberley, a rural Canterbury community in 1901, Rewi Alley captures the likely grimness of the school experience for some children:

I well remember the day I turned five, running up a pile of bags of chaff before my golden curls were cut off, shouting, ‘I’m a man now’ …. In the primer classes we had a mistress who was determined that every one of her charges without exception should learn. More than two mistakes in spelling or more than two sums wrong brought the strap. Coming into school with dirty knees brought the strap …. I do not think I escaped the strap on a single day in those early years. I do not think the mistress was particularly successful in teaching me to spell …. There was one day when I was strapped five times, the last offence being when I pulled my short pants high and painted my designs on my legs instead of the paper during a painting class.²

Punishment was institutionalised in European and colonial schooling traditions and its eventual demise slow. With evidence from oral histories recalling the turn of the century, historian Jeanine Graham states, ‘Far more children experienced physical violence at school than at home.’³ But the fact that Rewi had a ‘painting class’ was a clue to changes in the focus and fabric of schooling that were slowly infiltrating classroom practice. Policy documents of the period suggest a more kindly regimen and considerably more innovation. Poorly trained teachers, too many children, ill-equipped and unhealthy classrooms, and stern examination requirements were realities that frustrated endeavours to introduce new education methods intended to provide a more understanding and interesting environment for the youngest children at school.

Thirteen years later in 1914, Rewi Alley’s sister, Gwen Alley (later Somerset) began her training as a teenage pupil-teacher in the infant room at Elmwood School. Her experiences were the impetus for a life-long commitment to transform the education of young children. This later led to her leadership in the Playcentre movement:

On my first morning I found two rows of new entrants of five years seated on two forms facing each other beneath a blackboard. The room was deathly quiet except for the occasional squeak of a pencil slate. The two rows of new children sat quivering in fear of the strange world into which they had just been deposited. The Infant Mistress loomed above them. She announced, ‘The first one who cries will get this,’ and showed her strap.⁴

Fredric Alley, the father of Rewi and Gwen, was the head teacher of the school where Rewi got a daily strapping. While a stern disciplinarian of his children, Fredric was also known for his progressive methods and his love for literature, music and the natural environment. Recalling his fear that the inspectors would fault his focus on ‘children rather than results’, he told his daughter Gwen that ‘Father Pestalozzi might never have existed.’⁵ (In the early years of the nineteenth century, the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi had promoted a kind of schooling premised on affection and engagement between teachers and children.)⁶

A gradual lessening of violence within the classroom did not necessarily mean peace in the playground. John Money recalled that his first day at school in 1923 was ‘abominable’ for a five-year-old ‘enthralled by the prospect of learning.’ Money described his first day at Morrinsville School in the rural North Island to historian Michael King, who wrote that he felt like

a stranger among the Lord of the Flies. He was utterly unprepared for the manner in which the Pakeha children fought with Maori children in the playground, replaying, as he saw it, the Waikato Wars of sixty years earlier (there were at the school grandchildren and great-grandchildren of men who had fought on both sides of that conflict). Local Maori members of the Ngati Haua tribe were still smarting from the confiscation of much of their land as punishment for their rebellion against the Crown.

Money sought help from his older cousin in the girl’s play shed (an open-air three-sided shed where children could eat their lunch or shelter in cold weather). However:

The girls would have nothing to do with a boy in their sanctuary [and] abandoned me to the attacking warriors. Catastrophe!⁷

At lunch-time John ran home, on the pretext that he thought school had finished, but was promptly returned by his mother to the classroom. He learned to absent himself from the parts of the playground ‘where combat seemed to erupt every playtime and lunchtime.’⁸ Money’s mother did not demand, as would later be the case, that the school protect younger children. Such protection was only for girls and in the ‘sanctuary’ of their shed. The vignette also serves as a reminder of the short time span of our schooling and colonial history. John Money died in 2006, yet his first experiences at school re-enact the central events of nineteenth-century colonial history. While encounters between Maori and Pakeha became less cataclysmic, both races used schooling and education as tools to transform and contain the turn-of-the-century demarcations in power, politics, land and language. Maori and Pakeha scholars have told these stories about their education. The many images of schools in forest clearings may be an heroic story of endeavour for Pakeha settlers, but these same forested lands were the subject of loss by Maori.

Ohuru railway camp school built by settlers in forest clearing, Whanganui district, 1909. WH scs/misc/94

In addition to documenting the changing environment for the youngest children at school, this book reveals the growing influence of women teachers, women like Alley who, as infant mistresses of their own domain, successfully demonstrated the possibilities and practicalities of a distinctly New Zealand pedagogy for early years’ schooling. This history includes the stories of infant/junior school-teachers, who were sometimes radical or misunderstood. In this regard, it is opportune to consider the opinions surrounding the country’s most famous infant mistress, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, who taught Maori infants during the middle years of the century and then wrote about the experience. By this time the infant mistress, although not Ashton-Warner, had become a powerful presence and voice in schooling matters. The lives of these women have mainly been lost in our recorded histories of schooling.

As the balance between preschool and early schooling changed in respect to a child’s introduction into the education system, the voices of advocacy for early education also changed. The earlier presence and power of the expert infant mistress was, from the 1980s, eclipsed by a cohort of nationally and internationally noted New Zealand scholars and advocates in the early childhood sector.⁹

New understandings

‘I am five and I go to school’ opens at the beginning of a century when the term ‘new education’ was coined. The focus, rationale and methods of new education were deemed progressive, in the sense of being a necessary tool for social reforms intended to both equalise and harmonise society. Since understanding the young child was at the heart of progressive thinking, many of society’s ills were attributed to the consequences of misunderstanding. Twentieth-century progressive education was, in part, a refashioning of enlightened educational ideas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, ideas that had been largely overturned amidst the practical realities of delivering mass education in the nineteenth century.¹⁰

As a confluence of ideas emerging in Europe, Britain and the US, progressive education came to underpin the later reforms of education across many Western countries.¹¹ Curriculum and practice were reformed through a combination of new insights, such as Stanley Hall’s scientific approaches to child-study,¹² and John Dewey’s philosophical understanding of education,¹³ and the drive of reformist kindergarten practitioners.¹⁴ From Italy, the work of Maria Montessori came to attention and, for a few years, her methods were heralded as the ‘cure-all’ recipe for early years education.¹⁵ From England, the campaigns of Margaret McMillan brought a sharper political focus to the chances of working-class children in the education system.¹⁶ The issues of equal opportunity were theoretically framed by Britain’s Percy Nunn, who proposed the thesis ‘that the primary aim of all educational effort should be to help boys and girls to achieve the highest degree of individual development of which they are capable.’¹⁷

The radical theoretical insights of Sigmund Freud created a field of child psychology and educators, such as Susan Isaacs, who were demonstrating how self expression in childhood was a foundation for psychological well-being.¹⁸ At the same time, Jean Piaget was formulating his theories on the development of rational thinking in young children, which he postulated grew out of the child’s spontaneous play.¹⁹ Cumulatively, the impact was dramatic and ‘new education’, with the possibilities of both individual (psychological, intellectual and behavioural) and collective (sociological and political) transformation, was promising a pathway to various new social orders. In the later twentieth century, the Russian Lev Vygotsky’s understandings of the socio-cultural context of children’s learning and development were eventually popularised beyond their Soviet origins.²⁰

Although New Zealand was not at the centre of the formulation of new education ideas, neither was it a distant backwater. Some New Zealand kindergarten and infant school teachers made pilgrimages to the ‘laboratory’ experiments in Europe, Britain and the US and pragmatically adapted ideas for their children and classrooms ‘back home’.²¹ Experts on infant education were also recruited from Britain. What characterised the New Zealand response was a receptiveness to a broad range of perspectives, rather than the adoption of any particular brand. During the mid-century years, (Clarence) C.E. Beeby was the architect of the implementation of progressive education endeavours in the classroom. He later wrote, ‘If schools could turn out the right kind of individuals, they could surely help to produce a more just society.’²² The crux of progressivism was that this path began in the preschool and the infant classroom. That said, progressive education had broad aims across the whole spectrum of learning: that education was to do with the whole child; that the child’s individual personality was of primary importance; that the child’s needs and interests were more important than predetermined subject matter; and that individual motivation for learning, rather than external pressure, should be the basis of schooling.²³

Such was the optimism for the possibility of new understandings of childhood that in 1900 best-selling Swedish writer Ellen Key proclaimed the new century as ‘The Century of the Child’.²⁴ At the end of the twentieth century, Alison James and Alan Prout comment that the

… ‘century of the child’ can be characterised as such precisely because of the massive corpus of knowledge built up by psychologists and other social scientists through the systematic study of children. If the concept of childhood as a distinct stage in the human life cycle crystallised in nineteenth century western thought, the twentieth century has seen the theoretical space elaborated and filled out with detailed empirical findings [which have] … structured our thinking about childhood.²⁵

James, Jenks and Prout argue further that:

Developmental psychology firmly colonised childhood in a pact with medicine, education and government agencies.²⁶

‘I am five and I go to school’ documents the role of early schooling and the increased interest of the state in achieving the ends of a ‘colonised childhood’. Notions of childhood were predicated on scientific definitions of normality which, together with the sociological tenet of promise in new education, created the underside fear of the ‘child at risk’ becoming a risk to society.²⁷ As Kenneth Hultqvist and Gunilla Dahlberg point out in the introduction to Governing the child in the new millennium (2001), the

… construction of the normal child with a normal way of reasoning and emotional and aesthetic experience … also produced their opposites: otherness and the fears and anxieties that surround the figures of the non-normal child, the racially ‘inferior’ child, the proletarian boys and girls – characters that would, should these threats not be counteracted, disrupt the sanitary logic of the child’s nature.²⁸

‘The Uniform System’, New Zealand Graphic 1899. ATL PUBL-0123-001

By the end of the century, the quest for normalcy and the consequent identification of children ‘at risk’ was a key policy driver in education, and infiltrating the classroom life of the young. In 2008, a newly elected National Government announced its intention to introduce national standards into the primary classroom for ‘normal’ children to be measured against. The consequences of this exercise have not been fathomed. An historian cannot but note that there were similarly defined national standards operating in schools at the start of the twentieth century that created backlogs of children ‘held back’ in the infants for not meeting the standard. The legacy continued for much of the century. In the 1930s, the new language of psychology labelled these children as ‘retards’ by the age of seven years, a term that stayed with them and ensured they were always ‘behind’ the others.

By the end of the twentieth century, progressive education was under attack. It was deemed not to have delivered its benefits to all children and, despite the resources poured in and the catch-ups provided, there was evidence that some children were still failing at school. In the view of its critics, the ideals of progressive education had become tarnished.

Century of change

At the start of the twentieth century, children in the infants were always over five years of age; those aged five to seven years were 29.3 per cent of the primary school population. Also early in the century, much older children were in the infant classes as well, bringing the percentage of children up to 37.7.²⁹ Schooling was not compulsory until the age of seven (reduced to six years in 1964), by which time the tradition had long emerged where children started school on their fifth birthday. When the often-called infants or primers were officially termed juniors in 1964, the Infant Mistress was renamed the Supervisor of Junior Classes (SJC), changing to the Senior Teacher of Junior Classes (STJC) in 1970. In the 1990s, the STJC was designated an Associate Principal. By the 2000s, the once-Infant Mistress had become a Deputy Principal in some schools, whereas in others there was no senior position designated for teachers of juniors.

The early schooling of both Maori and Pakeha children was rethought several times during the twentieth century. At the start of the century, there was no prescribed syllabus (curriculum) for the preparatory classes. The children were variously ignored, regarded as a nuisance or, more often, drilled for the requirements of the New Zealand Standards class one compulsory examination for school-aged children. Taken at the end of the standard one year (now year three), this exam marked the end of their time in the infant classes. During the century, there was a gradual shift of focus away from domination by the upper standards. New forms of play within the infant room were transformed into tools for teaching the older 3Rs and broadening the curriculum. By the 1930s, the last separately run infant schools were incorporated into upper schools. By the 1980s, the junior departments no longer operated as semi-autonomous schools. The tide turned further. By the end of the century, the juniors were a less distinctive part of the school. The earlier independence of the junior school had been substantively constrained.

In 1991, a New Zealand Curriculum Framework was established for primary and secondary schools that outlined the ‘essential skills’ and ‘learning outcomes’ expected of the juniors who were Level One.³⁰ Political interests declared the education system a tool to ‘close the gaps’ and ‘reduce disparities’ so that New Zealand could become more competitive in a global economy. In 2007, a revised New Zealand Curriculum for schools was released, in which five key competencies were defined for school-aged children, expanding upon the five aims for preschool-aged children first defined in the 1996 national early childhood curriculum known as Te Whāriki.³¹ There was now some potential for better linking early years schooling with its pedagogical roots in early childhood education.

Throughout the century, Maori children were the recipients of more and more ‘catch-up’ policies. In 1900, there were 1529 Maori children across the preparatory and standard one classes attending Native Schools, with a similar number attending Education Board schools.³² Assimilation policies were to the fore in the Native Schools for much of the century, although a number of things ‘Maori’ (not including language) were gradually allowed. By the middle of the century, the Maori language was in demise. With the migration of many Maori to urban areas, the difference between Maori and Pakeha children in the early school years was deemed a ‘problem’. The schooling of young Maori children became the site of much intervention, both before and after the age of five.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, amidst discourses of bicultural development and self-determination, some Maori parents and educators took control of the early schooling of their children by setting up Kura Kaupapa Maori.³³ Established in response to the Maori language immersion Kohanga Reo for preschool-aged children, the Kura Kaupapa provided some children with an opportunity to continue their schooling in Maori from the age of five years. The juniors were the first step in an upward progression of a new pedagogy of immersion language schooling.³⁴

Preschool–early school contexts

The youngest children at school have not been particularly visible in the analysis of education history. Similarly, their teachers, whose pedagogical innovation was the front line of school reform in the twentieth century, have also been given scant attention. One exception is the book Teachers talk teaching 1915–1995: Early childhood, schools and teachers’ colleges (1997) by Sue Middleton and myself. Based on interviews with teachers, this study paints a picture of life in the classroom across various waves of new ideas and the changing policy dictates that emerged during the twentieth century. ‘I am five and I go to school’ both recounts and expands on the considerations concerning early years schooling that began with Teachers talk teaching.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, a clear distinction between school and preschool had emerged, due to the enforcement of the age of five as the minimum for school entry and the advent of preschool institutions such as kindergarten. I have already told the preschool history of New Zealand early childhood education in The discovery of early childhood (1997) and Politics in the playground (2001 and 2009).³⁵ Unlike public schools, the preschool institutions remained largely outside government interest. However, this began to change in the mid twentieth century, when policy-makers started to realise the possibilities of more purposeful, yet playful, ways of preparing three and four-year-old children for school. School beginnings and this book complement the preschool story, although the demarcation is not neat.

The period of ‘early childhood’ development and pedagogy is usually defined as being from birth to eight years. Preschool and infant/junior classrooms had shared concerns and interests for much of the twentieth century. However, as government funding was extended from part-day preschools for three and four-year-olds to embrace early childhood care and education from birth to five years, the junior classrooms increasingly looked upwards within the school for their connecting pedagogy. The philosophical and structural demarcation between school and preschool interests began to sharpen. In the early 1900s, there were few children attending preschool institutions. By the end of the century, almost all children would be expected (not compulsorily) to attend a government-subsidised early childhood centre.³⁶ The school was no longer the front-line institution for education, although the early childhood sector strove to hold the line against ‘schooling’ intruding downwards ‘before five’.³⁷ Nonetheless, the play activities of ‘before five’ were scrutinised. In the regulated early childhood centres, under five-year-olds, including babies, were also under the careful attention of qualified early childhood teachers. The institutions of schooling had effectively moved downwards, albeit within a more playful regime.

Overview and outline

School beginnings traced the origins of early schooling, from the time of the first missionary ventures with Maori children until the end of the nineteenth century, when the colonisation of New Zealand was all but complete, and a ‘Brighter Britain’ was peopled by so-called ‘Better Britons’.³⁸ Against this backdrop, the infrastructure of a national education system that included schooling for infants was established for both Maori and Pakeha. There was tension between new ideas for educating the young, demonstrated by reformers and radicals such as Robert Owen, Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel, and the creation of public schooling for all children and the dictates of a uniform school syllabus. The overall concern of teachers and inspectors was the ability of each child to meet the exacting 3Rs requirements of the standard one exam. For arithmetic this involved:

Counting and oral addition by twos, three, fours and fives, up to 100; numeration and notation to 999; addition sums of not more than three columns, multiplication of numbers not exceeding 999 by 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Rewi Alley’s teacher may deserve some understanding concerning her methods for achieving the task.

In this book, the twentieth-century story of schooling is told against the backdrop of New Zealand’s development as a nation where, at the start of the century, a national force including Maori and Pakeha set sail to South Africa to fight with the British in the ‘Boer War’. After the relief by British forces of the besieged town of Ladysmith, there was public bell ringing in New Zealand on 28 February 1900. On 2 March, Premier Seddon instructed all schools to grant a half-day holiday. The capture of Kimberly, Mafeking and Pretoria sparked ongoing celebrations.

Later the nation both cut its ties with Britain and had them severed, but the ANZAC spirit (with Australia) seeded in World War I became a signifier of independent nationhood in the Antipodes. The story of education in particular in this period concerns the establishment – in policy and in practice – of a distinctive infant school pedagogy in New Zealand schools that included a clearer articulation of the role of infant classes in the school. This rethink was fuelled by the ‘progressive’ new education ideas that swept through Western education thinking during the first half of the twentieth century.³⁹ However, as Gwen Alley would discover in 1914, this did not mean that the gentler techniques of teaching encouraged by the new education were necessarily understood.

The nature of the historical material on early schooling has meant that it has taken many fragments to piece together a story. Much of what children produce during their first years at school is ephemeral. The content of the slates, copybooks, sand trays and blackboards was short-lived. Hard copies of children’s first reading books from the twentieth century have survived: we are indebted to Hugh Price and Beverley Randell for the collections they have preserved.⁴⁰

Hoisting the Union Jack, Sydenham School, Christchurch, to celebrate the relief of Mafeking in the Boer war, 2 July 1900. CM Bishop collection 1923_53-465

Booklets recording the histories of individual schools abound in libraries, but they give only passing mention to the infant classes. Some individual school records have survived the annual school clean-outs. Except for those of the separate infant schools that operated in the early years of the century, the records invariably make little mention of the infants, primers and juniors. Government records of education have been useful in documenting the changing policy interest, or lack of interest, in early years schooling. The reports of school inspectors give clues about what might have been happening in the classroom. In the final years of the century, a flurry of research and policy reports on particular curriculum areas appeared and were useful in signposting later understandings of learning and teaching.

More recent accounts of life in the infant room have been harder to source. Few teachers deemed their time teaching infants to be worth recording or their resources worth saving. Fortunately, there have been exceptions. Interviews with many teachers have also provided an invaluable insight into life in the infants/juniors. Pupils’ recollections of their early school days are elusive. Biographies and memoirs about school days are dominated by experiences in the upper parts of the school. Usually only the extraordinary events at junior school have been recorded.

By drawing on both published and unpublished sources, it has been possible to give some perspective on life for teachers and young children in the twentieth-century classroom. The changing style of classroom accommodation for the youngest children at school in both town and country has also provided clues to their status, the style of teaching and the consideration (or not) for their comfort. Some of the richest records are photographic. As the technology changed, school images of the young shifted from infants lined up outside the school to include formal and informal indoor scenes, as well as film and video.

International literature on the pedagogy and practice of schooling young children abounds. This is of interest when certain books are known to have circulated locally, although it would be a mistake to presume that classroom realities matched these prescriptions. New Zealand writing on infant or junior school pedagogy and practice starts to appear during the twentieth century. In the later years of the century, the country’s early years schooling endeavours in reading, language immersion and indigenous Maori education were of international interest. This was also the case with the New Zealand model of ‘self managing schools’, as well as its early childhood curriculum.⁴¹ The Reading Recovery Programme, pioneered by researcher and educational psychologist Marie Clay, became an international icon of New Zealand education.

Alice Peterson (5 years), Arthur Street School, Dunedin, 1975. Private collection

Giselle Cathro (5 years), Arthur Street School, Dunedin. Private collection

While there were scholarly reasons for writing this book, there was also a personal motivation. My own career in education began as a junior teacher. After two years at Christchurch Teacher’s College in 1964–65, I taught new entrants through to seven and eight-year-olds in both New Zealand and England from 1965–74. These were the days of developmental free play in the infant room, coloured Cuisenaire mathematics rods and the new Ready to Read reading books. It was also a time when, apart from loosely defined ‘suggestions’ for teaching reading and mathematics, there was considerable freedom to determine what we would teach. At the time, not being a student of education, I was unaware that I was teaching at the tail end of the progressive and so-called ‘play-way’ era.⁴² My teaching life then crossed the divide into the preschool world and, later, the realms of teacher education and academia.

Learning to print and write: ‘Page one of her first book for new entrant Nell’ (5 years) 1991, Knighton Normal School, Hamilton. Private collection

Nell’s story and drawing, 1992, Knighton Normal School, Hamilton. Private collection

Gilda Chance (6 years), High Street School, Dunedin, 1958. Nola Wyber Collection

In the late 1980s, colleague Margaret Carr and I disentangled the primary school infiltration of kindergarten teacher education to establish a first stand-alone degree in early childhood teacher education at the University of Waikato.⁴³ During the 1990s and again in partnership, Margaret and I were the co-directors, with Dr Tamati Reedy and Tilly Reedy from Te Kohanga Reo Trust, of the development of a national early childhood curriculum. During this process, we deliberately delineated between school and preschool understandings of children and learning.⁴⁴ In ongoing research across both sectors, Margaret, with other research colleagues, has sought to reconnect these divides with the view that early schooling is about continuity with early childhood education.⁴⁵ I have regretted not returning to the junior classroom. Writing this book reconnects these worlds. I could not have written it without my passion and experience as a junior teacher to draw on, and my later time amidst the politics of the preschool world.

The following five chapters each cover a distinctive phase of educational policy and practice in twentieth-century New Zealand. Chapter Two describes the emergence of new educational ideas in the first decades of the century at the policy level and through the personal passion and insight of individual teachers. However, amidst the realities of an incomplete infrastructure of schooling in a still-raw nation, change was slow in coming. Traversing some of these same years, Chapter Three relates the rise and fall of the Montessori phenomenon and the effects of a world war and economic depression, which both hampered and fuelled the mood for reform. Chapter Four covers the years mainly influenced by C.E. Beeby, appointed Assistant Director of Education in 1939 and then Director of Education in 1940, a post he held for twenty years. During this time, the infant classroom became a site for required changes, welcomed by many teachers but adopted cautiously, selectively, or resisted by some. Chapter Five follows a raft of home-grown curricular developments and experimental initiatives within infant/junior classrooms. This became a heyday for tolerated, and sometimes radical, alternatives to flourish. In Chapter Six, the impact of changes in policy and pedagogy during the last decade of the century and the first decade of the 2000s is recounted. Policy-makers and, indeed, politicians were clearly in charge. By the turn of the century, education reforms of the late 1980s were settling down – a new education language of accountability had emerged that must have felt just as strange as the ‘new education’ language of ‘understanding’ at the start of the century. Misunderstanding was a characteristic of both eras.

Helen (May) Cook on an outing with her class, 1972. Author’s collection

Helen (May) Cook with Room 2 class, Brooklyn School, Wellington, 1973. Author’s collection

Small country school: Okau School with their teacher Mr R.L. Pennington, 1912. Tainui Historical Society

2 Rethinking the Early Years, 1900s–1920s

I arrived in standard one [in 1926] hardly able to add or read. I was a left-hander who couldn’t write as the teacher required. I had been battered to utter misery and exhaustion, bashed with straps, held hostage in front of the class, or made to stand up for ridicule on the desk top.

Somehow I