Jim Neyland

Education took a huge body blow last week with the passing of one of the best educators, and certainly one of the best people, I am likely to meet. Kelvin Smythe gave a fitting tribute at his funeral along with many others and there is a heart breaking but the same time heart warming exchange between the two of them over the last year and through Jim's illness on Kelvin's website. Until sitting in Jim's class I didn't realise it was possible for a teacher to have such an effect on a student. Who knows where my teaching and learning and thinking would be at now without the kinds of challenges he posed me and the patience he gave me. He spent three weeks teaching about outcomes-based education before I worked out why I was confused. It took that long before I realised what he was saying so clearly: Outcomes-based education does emphatically not have the last word on education. I had so totally absorbed the status quo that it was if he was trying to convince me I had a third arm.

I still regularly give out the first version of page of 1 of my Masters thesis to my students when we are doing writing. You can barely see my words from Jim's arrows, scribbles, asterisks, comments. It gradually got less and less. By page 7 he had pretty much given up. What better way to learn that writing is a process!

All teachers, but I think especially secondary teachers and above all maths teachers, need to be familiar with Jim's writing and his vision for education. His new book, "Rediscovering the spirit of education after scientific management theory" can only be described as essential reading. His message is particularly pertinent to those of us educated in New Zealand's schools since the reforms of the 1980s. We cannot afford to be naive of the historical context of the political climate that we find ourselves in and that has shaped education since the 1980s. Nor can we afford to be philosophically and theoretically uninformed about the nature and purpose of our subjects. No one is going to tell us about it - in fact, it seems like the system wants to actively dissuade us from exploring this. We need to actively seek out educators like Jim Neyland.