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As German-American journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken once explained, “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”. Read more

Schools are labs and students are the subjects. Though this may sound controversial, behind closed doors teachers experiment on their students. Read more

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an admired African novelist, once said ‘show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become’. It sounds like a cliché but it applies neatly to the portrayal of our schools and students. Read more

Most people would agree that fairness means that equal things get treated equally and different things get treated differently. In the schooling sector, the current funding system by deciles is one such attempt to be fair. Read more

We should laud, not vilify, the actions of a Wairarapa school that has taken the brave step to ban students (and presumably staff too) from climbing trees on school grounds. Management have quite correctly noted that trees pose a health and safety risk to those playing in them, and have acted wisely to shut down any possibility of this risk eventuating on their watch. Read more

Spurred on by the Labour Party’s recent pledge to deliver three years of free tertiary education (should they be elected in 2017), New Zealand’s student unions are again calling for universal free education. But in praising countries where universal free tertiary education exists, advocates often gloss over what makes free tertiary education possible in the first place – like higher taxes. Read more

Talk to a teacher at a state school and most will tell you competition is a dirty word. When it comes to relationships between schools, cooperation rules. Read more

Take a good look at the person sitting next to you at work. They might have a lot more influence on your life than you give them credit for. Read more

The old human sciences building on the grounds of the University of Auckland was affectionately known among my peers as The Dungeon. With its dingy basement corridors and eerie acoustics, it stood in stark contrast to the more recently-constructed business school, a colossal, contemporary glass structure. Read more

As a general rule, heated policy debates do not really make for appropriate wedding banter. Regrettably, this was the situation in which this correspondent found herself over Waitangi weekend, stuck in a rather incoherent conversation with a heartily inebriated guest over whether the benefits generated by tertiary education are entirely public. Read more