An outstanding thinker Ivan Augustine Snook
Emeritus Professor of Education 1933-2018
Ivan Snook was a highly influential teacher, an outstanding thinker, an advocate for public education and, in later years, a strong critic of neo-liberal education policies and practices.
He felt that our schooling system had been sold out to narrow values, effectively destroying what had been one of the best in the world. His intellectual work was renowned nationally and internationally for the clarity of his thinking and his strong belief in humanitarian values.
After studying for his PHD at the University of Illinois, he began academic life at the University of Canterbury. His main academic focus was on philosophical questions about what education was for – what should be taught? Questions about what values were reflected in schooling became important to his later work.
In 1981, he took up the position of professor of education at Massey University, Palmerston North. In both his academic positions, he influenced thousands of future teachers, educators and others. Clear, concise, well-argued, his lectures and seminars were a joy. His personal qualities were kindness, a generous spirit and the ability to speak and write with clarity. He was also a model of the values and approaches that he discussed in his work.
After a heart attack in the mid1990s, Snook retired from the university. By this stage neo-liberal policies had made huge inroads into the education sector, with tertiary fees, devolved schooling and talk of privatisation. These philosophies were the antithesis of what he taught and believed. He vowed to spend the rest of his life fighting the neo-liberal incursion into education, and this is what he did.
For him, neo-liberalism meant testing, not teaching; competition, not co-operation; ‘‘skills’’, not education; teachers removed from any intellectual role and just treated as technicians and, he noted: ‘‘The school’s role in promoting social justice has been minimised. To raise it is to be deemed ‘politically correct’, a term of abuse that discourages any sense of fairness.’’
Under the Labour-alliance Government at the turn of the century, he was appointed as a member of the Tertiary Education Advisory Committee, which set up the new system to run tertiary education. He found it terribly frustrating. He recounted that the group would agree on some approaches, but by the time it got to the next meeting, the officials would have subverted and changed the decisions. He found little acknowledgement at government levels of the importance of public education.
He was a frequent commentator on education issues. In particular, he often challenged the many claims of school ‘‘improvement’’ under Tomorrow’s Schools. He made the point repeatedly that educational achievement remained tightly aligned to socioeconomic status and that socioeconomic gaps were increasing, not decreasing. For his work over many years, in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Massey University.
Snook was the main driving force behind the Quality Public Education Coalition, founded in 1997. The goal of that organisation was, and is, to promote high-quality public education for all. This means to at least meet, and perhaps extend, Peter Fraser’s goal in 1938 to provide free education, of the right kind, to all people regardless of their circumstances, to ‘‘the fullest extent of their powers’’.
He was also a key member of the Massey Education Group, which analysed education policies and produced scholarly reports on them. He remained involved in the coalition and the Massey group until the end of his life.
Snook was a humanist. He strongly believed in the power of education to transform individuals and improve societies. He espoused strong values of caring, compassion and development. There was never a time that his values wavered. He fought for a better education system and a fairer society right until the end of his life. His legacy remains in the influence he had on so many people and in his writings.
Snook died on October 19 at the Arohanui Hospice, Palmerston North. He is survived by his wife Josie and children Kathryn, John and David. – Dr Liz Gordon, managing director of Pukeko Research and a former Alliance MP