Kelvin Smythe: An educational battler
Kelvin George Smythe April 9, 1938 – October 13, 2018
To some Kelvin Smythe, who died in Cambridge aged 80, was an educational warrior who fought to the end to protect primary school teaching from technocratic, formulaic approaches.
To others he was, in his own words, that ‘‘wretched Kelvin Smythe’’, nothing more than a thorn in the flesh, a constant irritation harping on about a holistic, creative, and democratic teaching curriculum.
But, whatever the views of those in education, Kelvin spoke from a position of strength on matters affecting primary school education.
Born in Kohimarama in Auckland, Kelvin was schooled in Devonport, New Lynn, and Avondale College, before enrolling at Auckland Teachers’ College in 1957.
A top sportsman (he was a University Blue in golf and played for the Auckland provincial team) he was, says wife Barbara, not a brilliant student at college, although he went on to become a brilliant teacher.
It was golf that bought Barbara and Kelvin together at an Easter Tournament in 1958. The couple married in 1962 and went on to their first teaching appointment at Maromaku, south of Kawakawa.
In his time, Kelvin was a teacher, a deputy school principal and, for six years, lecturer in history at North Shore Teachers’ Training College.
At 36 he was the youngest teacher then appointed as a school inspector, a role he took up in Hamilton.
Up until 1989 Kelvin was a senior inspector at the Hamilton Education Board. Inspectors had two roles, one naturally being to monitor school and teacher performance.
The other one, more important in Kelvin’s opinion, was to promote and enhance teaching and learning, and that is where his passion for social studies came to the fore.
This secondary function of the inspectorate was one of the big casualties of the Tomorrow’s Schools ideology.
He spent 15 years as school inspector and senior inspector, and then, in the late ’80s, after the Tomorrow’s Schools restructure saw him lose his job, started out as a publisher and writer of a magazine for primary school teachers, Network Magazine.
Colleague and one-time principal, Allan Alach, said Kelvin had a burning passion for primary school education and spent his entire working life either promoting his philosophies or battling, with everything he had, political agendas that went against his beliefs.
Up until 1990 his efforts went in the promoting of his vision of education.
‘‘However, the introduction of the neoliberal- focused Tomorrow’s Schools in 1990 meant he had to switch to attack mode to safeguard what he believed was the true gem of primary school education, and to take down all he abhorred about the Tomorrow’s School regimes and the associated changes in the curriculum that accompanied this,’’ said Allan.
His aims with the magazine, Kelvin said, were to provide curriculum help and maintain teacher morale in the face of growing bureaucracy.
The proof of the pudding was in the eating, and the magazine was bought on subscription by three out of every four primary schools.
Kelvin closed the magazine in 1999 as he hoped that the incoming government would see an end to the ‘‘ticking the boxes’’ ideology, Allan said.
However, by 2007 or so, disillusioned with the lack of real change, Kelvin reappeared online with a website called networkonnet.
To Kelvin, this was a very timely move, as within a couple of years, to his mind, primary education took a major turn downhill with the introduction of National Standards which, he thought, took the worst aspects of the 1990s and imposed even worse restrictions on primary education.
Kelvin’s main message was that, in the development of curriculum, teachers would pay a high price for silence, for not acting decisively, and morally.
Politicians and the educational bureaucracies, he warned, would conduct conversations with themselves, interpreting teacher silence as acceptance.
Allan said from 2009 Kelvin had led the battle against the then government’s imposition of national standards.
‘‘I think it’s fair to say that his efforts contributed to the removal of these when the government changed a year ago.’’
Kelvin’s opposition to Tomorrow’s Schools was total. In 1996 he organised a national primary school petition in favour of changing the way education reviews were conducted, arguing that, while there was a need for reviews, they needed to be carried out in a more positive and constructive way.
He questioned the Tomorrow’s Schools programme’s allocation of increased powers to layers of bureaucracy at the expense of teachers’ sense of control over things important to them.
In doing that he took on the powerful Education Review Office, challenging its role in the overall education culture.
‘‘Good teachers are leaving,’’ Kelvin said at the time, ‘‘good teachers are feeling stifled.
‘‘The review office is at the centre of promoting and imposing the bureaucratic demands so widely complained about. Its managerialist and behaviourist philosophy is seriously out of kilter with primary schools.’’
Famously (among primary school teachers at any rate) in 1999 Kelvin got race relations conciliator Rajen Prasad to investigate the draft social studies curriculum after he complained aspects could be incompatible with the Human Rights Act.
And in 2010 Kelvin again hit the headlines telling an education conference that national standards legislation was based on ‘‘distortion akin to a lie’’ and called for the ERO boss, Graham Stoop, to resign.
He made the call at a principals’ conference, saying he was seeking legal advice on taking a judicial review of the legislation that ushered in national standards.
National Party education minister Anne Tolley was irritated enough to comment: ‘‘This nonsense is not worthy of comment.’’
In addition, Kelvin was always ready to leap into action to support schools and principals who had fallen out with the ideologues in Wellington, especially the Education Review Office, an organisation for which he had complete disdain.
Of late, Kelvin pleaded for teachers to see behind the commodification of education, the managerialism, the data gathering, the claims of new knowledge, the fads, the array of electronics, to what he believed teaching was about – key interactions between teacher, child, and what is being learnt.
He knew many of his concerns about education and his style of writing about them would be dismissed as out-of-date. His claim, though, was that the key interactions remained the essence of what teaching should be. Allan said the great tragedy of Kelvin’s education life was that he had to spend the last 28 years battling against all that he abhorred, rather than promoting his vision of how education could be.
‘‘His battles made him rather unpopular with governments and bureaucrats and so he was never given the chance to promote his holistic philosophy of education.
‘‘Kelvin was one of the foremost educators of our time. In my opinion, he was up there with the other greats such as Clarence Beeby, Jack Shallcrass, and Elwyn Richardson.’’
Kelvin was the husband of Barbara and brother of Averil; father and fatherin-law of Ann and Malcolm and Helen and Martin; granddad to Charlotte, Sophie, Georgia, Anna, Callum and Becky.
Charles Riddle —
A Life Story tells of a New Zealander who helped to shape the Waikato community. If you know of someone whose story should be told, please email Charles.Riddle@wintec.ac.nz