Education head needs to be a New Zealander

It surely goes without saying that Hekia Parata should resign or be fired. As to who her successor should be, we will have to hope for the best of a shabby bunch.

But the choice of the next secretary for education will need to be made with care.

Arguably, her successor should be a New Zealander, with understanding of how our society works. In the UK, where Longstone came from, central government is at a further remove from the grassroots than here in New Zealand, isolated from local opinion by a tier of local education authorities.

Longstone can hardly have understood the extent to which central government here needs to be more sensitive to local feeling and opinion, and that may have affected her advice to her minister (who should of course have known better). Her successor should be someone free of that defect.

J R WILLIAMS

Sockburn

Rethink on vote

Doug McGilvary (Dec 21) asks us to raise our hands for teachers who don’t make mistakes. Most teachers are good spellers and grammarians. Nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes from time to time.

Some of the most glaring howlers recently have come from the Minister of Education. Try reading her press releases, in particular, the errors on the Christchurch school closures.

Sadly, McGilvary believes the myths that teachers have lots of free time and that they are strident unionists opposed to the National Party. I wish!

After 32 years as a primary teacher, I can assure him that most teachers are very busy working hard for their students and they seldom protest. Many primary school teachers are quite conservative people who voted for John Key in the past two elections.

I think that come the 2014 election, this is something they will be reconsidering.

WENDY HAY

Yaldhurst

Award overdue

Kudos are due, actually overdue, to Professor Roy Kerr who solved the problem of the exact description of the space outside a black hole some 50 years ago (Dec 20). If I recall my physics instruction correctly, his solution was the most notable and admired of any general relativity problem throughout the intervening decades.

The question has to be asked, why was this Einstein award so late in coming (even though he had received several other awards earlier)? Was he considered as too much of a wunderkind, too lucky as a young theorist to have chosen the one tractable problem, or was he just too nice a person in the competitive bitchy world of theoretical physics?

Whatever the answer, he should have had the award (and maybe a Nobel prize) decades ago. Kudos are certainly due.

LORNE KUEHN

Kaituna

We all drank raw milk

I wonder what writers of letters in The Press think people drank before milk was pasteurised.

We all drank milk from a cow and lived to a ripe old age. My family, farmers, lived to their late 80s and had milk straight from a cow. It was fun to let Dad squirt it straight from the cow into our mouths.

My boys were brought up on cows’ milk and Karilac, and in their late 50s are still perfectly healthy.

PM DRUMMOND

Spreydon