FIRST STEPS

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32819, 20 January 1972, Page 9

FIRST STEPS

(By

JOHN BROWN)

Soon more than 15,000 “illiterates” this year’s wave of new school pupils—will enter the New Zealand education system which last year cost the taxpayer $3OO million.

But the often bewildered five - year - old clutching his new school bag and nervously summing up the other anxious faces around him, thinks little of the gigantic system into which he is taking his first tentative — and compulsory—step.

His only interest for these first few fledgling days is survival in a new world of large strange adults, noisy and brazen “big-kids,” hard chairs and a playground which to him seems to stretch forever.

He has been carefully conditioned by society to give a prominent place to this, his first day as a member of New Zealand’s largest “club.” “When do you go to school . . .?” . . . “What are you going to do when you go to school . . .?” “Do you want to go to school . . .?” and often sadly “Wait till you get to school and they’ll straighten you up . . .” have been statements which the pre-schooler takes as a fact of life.

Now, however, there is no turning back, no yearning for the safety and protection of his family—the new pupil is now, perhaps for the first time in his life, on his own, and he is judged accordingly. Enrolled, documented and classified, the young pupil enters the first real test of how successful he has been in the first half

decade of his life — the almost “magical” first five years so comfortingly referred to by all psychologists. How well he adapts, how well he mixes with others, how well he conforms, can be traced back to those first five years. No amount of patience and affection from infant teachers will replace lack of parental affection in those important years. No amount of hard work by teachers will completely make up for important pre-school experiences in the child who was closeted and protected by his parents from the world around him.

But if psychologists tell us that the first five years are important they also point out that all young children are magnificently adaptable. The tremulous first approach to “teacher” soon gives way to a chatty “good morning” and the first nervous look of another five year old to a rousing chase around the playground. The first great moment for the new pupil, the moment which sends him scurrying home to tell all and sundry, comes on the day that “teacher” actually asks him to say something on his own to the rest of class.

“I’ve made it” something inside him cries — the infant pupil has “survived,” as of course they all do. But nothing at no time in the future will ever quite be the same as that first day at school.