set 1989 : no. 1

The stress on 'getting your qualifications' has become such a dogma that in New Zealand secondary pupils recently received a personal letter from the Minister of Education encouraging them to stay on at school. In this he gives support to the prevailing wisdom. Unfortunately staying at school is promoted by many others too: academics, school principals, the press, careers advisors, parents, and even by young people themselves who often blame their unemployment on their failure to get their… Read more

Improved energy management in schools would produce significant cost savings. Only a small number of schools will make big savings but a large number of schools will be able to make worthwhile savings. However, many schools should look for savings in other areas, for example, text-book management, which may give a better return. The first step in improving energy management is to identify to which category a school belongs.
This article starts with a brief history of our research over… Read more

RECORDS, tapes and radio are central to adolescent experience and a key part is MTV - musical television - and its staple, the music video clip. 'MTV' itself is a 24-hour, non-stop, commercial cable television channel, beamed by satellite across the United States; devoted to screening rock videos.
Putting music and film together is, of course, hardly new, but the combination took off in the 1980s with the advent of cable television, along with dramatic advances in what was technically… Read more

'The more socially unacceptable smoking becomes in adult society the more attractive it appears to the younger generation'. This was the comment of a South Auckland intermediate school principal whose school I visited during a nation-wide Health Department survey of Form One (Year 6) students' smoking. On the affluent northern shores of metropolitan Auckland, I again became aware of an air of pessimistic despondency. 'Girls today know more than we knew about the ill-effects of smoking yet… Read more

It is in the family that children learn the skills and knowledge necessary to get along. Most children in fact become pretty competent in both their own family group and in larger social groups such as school. However, some families manage to help their children to be competent better than others. Perhaps there are ways to assist.
Of course there are some things that are unalterable, such as the general level of health of family members, the family's cultural background, and quite… Read more

This story about sex-stereotyping was used by two American researchers to illustrate the persistence in United States' schools of traditional ideas on sex roles. But it could have come from a New Zealand kindergarten. Or an Australian one. In all three countries educational institutions have been slow to recognise the special problems faced by girls and even slower to deal with them.

Nine out of ten children change from one school to another as they go from primary to secondary school. There is much discontinuity at the divide for the children, reinforced by the way in which the administration and functions of education have evolved, with separate systems of primary and secondary education, separate funding, separate teacher associations, inspectorates, training, curriculum and conditions of service.
Over a quarter of a century ago, a New Zealand report noted that… Read more

In 1984, in one hundred Form 2 (Year 7) classes and in one hundred Form 5 (Year 10) classes throughout New Zealand, six thousand children wrote three pieces each. Their work was collected and the 18,000 pieces analytically marked according to internationally agreed criteria. Now the results are known. Not all the international results and comparisons from the other 13 countries and systems are available. It would be good to know 'how well New Zealand scored', but there are dangers in that -… Read more

Believing that it is our responsibility to address from our particular disciplines the most dangerous and destructive activities of our species, violence and war; recognising that science is a human cultural product which cannot be definitive nor all encompassing; and gratefully acknowledging the support of the authorities of Seville and representatives of the Spanish UNESCO, we, the undersigned scholars from around the world and from relevant sciences, have met and arrived at the following… Read more

No matter where you go in the world, secondary schools have a lot in common. This article describes high schools in the USA, but the description of the good news and the bad, problems and solutions, traditions and innovation, rings very true for Australia and New Zealand.