The Engine of The New New Zealand

Education

The children are our future.

By getting involved in education, you can change the future of the world. Really!

Teaching is the obvious career path to take after studying education, but education is actually a broad term that covers a wide range of areas.

Studying education will help you develop your skills in critical analysis and research, giving you a good basis for careers in government, administration and analysis.

Becoming a teacher is a really rewarding career – you can really have an impact on people’s lives, of all ages. Increasingly skilled educators are in demand all around the world.

Massey’s College of Education offers qualifications across Education (Human Development, Support Workers, Teaching English as an Additional Language)and  Teaching (Early Childhood Education, Early Years, Primary, Secondary, Te Aho Tatairangi).

Download Your 2013 Guide to Education and Teaching.

History of Education

Education has been in existence since the very beginning of humankind. How else did we pass on essential knowledge about things that were OK to eat? How to make fire? Cultural, social, religious values?

Before writing, it was through word of mouth, then writing, then printing and today technology has added another dimension.

Formal education in a classroom sense also has a long history, but began as a privilege for the wealthy and powerful. Knowledge is power – and the ancients knew it. They kept that knowledge to themselves, and they kept the power to themselves.

Greece,Rome and Asiathere were already schools in 5000BC, although anyone could open one, and there was no formal training. Anyone could teach whatever they wanted. By 1000BC there were formal schools in the Middle East and China.

Europe was a little bit sloooooower to catch up. By the 6th century AD monks and nuns taught classes, and by the Middle Ages monastries of the Catholic Church had become centres for education, producing painstakingly-detailed books.

The first universities began appearing in about the 11th century, and this is when literacy began to become more accessible to the masses. They were still instigated by the church, primarily for educating their clergy. But in 1179 a mandate for free education for the poor was put forward by the Church, and priests and scholars set up schools. It was the predecessor of education as we know it today.

Early Childhood Education

There have always been pre-school kids. But we haven’t long been in the game of ‘educating’ them.

The first programmes to look after kids were set up in the late 1800s/early 1900s (the first kindergarten in New Zealand opened in 1889, and the first childcare centre in 1908). Both were set up to look after kids whose mothers were working. In those days there was no age limit for kids to be wandering about on their own. They were simply locked out of the house with some bread and cheese for the day and left to their own devices.

So the first programmes had the ‘noble’ aim to get the kids’ off the streets’ and into care. Programmes were structured and rigid. It was the ‘do-up-your-top-button’ and ‘sit still’ type of care.
The philosophy of childcare centres being places to ‘care’ for children in this way survived until just before World War Two, when English educational psychologist and psychoanalyist, Susan Sutherland Isaacs, visited New Zealand. Isaacs promoted developing children’s independence through guided play. It was a radical notion that time spent in free play could be just as valuable as being able to rote learn the times table by the time you were three.

The women of New Zealand were inspired, and the Playcentre movement began.

In 1985 the Government moved responsibility for childcare centres from the Department of Social Welfare to the Ministry of Education. This set a new precedent for childcare to focus on development and learning, as well as care.

That’s not that radical in itself, but Massey University lecturer and researcher Claire McLachlan, with Massey, has taken it to a whole new level, with Massey’s expertise in this area now sought all over the world.

Teaching

If you have anything to do with kids at all, you’ll know they can be a huge challenge.

But you, as their teacher, can have a huge influence on their lives and the way they learn for the rest of their lives.

Without wanting to sound all preachy, the best jobs are challenging – that’s what makes them rewarding.

You’ll love it.

You can choose between teaching kids at pre-school age, at primary school, or at secondary school level.

Find out more about how you can do it too, and get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Education Research

There is tons we don’t know about how we learn. Or how we could learn better. How different cultural backgrounds and upbringings can impact on your ability to learn later in life.

Research and postgraduate study in the area of education can be hugely rewarding. You can choose your own topic/thesis and investigate specific areas of education that you are interested in. Adult education, cultural issues, the myriad of things that impact on our ability to learn, the way young children learn, learning in a corporate environment.

We spend our whole lives learning in some form. You can help the world do it better.

Why Massey?

Massey is one of New Zealand’s best universities for learning about teaching. Our degree is world-renowned.

We offer things that other New Zealand teaching colleges don’t – for instance we’ve got the only School of Maori and Multicultural Studies in Education (Te Uru Maraurau). We’ve got the largest internationally-recognised research going on in New Zealand around children’s literacy learning.

Once you’ve finished your undergraduate degree, Massey has lots of postgraduate study options such as Certificates,Graduate Diploma, Postgraduate Diploma, Masters or a PhD. With these you will be able to do your own in-depth research like Talei, into areas that interest you.

Research is often never ending – research you do uncovers things that need to be investigated more. That’s what’s happened to Talei. The lack of research around how Pacific people learn has encouraged her to do this work herself. You too could come up with ground-breaking research that helps not just children, but New Zealand, learn better.