Page 2326 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 1 November 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
So, as we come to that question of numbers, I would like to urge the following points. Firstly, there is the especially crucial factor of neighbourhood - at that level of schooling - for the parent. The parent is usually a woman, often with no car at that stage of her life, and on one income. That is, we are asking people who are in the greatest difficulties to bear considerable costs and considerable disadvantages.
Let me go back to the experience at Baker Gardens preschool, when my wife was at home. It was so important that while I was at work - she was working, of course - she was walking the child around the corner, down the street a couple of blocks to the Baker Gardens preschool. She did not have transport; there was no bus between our house and the Baker Gardens preschool. So I stress that especially crucial factor of neighbourhood.
Then there is the especially crucial factor of neighbourhood, not for the parent - not for the mother - but for the child. There is the chance for the child to walk with his or her parents around the corner and a few blocks away with a sense of the joy of place plus the new joy of education.
In this connection there is a third point. I would like to note the area of special education in which the staff to student ratio is very favourable. I would want to argue that the staff to student ratio in preschools also ought to be very favourable. This is a student's first experience of education. It is so important that they get this wonderful start at age three or four, or whatever age they arrive at that preschool, so that school becomes a joy; it becomes a joy in their neighbourhood; it becomes a joy for the family; not some great chore to which some parent will object and where the child is dumped several kilometres away because a school was closed.
So there is a very special need, a very special benefit, for small, intimate classes at that beginning point of the educational process. That must be, for the administrators of these proposals, a very high concern.
Now to the particular question of size. What is an optimum number? I want now to refer to a program in the United States. I am indebted in this connection to Mrs Faye Dockrill who, while a part-time student at the ANU, wrote her BA honours thesis in the history department on the headstart program. While doing so, she had several tiny ones of her own.
The headstart program came in the early 1960s out of the so-called Great Society and Lyndon Johnson's administration. The whole notion was that by the time children from deprived areas - black children, Puerto Rican children, et cetera - got to primary school they were already one, two or three years behind. They were not just
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .