Once Were Warriors, like Beth, was the creation of Alan Duff and her observation was, as he told me as we were trundling through a bus in the Netherlands, his. The relative under-performance of Māori, Duff believed, was in part due to a lack of reading. You can’t read if you don’t have books.
Beth’s insight drove Duff to do something. He doesn’t merely want to observe. He wants to have an impact and putting books into houses was one way of achieving this. So, 31 years back, in the euphoria of this writing success, he began a program to do exactly that.
This was the mid-1990s and Duff was the nation’s expert on issues facing Māori. A young child was murdered and Duff was on camera giving his perspective and the program caught the attention of Mainfreight founder Bruce Plested, who, thankfully for this story, is on the same bus. More on that in a moment.
Plested, as Duff tells it, “got my number from somewhere” and asked how he could help. The details get a little foggy here. We are going back over three decades. The takeaway is Plested sent Duff a cheque large enough to establish a trust that has endured and now runs a program in some 500 low-decile schools providing books to junior school students.
Duff’s programme, Duffy Books in Homes, has endured.
Beth’s insight drove Duff to do something. He doesn’t merely want to observe. He wants to have an impact and putting books into houses was one way of achieving this. So, 31 years back, in the euphoria of this writing success, he began a program to do exactly that.
This was the mid-1990s and Duff was the nation’s expert on issues facing Māori. A young child was murdered and Duff was on camera giving his perspective and the program caught the attention of Mainfreight founder Bruce Plested, who, thankfully for this story, is on the same bus. More on that in a moment.
Plested, as Duff tells it, “got my number from somewhere” and asked how he could help. The details get a little foggy here. We are going back over three decades. The takeaway is Plested sent Duff a cheque large enough to establish a trust that has endured and now runs a program in some 500 low-decile schools providing books to junior school students.
Duff’s programme, Duffy Books in Homes, has endured.
“There are three aspects” Duff explains. The child chooses the book, although from a selection curated by the school. The books are new. The books become the property of the student.
Plested remained engaged. He isn’t a distant philanthropist and as we chatted at the back of bus to Amsterdam he rattled off the scheme’s successes, frustrations, and the strategies used to ensure the books were read.
“We’d get heroes” he explained, to go to the schools and tell how their success could not have been achieved without reading.
“We got Zinzan Brooke,” Duff went on, admitting that an author, even one as successful as himself, wasn’t going to have the impact that a sports star would achieve.
The logistics tycoon scrolled through his phone to show me an email from a young medical student who attended a speech by former US presidential hopeful Ben Carson, who visited Auckland for a Duffy Books in Homes fund raiser.
She was inspired, the email explains, by Carson, a exceptionally gifted surgeon, to become a doctor and is now on her way.
Plested is a failed teacher; lasting only a year before leaving the classroom to the boardroom, but he retains the passion for education and places his money and energy where he believes it can achieve the most impact.
The program is limited to junior schools. Duff tried senior schools but accepted that once the kids got to intermediate without reading “It was too late. We lost them.”
Duffy Books is now bigger than its founder. Over a dozen staff work for the charity and it has a wider sponsorship base than Mainfreight. “It is a team” the author is insistent to explain, and the program recently celebrated the delivery of 15 million books into homes.
Meanwhile his partner in this enterprise delights in telling a story about how Kaiti School, near Gisborne, achieve a 90% attendance by deploying kuia to chase down stragglers, and his enthusiasm for remains undiminished.
Duffy Books in Homes is a private solution to a public failure and it exists because these two men were willing to put their time and capital into improving lives. They have demonstrated their ideas work and have brought others into the scheme. Plested is a relentless champion, pushing his peers to open their cheque books and has brought the energy that brought Mainfreight to the globe to this venture.
Duff, Plested and 40 other chief executives, business leaders and, incongruously, myself, are on the NZ Initiative tour of the Netherlands looking for ideas and inspiration to bring back to New Zealand. And I will write up the outcomes of this adventure when I have assembled them in my mind......The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
Plested remained engaged. He isn’t a distant philanthropist and as we chatted at the back of bus to Amsterdam he rattled off the scheme’s successes, frustrations, and the strategies used to ensure the books were read.
“We’d get heroes” he explained, to go to the schools and tell how their success could not have been achieved without reading.
“We got Zinzan Brooke,” Duff went on, admitting that an author, even one as successful as himself, wasn’t going to have the impact that a sports star would achieve.
The logistics tycoon scrolled through his phone to show me an email from a young medical student who attended a speech by former US presidential hopeful Ben Carson, who visited Auckland for a Duffy Books in Homes fund raiser.
She was inspired, the email explains, by Carson, a exceptionally gifted surgeon, to become a doctor and is now on her way.
Plested is a failed teacher; lasting only a year before leaving the classroom to the boardroom, but he retains the passion for education and places his money and energy where he believes it can achieve the most impact.
The program is limited to junior schools. Duff tried senior schools but accepted that once the kids got to intermediate without reading “It was too late. We lost them.”
Duffy Books is now bigger than its founder. Over a dozen staff work for the charity and it has a wider sponsorship base than Mainfreight. “It is a team” the author is insistent to explain, and the program recently celebrated the delivery of 15 million books into homes.
Meanwhile his partner in this enterprise delights in telling a story about how Kaiti School, near Gisborne, achieve a 90% attendance by deploying kuia to chase down stragglers, and his enthusiasm for remains undiminished.
Duffy Books in Homes is a private solution to a public failure and it exists because these two men were willing to put their time and capital into improving lives. They have demonstrated their ideas work and have brought others into the scheme. Plested is a relentless champion, pushing his peers to open their cheque books and has brought the energy that brought Mainfreight to the globe to this venture.
Duff, Plested and 40 other chief executives, business leaders and, incongruously, myself, are on the NZ Initiative tour of the Netherlands looking for ideas and inspiration to bring back to New Zealand. And I will write up the outcomes of this adventure when I have assembled them in my mind......The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
6 comments:
New Zealand desperately needs some inspiration.
The last 30 years has seen a depressing general decline, and this nation is no longer recognizable and poorer for it over that period.
Alan Duff was our neighbor in the early 1990s and with his book was the first person to open many kiwis' eyes to the jarring truth.
We need more truth, less lies and inspiration if this country wants to succeed.
I have respect for Alan Duff and his work and in no way wish to denigrate his work. It was well intentioned , but misguided.
Unfortunately the books in homes gave people the wrong idea our low literacy standards were related to the number of books a child owns. This was, a distraction from the real problem we faced in the 1990s, when the' Reading Wars' raged.
The 1990s was the peak of the NZ Whole Language ( WL) reading craze when Marie Clay dominated in reading instruction. She is largely responsible for teaching the entire English speaking world that no child needed to be taught phonics explicitly. Reading according for her in WL theory occurs naturally like learning to speak . Exposing beginner readers to heaps of books focused on the main strategy of guessing words from context and pictures was the strategy promoted.
The consequence of this was a fiasco with NZ now having the worst reading scores in the English speaking world and longest tail of underachievement in the developed world .
My mother in high decile Kapiti taught privately explicit phonics to thousands of remedial students , who were failures of local schools. These children came from homes loaded up with books and parents who read to them. Some children were so committed to compulsive guessing when reading they had to do be home schooled for a while to get away from the WL reading books!
Only fairly recently thorough research has proven conclusively WL and associated Reading Recovery to be a complete failure and English speaking countries are attempting to re-establish explicit phonics as we used to have earlier last century.
If you wish to help poorer children encourage parents putting up for the children a poster/ frieze featuring the sounds of the letters of the alphabet and the English phonemes (sounds ) Not the names and revising those every day. Eg Apple /a/. The sounds are available on NZ Yolanda Sonryl's u tube web site. The Min. Of Ed. now have a web site with the basic phonics for beginners.
Unfortunately I suggest trashing the current WL reading books , still abundant in our schools and libraries since they encourage guessing , and are counter productive to real reading .
It would be a good idea for 'Books in Homes' to change their name to 'Alphabet Sounds in Homes'.
What has this (WL) nonsense got to do with Alan Duff? and how was his intention to promote books in the home misguided?
This sort of misdirected argument and failure to see the obvious problem is exactly why NZ is failing.
Stick to the facts and stop going off on nefarious tangents and blaming someone for implementing into the system a faulty theory for which they had zero input.
Many of the books, but not all , Alan Duff was giving out to children were aligned with the WL reading method and ideas. I am sure some children did benefit from being given a book, but just memorizing a story is not true reading either. About 40% of children learn to read regardless of the method .These WL books are quite different from story books, which parents read to children. Also simply reading to children does not help children to become good readers. This is another fallacy WL promoted. In no way am I blaming Alan Duff for the system but my family have have been endeavoring to change the system for over forty years , and the Reading Wars were very damaging and distressing to my own children and hundreds of children in Kapiti. last century. My families efforts did contributed to a change back to phonics. People were shocked by the persecution children got from teachers for attending our outside reading lessons.
WL reading books have a specific recognizable formula.
The distinctive and destructive feature of these reading books is a reliance on pictures from which to guess words and an extravagant vocabulary requiring guessing words from context.These have been shown by research to be developing in children the habits of poor readers.
Children in NZ , have been failing abysmally from certainly not a lack of books in their homes or elsewhere but the completely wrong reading method being taught in school which was deliberately antagonistic to phonics. Low decile Children are specifically damaged by this iniquitous reading method. I have tutored children who had a number of the Duff donated books but these kids were four or more years behind in their reading ability and they had been of little help to them.
My mother taught traditional phonic reading to poor children in NZ State schools earlier last century during the Depression and every child learned to read at the correct level for their age although few had any or many books in their homes. They did however have the phonic Whitcombe and Tomb r phonic readers which were home based. All along my family have recommended similar readers to these to be in all homes. Specific and simple instruction on how to teach beginner phonic reading for anyone and particularly parents to participate in. This would be a good project for a real and effective 'Books in Homes' project. Instructions on how to teach infant reading phonically , in every families' home was probably one of the reasons we had the best reading schools internationally , earlier last century.
I do wonder if Anon. has had any experience , as I have , in successfully teaching a dyslexic or other reading disabled child. Phonics is absolutely essential for them. There are very few phonic readers available although some Dr Seuss books are good ones. The Dandelion readers are quality ones. I have tried to get the local library to stock phonic friendly reading books but perversely met severe opposition. WL ideas are still well entrenched in our institutions and low SES students will continue to suffer most from this. Just dishing out any story/ reading book to a child will achieve little. This country is awash with children's books . At Second hand book sales you can get a stack for a dollar.
It was interesting that when "Once Were Warriors", as a book became available, the Author received "backlash", particularly from Maoridom, in the first instance, then others of New Zealand 'intellectual' society.
Strange that once it became a film, the 'accolades' that were placed on this film (and actors) defied what had happened in the first instance.
It is interesting that the story Alan Duff wrote came " from the heart" as he had experienced those times.
That was his domain.
His second book - " A Conversation with My Country" (2019)
also saw Alan Duff, again, receive a societal backlash, Maoridom being " the first taxi " off the rank.
His endeavors to begin a reading program, led to the " again like all things New Zealand", the backstabbers, naysayers etc. et al. coming out of the woodwork,
And within this article, the comment by Gaynor is typical of that approach.
Is it not interesting, that today we have children who are illiterate, and a lack of reading skills is very apparent -
- from exposure to books
- but not to social media via a cell phone.
My mother was demonized for what she was doing as well. Journalists and teachers were threatened with job loss if they visited her. The Ministry of Education ued a number of tactics to try and close her down. The students who came to her were frightened and discriminated against by teachers at schools , leading to the making of a 20/20 doco on this , screened on National TV , last century. The producers of this programme said they had not seen such vile child abuse. A particularly cowardly act. I deny I have attacked Alan Duff , but rather the reading method and reading materials we have in NZ . Unless you are intimately involved in effective teaching reading and followed research you would not know there was any problem at all with either of these aspects. I am sorry Alan has had back stabbing for what he has done in attempting to help children with their reading . " Once was Warriors" was controversial and showed the violence in Maori families , which was very revealing and brave of him to produce.
Our international and national reading and writing scores are quite appalling. We need to focus very carefully on what really has caused this, when we used to have the highest scores , internationally . If anyone had genuine constructive criticism of what I was doing I would welcome it not , I hope become defensive and accuse them of backstabbing.
Our NZ , WL method reading books were sold world wide and caused the Californian Educational Fiasco , which resulted in that state having by far the worst reading scores of all States . These books are a curse and have destroyed the academic futures of multi -millions of children world wide . They are seriously wrong and the sooner they are removed from our schools and elsewhere the better. I have special hatred for them and would never use them or any book similar for a child struggling to read.
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