The National Library set to destroy 500,000 books
Yesterday morning, the National Library of New Zealand began the process of destroying half a million books and says they're going to be shredded and fed back into the recycling system. The library claims they've been trying to re-home them since 2018, that there's no demand, and that most haven't been requested in decades. Book dealer and Hard To Find Books owner Warwick Jordan disputes this. There is a demand, he says. In fact, he wants them himself, and says he's already made several offers. Warwick Jordan and National Library director of content services Mark Crookston speak to Jesse.
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NZ Herald
16 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Invisible Intelligence: AUT lecturer challenges how we judge education success
He is now a professor at AUT and has received a spate of awards including the Prime Minister's Award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, the NZ Government Award for Sustained Tertiary Teaching Excellence and the inaugural AUT medal for his contribution to learning and research. In other words, Ings is now in the delicate situation of having reached the very pinnacle of a system he is deeply critical of. He qualified as a teacher in 1976 and went on to teach in both primary and secondary schools but 'fled' those environments where he was forced to test and score children by measures he didn't agree with and 'wriggled' his way into the corner of education where he no longer has to. Now, he supervises PhD candidates, who are given the greatest amount of time to develop their ideas and who receive feedback rather than grades. 'I taught woodwork in a class with 28 people. I know what that is, and I know that you can't really do a good job. You can do an adequate job. You can help people, but the logistics are not right. You just can't. You can't do it.' Welby Ings in his AUT office in Auckland. Photo / Alyse Wright He rejects the accoutrements of traditional education: standardised assessment regimes, grading, pre-packaged 'teacher-proof' curricula, streaming and milestoning. 'Don't think that the comparative grades that come back from school are an adequate description of your child,' he says. 'Don't fall into that trap. 'Be very careful about milestones because every one of us is unique, and the milestones are there to systematise something. They're not there to understand the complexity of the human being. They're there to set up a system. And if your child doesn't meet the walking deadline, the talking deadline, the spelling level, the maths computation ... They may not be flawed. They might just not be meeting that milestone. It's not the only milestone. It's not the only road.' Ings suggests that rather than trying to make children into an ideal as defined by the system, parents should instead try to understand their children's strengths and use those as building blocks. 'It's what we call an appreciative approach. It's not soft. It's a strength-based way of looking at education.' Know the limitations of the system He says his new book is not a manifesto ('I'm too flawed to be writing a manifesto') but he believes the goal of education is to 'enable the most luxuriant growth from the seed of a human being'. To teachers, he says, you should 'know the limitations of the system so well that you can work to the advantage of people who are in that system so you achieve as close as possible to the same thing'. Ings describes himself as a 'humanist' and learning as a 'human endeavour'. He believes effective teaching is to be found inside human relationships. He says learning is 'embodied and it's social, and it's emotional'. What it's not, he says, is 'cognitive mechanics'. 'It seems to me that the bottom line is that learning and the growth of learning is a human activity undertaken in close proximity between human beings.' He doesn't believe a grand redesigning of the education system will fix it, and neither does he believe in 'reformist visions'. Instead, he says, he believes we should be 'infecting the system with higher levels of humanity'. Why love matters In Invisible Intelligence, he writes of the importance of things that don't get mentioned much in discussions about education, such as love. 'Love matters. When you are struggling as a learner, this love often feels like belief… You cling to someone else's belief in you when your own faith is no longer strong enough.' Besides love, he believes time and work are the other critical elements in an effective education. Ings says now: 'Of those three things, school is only well equipped for the last one: work. It's hugely under-resourced for time and it's under-resourced – I know it sounds strange – for love. Because that requires you to know somebody, and when you've got 28 people in your class, it's very difficult, and that class is going to either change at the end of an hour or at the end of the year. It's not fair to ask somebody to have that level of insight.' As a self-described optimist, he believes all this is fixable and says the first thing that needs to happen is a change in the ratio of teachers to students. He also believes in using new and emerging systems to cut down on the administrative load so teachers have more time to be with students 'growing the garden' instead of 'counting how much fertiliser there is in the shed out the back'. 'I've taught your kids' But is all this really necessary? Is our system really so flawed? Plenty of New Zealanders have excelled at school, got good grades and gone on to successful careers. Is it wrong for these people to hope for the same for their children? To them, Ings says: 'I've taught your kids. They come in here with their golden trajectory glowing behind them and they're terrified. They've learned strategy. And when it comes to actually having independent thought, they're afraid to take risks, they're afraid to go into the unknown. They become disparaging as a defence, or dismissive, going: 'That's rubbish. I'm not interested in that'. 'They're deeply injured. They're some of the most difficult people to help heal. Because they have learned strategies to conform to an ideal of what intelligence is and it has disabled their ability to really think.' Ings rarely talks about the economic value of education, either for the person receiving the education, or for the country as a whole. In announcing the defunding of humanities and social sciences from the Marsden Fund earlier this year, Judith Collins, in her capacity as Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology, said the changes were being made to help 'lift our economic growth' and said, 'We are focused on a system that supports growth, and a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.' Ings says New Zealand has a long history of electing business leaders to positions of power: 'Too often we trust the leadership of a nation to people who have shown expertise in business. But a nation is not a business. It's not a business. It's much more than that.' 'When people would start using that language like 'We fix it with growth' or that the solution will lie economically, you go. 'How's that going for you?' AUT lecturer Welby Ings' new book Invisible Intelligence outlines why the education system in New Zealand is failing too many students. Photo / Alyse Wright The point of Ings' book is not to suggest that what our children are taught in school is wrong, but that much of value is not taught at all, and that, as a result, the system is failing too many people. Intelligence is diverse, he says, and we need to be careful about labelling things as problems when they are just signs of difference. 'Talent that looks very different is vulnerable. It's vulnerable. And it's vulnerable to systems that say it's redundant talent.' He says that more than a third of the PhD candidates he supervises are managing physical or mental health issues. 'These are brilliant, brilliant people. And they have risen inside this antithetical system called the Academy. They've risen and they are uneven. It's part of their brilliance that they are uneven. An education for them is about knowing what you're good at so you can work out how to most productively use what you have, so you know where the gaps are that have to be filled in and you can fill them with the minimum that's needed to get them working.' Great sportspeople succeed, he says, not because they're excellent in every aspect of sport, but because they've used their strengths and filled in the gaps to achieve success in the area in which they're strongest. 'They take an appreciative approach. And it's interesting because we see it in very high-end performance stuff. We know it. Yet we don't necessarily do it in education.' Leaving something of value Ings is primarily known as a teacher and thinker but he is also a designer, a filmmaker, a writer and a creator. He says he wants to leave something of value in the world, and he is very specific about what he wants that to be: craft. He is involved with, and attracted to, craft across many fields: thought, design, literature, furniture, film, music. 'And one of the reasons is that craft often lasts and craft can transcend momentary flickers of fashion. It can go beyond those things. So I try to leave behind crafted things, knowing that they are all flawed. They're not ideals, but I'm proud of them. 'Everything I look at, I can still find the flaw in it. I can still go: 'I should have cut that scene, that beat.' I was reading something that I've written years and years ago and thinking, 'Oh shit! That's terrible! It's terrible!' And you go: 'No, no, it's not terrible. There are things that you'd change now…'' Ings is trying to articulate something valuable about the idea of value, but it's not immediately clear exactly what that is. He tells a story about a moment a few years ago, when he was at a film festival in Scandinavia that was screening one of his films. At the time, he thought he was about to lose his job at AUT. 'The cinema screen there goes just beyond your peripheral vision, so you see the whole film with all your vision, and the sound was brilliant and I sat there naked in a room full of people on the other side of the world, knowing that they could see my imagination with all this exquisite clarity, and I was terrified and proud at the same time.' This is of value, he says, 'Because it reminds us of what we can be'. What he doesn't need to add: like a great teacher. Invisible Intelligence by Welby Ings, published by Otago University Press, on sale July 24, RRP $45. Sign up to The Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Broken pump forces Hamilton firefighters to withdraw from house fire
The professional firefighters' union says crews are under-resourced, but their employer says they're trained to cope. Photo: RNZ / Tracy Neal A "catastrophic failure" to a fire truck responding to a Hamilton fire highlights how under-resourced firefighters are, the New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union (NZPFU) says. But Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) says issues like this can and do occur and crews are trained and highly skilled to cope. Six fire crews responded to a garage fire in Flagstaff late Thursday night. On arrival they were met with a fully involved house fire. Hamilton local secretary for the NZPFU Jay Culhane said that while in the middle of fighting the fire, Te Rapa's pumping appliance lost the ability to pump water. "There was a catastrophic failure of the pump, so they lost water pressure to the firefighters, both to the internal and external firefighting crew," Culhane said. The crew inside the house had to withdraw from the building and the external firefighters had to move away. "The biggest problem is a fire doubles in size every thirty-seconds so the delay in operations ... you are going to lose more property and suffer more damage." Pumping operations were quickly swapped over to the Chartwell pump truck which began pumping water to continue fighting the fire. There were no reports of injuries to the firefighters. However, Culhane said more incidents like this were happening and poor planning and under-resourcing were to blame. "You can service an old truck as much as you want but they are still going to have issues," he said. A FENZ spokesperson said it had a fleet of around 1300 firefighting trucks. "Our firefighting trucks are well maintained, safe, certified, and legally compliant. We have a strict schedule for regular maintenance and repairs. "We typically spend more than $20 million each financial year on new firefighting trucks and other vehicles. In 2023/24 we spent $26 million, in 2024/25 we spent $20 million, and in 2025/26 we will spend $29 million." The spokesperson said since FENZ was established in 2017, it had purchased 317 new firefighting trucks. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Faith Farm Fresh keeps milk flowing direct to customers
rural farming 15 minutes ago It's a busy time of year for Stacey Faith, calving 300-plus cows, rearing their calves and keeping the Faith Farm's roadside milk dispensing outlet going, providing locals with milk fresh from the cows over the fence - with the cream on top.
