Why does the NZ Herald hate teachers?
Today was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Of all the musings on the Ashley Maddison leak - and believe me, there are many interesting ones - the Herald, today, ran this as their lead story:
Email addresses from 65 New Zealand schools are in data leaked from controversial adultery website Ashley Madison, prompting calls for an investigation into whether staff were using the website during school time.
From where these calls are coming, the article doesn’t say. What the Herald is proposing, however, is essentially that every school should undertake a witch-hunt of how its teachers use the internet. That same demand could, of course, be made of Ministry of Justice officials, politicians, or, you know, people living in the Bay of Plenty. But the Herald has, once again, chosen to target its whipping boy-du jour, our nation’s teachers.
Take a peek of the Herald’s education section. Go on. Here’s just a selection of the latest headlines from the past week:
“Tensions boil over at troubled boarding school”
“Auckland Grammar teacher facing seven years in jail for fraud”
“Teacher censured over sexual relationship with student”
...and my personal favourite:
“The school that started with a murder”
The issue with this wall-to-wall coverage of teacher misdemeanours is that it inevitably seeps into our collective psyche. There’s only so long the average New Zealander can retain a high perception of teachers when our nation’s most influential newspaper is telling them what deviant miscreants we are every single day.
Perception also breeds reality. There’s only so long we, as teachers, can read about how scurrilous we all are before we begin buying into the narrative, too. A demoralised teaching force is the last thing our students need.
Now, I can’t for the life of me see how a National government - in the middle of teacher pay bargaining - could stand to gain from such a media vendetta. Of course I’m not suggesting that the Herald could be in cahoots with Parata over this, because that would be... well, that’d be dirty.
