After experience as a primary teacher and principal, then university lecturer and senior inspector of schools – when Tomorrow’s Schools with its managerialist philosophy was implemented in 1990, I left the formal education system to do what I could do to speak up for teachers and children against the inevitable downgrading of teacher professionalism and focus away from children. Through the ‘90s I produced a magazine (Developmental Network Newsletter), and in 2007 I turned to the internet. The first networkonnet website (networkonnet.co.nz) ran from July 2007 to April 2014 when networkonnet.wordpress.com replaced it. Now, to allow the historical postings for the first networkonnet to be available, they have been transferred to this new site: kelvinsmythenetworkonnet.wordpress.com.

I am most grateful to the networkonnet editor, Allan Alach, for his phenomenal work in this task and everything else he does to keep the networkonnet concept going.

Under Tomorrow’s Schools there was an inevitability about school education going into decline which meant that deception, propaganda, and increased centralised control would be used by the government to have that decline somehow perceived as success. To expose that perception, my writing has striven to lay bare the destructive effects of the current system in the hopes of a teacher-inclusive one replacing it, and to promote the holistic curriculum as against the current narrow and impoverished one.

Welcome to the site with its mixture of pain, delight, hope, despair, anger and utu.  I would, of course, always be delighted to hear from you.

Kelvin Smythe

14 April, 2016

ksmythe@wave.co.nz