Community School Curriculum 1964

When Elwyn S. Richardson first came to New Zealand’s Oruaiti School he stopped to examine the green clays in the neighboring creek beds. One day he and his students found a seam of grey clay that they thought looked promising so they dug and carried several loads back to an outdoor patio area. They watered it, chopped it and worked it with hands and feet and finally got it into a workable consistency.

Next came a series of clay samples brought from home on a regular basis for testing and selecting. One day a boy named Rex wheeled his mother’s wheelbarrow one mile up the valley to the school loaded with bricks to make a kiln.

“The clay we used in the first months was not good. So we used the scientific method to solve the problem. We dried some pieces rapidly in the stove and these all cracked badly. Those that were sun-dried also cracked but those which were placed in the dark of the store room cupboard and dried slowly did not crack at all. We found that bottoms cracked unless we turned the pots early in the process of drying.”

The children at this school were real people to their teacher and to each other. Coronavirus could not distance nor defeat them because the vaccine against infectious anomie was their creative community. They were not reduced to social security numbers or login ID’s. Together everyone opened up to the immediate world, examining and uncovering it as if they had recently arrived from some other dimension. And maybe they had. Fresh eyes that fell in love with the work undertaken.

There was a romance involving GRASS and here is how Clifton-10 years expressed it. “I saw the clip of the grass gently move. the long dry wind, bending ticklish grass. The sticky heat of the paspallum walk. The mown grass breath of the wind. The sharp needle of the prickly gorse sticking into grass tops. They sat and watched the blinking sheep and the long bent grass waves. The long silent grass blows over the hill. On the top of the hill is the grass bending over like me bowing.“