A staff meeting with Sir Richard and Lady Tania Taylor at Weta Workshop - nurturing "wonderment and delight" our educational imperative

I am continually blown away by the capacity of ordinary New Zealanders to do extraordinary things.

We were hugely privileged yesterday afternoon to meet with Sir Richard and Lady Tania Taylor at Weta Workshop and once again I found myself involved in an internal dialogue about where greatness comes from? What is it that enables some people to move out of the ordinary world and do extraordinary things?

Surely talent and giftedness must be central in this….

Sir Richard Taylor said that he currently has 150 people working in the workshop, many of who came to him as drop outs of the traditional school system. He said that when he chooses staff he looks first for passion – what’s in their heart? Then he looks for enthusiasm –do they have the drive to take the passion and turn it into action? Next he looks for tenacity – do they have the courage and fortitude to hang in there and take the knocks, to stick at it? Finally, he looks for talent.

Talent is important (and we all have talents in some area or another – only a few are truly gifted) but it is passion, enthusiasm and tenacity that are the capacities and dispositions that the extraordinary success of Weta Workshop has been built on. These capacities and dispositions are available to all of us. It is these that Sir Richard and Lady Tania said must be nurtured in schools, but are often suppressed.

Sir Richard spoke of the “emotional stonewalling” that he often meets with when speaking at tertiary institutions in New Zealand – students who are turned off learning, too afraid or unable to show wonderment and delight. He compared this with the students in China, that he encounters who are fiercely determined to stand out as individuals and show their enthusiasm and passion openly in a crowd.

Surely our goal in education is to assist students towards greatness – to be ordinary New Zealanders who do extraordinary things. How do we do this?

According to Sir Richard and Lady Tania we need to ensure that students leave our institutions with a hunger for learning, joy of life and a higher level of excitement with the world. We need to keep eager wonderment alive in children through joyful experimentation - not instructing them, but leading them towards self-discovery. They need to have a sense of ownership in the learning process. They need to get their hands dirty. As Sir Richard said, “Joy of discovery is a worthy thing and the world is there to sample, touch, smell and feel.” Both Sir Richard and Lady Tania spoke of the need to go back to being a society of “makers”. Weta Workshop, for example, is “looking for people who just love to make things.” We need to teach students not just to walk through the world looking at it, but to observe it. Observation requires us to acknowledge the world, to learn from it, to be instructed by it, to touch it and to be touched by it.

This is our challenge. Yes, to ensure that our students leave our school numerate and literate. But more importantly, to design curriculum and develop cultures and connections that ensure our children walk through the world interacting with it and learning from it with awe, wonderment, joy and delight.