I have had the feeling for a long time that we are spending too much time and energy on schoolwork and not enough on spiritual work and pastoral work.
John Rees April 1961
The annual report of the Methodist Highlands District told one story about education. Perhaps it was true for education in Tari. In Mendi it was a different story. This chapter is about education in the Mendi Circuit.
The Report for 1961 said:
Good work has been done in the Circuit Training Institutions, now circuit primary schools and in the village schools (lower primary schools). The Synod wishes to establish a District Training School for boys above Standard 4 who are members of the church, to be trained as pastors or teachers. Shortage of staff is delaying this move.
The name ‘Circuit Training Institution’ sounded very good. This was the description of the large schools in the older Districts like New Guinea Islands. When a new teacher, Margaret Higman, arrived from Australia for the Methodist school at Unjamap in Mendi in the middle of 1961, she was surprised to find that the Circuit Training Institution there was very small. The standard of work was not good. There were only 29 students altogether, with three teachers from the coastal regions and herself. Only one of those teachers had any teacher training. There were only seven students in the three top classes and their school work was very poor. It was very disappointing.
Early in 1961, the minister in Mendi, John Rees, wrote to the new teacher before she went to Mendi. He wrote:
I have had the feeling for a long time that we are spending too much time and energy on schoolwork and not enough on spiritual work and pastoral work. Our people here live in individual houses which are scattered all over the place, not in villages. In order to contact them satisfactorily requires a lot of walking and much time. However, because of the demands of the Education Department with its generous subsidies, our native teachers on their stations are very busy in school and do not have time for anything like adequate pastoral work. It is my desire, and I am at present discussing it with the acting Chairman and John Hutton, that we spend less time on schoolwork except in our Circuit and District training institutions, and allow our men more time to be with their people and to prepare themselves for Bible class meetings and Sunday services.
When the new teacher, Margaret Higman, arrived in Mendi she found that there were many problems about schools and education for the Methodist mission. Most of the local ‘pastor-teachers’ were not trained teachers and had very little education themselves. They did not have many educational resources for teaching. Teachers who were expected to teach literacy in the Mendi language did not speak that language. There were old teaching charts for teaching children to read in the Mendi language but there was a problem. Those old charts used four different ways to spell the Mendi words. None of the old charts used the latest method for spelling so they were useless. Not many children were coming to school and only came when it suited them. And that was just in the main Circuit Training Institution in Mendi. She wondered what the little village schools in the pastor stations were like. Each little school was expected to teach four levels of education; two years of vernacular teaching in basic literacy and two years of early education in English, with one untrained teacher to do it all.
When the Methodist Mission started their first school at Unja in 1951, it was the only school in the Mendi Valley. Now in 1961, there were seven new schools in the Mendi area run by the Government with trained teachers and good resources. Now the minister, John Rees, was questioning whether it was a good idea for the pastor-teachers to be teaching in schools at all.
By the time school started again at the end of January 1962, they had worked out a new plan. Village schools would only teach one class in Mendi language and one class to begin English. Children in Standard 2 would come to school at Unjamap and live as boarders at the mission. There were only a few of them.
The new school year started happily at Unjamap in Mendi. At the start of the school year, there were 89 students. Nine children came from the village schools on the out-stations. Some children were starting school for the first time and some who had left now wanted to come back to school. Two new pastor teachers arrived from the Solomon Islands, Isaac Kenaji who was a trained teacher and Solomon Dongohoring, a senior man. New students were happy to receive blankets and new laplaps, and Margaret Higman sewed dresses for the new school girls. A new school building of bush materials with a thatched roof was ready for one class on the mission property at Tende. The rest of the school stayed at Unjamap until other buildings were ready at Tende. Margaret prepared some new primers to begin teaching children to read in Mendi language, using the latest spelling.
On Anzac Day 1962, the Methodist school joined all the government schools in the district for a special parade at the town centre of Murumbu. Many of the Australian government staff came to watch as all the schools marched by in their colourful uniform laplaps in groups of blue, white, red or green. Everyone watched as people laid wreaths, officials made speeches, the police party paraded and the Australian flag was lowered in respect for the memory of those who had served in war. Margaret Higman wrote:
I was proud of my students. They looked lovely in their blue laplaps and dresses, and marched and behaved beautifully.
Some of the other Australian teachers were surprised to see several adult men among the Methodist school students. They joked, ‘Is that your Prep class?’ These young men included Wasun Koka and Sondowe and a few others who had asked to return to school to improve their education. This was unusual. However, their teacher was happy to encourage Wasun and the others to learn to read and write in English. Wasun was working very hard and had improved his reading a lot in a short time. When he was given a test, it showed that he had improved in one and a half years as much as most students learned in four years.
There were a lot of challenges. There were only two students in Standard 6. One of them, Wesi, ran away from school early in the year. She and another girl, Angopa, had been going to the mission school for years but their education had been interrupted when teaching staff had left. Both Wesi and Angopa had just been baptized two months earlier. Wesi was accused of stealing a pineapple and ran away for weeks. Then she turned up to see the teacher. She wanted to come back to school. She said that she ran away ‘because “people” didn’t want her on the station’. Instead of her usual school dress, Wesi was wearing a grass skirt and a very dirty towel on her head, with grey ash over her face. John Rees said that she should not come back as she would only make trouble. Wesi had been fighting with some of the other girls. She came back several times to ask the teacher if she could return to school. In the end, the teacher Margaret Higman invited Wesi to her house with the other school girls. They all had a long talk to each other, said sorry for their fighting, prayed together and re-dedicated themselves to God. Margaret took responsibility for letting Wesi come back to school, even though the minister did not think it was a good idea. By the end of March 1962, Wesi was back in class, very clean and wearing a new dress.
Later in the year, the Methodist mission had a letter from the Lutheran Hospital at Yagaum in Madang. If Angopa and Wesi passed Standard 6 exams at the end of the year, the Lutheran Hospital was willing to accept the two girls for nursing training. Many years later, Margaret met Wesi in Mendi in 2011. Wesi, the girl who ran away, was now Sister Wesi, Director of Nursing at the large Mendi Hospital. Margaret was very glad that she took the risk of letting Wesi go back to class in 1962.
One of the Australian teachers from a government school made a good suggestion to the staff at the Methodist mission. He said, ‘You should offer to teach Religious Education at the government school in the town. The priests from the Catholic Mission go every week. There are a lot of students who come from other churches.’ The families of many of the students at that school in the town of Murumbu came from other parts of the country for work.
At first, John Rees said that he was too busy to add that extra work. Margaret said, ‘If one of the pastors’ wives is willing to teach sewing in my school class once a week, to give me the time, I’d like to do that.’ She began to go to the government ‘T’ School every week from the beginning of 1962.
Margaret liked teaching Religious Education very much. She had a large group of about 40 students and they were interested in this teaching. As it was nearly time for Easter, each week she told the students the story of Jesus. She talked about Jesus as he walked to Jerusalem with his disciples, with the people who loved him and the others who were his enemies. She told the stories of the garden, the trial, the cross and the resurrection. It was the first time some of those students had heard this story. Soon a number of those students, who were nearly all boys, started coming to Unja on Sunday for church services and Sunday School.
By the middle of the year, some of those students asked for a class where they were able to prepare for baptism.
This was important. It showed these young people that to be a Christian and a follower of Jesus was something for everyone, not only for people who attended a mission school, or worked in a mission job.
In the Circuit Training Institute during the first part of 1962, the students were doing their best but they were so far behind with their work that it was hard to catch up. Some of them were doing quite well but others were struggling and none of them were as confident or advanced with their work as they should have been. Their teacher Margaret was very discouraged and wrote, ‘They all have an impossibly long way to go’. Some of the new school buildings were ready at Tende by now and most of the classes were meeting there. The bush materials classrooms were on a hillside surrounded by nothing but kunai grass. They started to make gardens for sweet potato and other vegetables, as well as flower gardens with flowers from the bush like impatiens and coleus to improve the area.
The difficulties of the Mendi Circuit Training Institute were a problem. But as well as the CTI, there were also seven mission village schools that were the responsibility of the Australian teacher. She was told that at least some of them were in good hands but it had not been easy to visit them because of distance and not often having access to any transport.
One of the pastor-teachers who had recently taken over the station and school at Kamberep asked for help. He was worried about his classes. Margaret went to visit. She wrote later:
At Kamberep I had a most depressing morning discovering that the kids knew literally nothing. They hadn’t even begun to register the Mendi reader or a scrap of oral English. It was really terrible. I couldn’t help him much more than by saying to start all over again.
A few days later, she learned that the school inspection was due on 16 August 1962. She wrote to her parents:
I feel ill. It is bad enough to have to prepare my own three classes but when I think of the rest of the school here at Tende and the other seven schools… Last Tuesday I reckoned that the only thing to do with Standard 2 exercise books was to burn the lot and start again. I might do it too!
I’ve been really busy this week and, the more I do, the more stares me in the face. The state of my schools horrifies me. If Kamberep is as terrible as it is when I thought the former pastor was supposed to be a good teacher, what are the others like? The pastors make no secret of the fact that they don’t enjoy teaching and they’re not trained for it.
To add to her anxiety, Margaret Higman met the District Education Officer and a senior official from the Education Department. They had many questions about the mission schools. They did not agree with the mission plan to teach literacy in the local language and insisted that instruction in schools should be only in English. She tried to defend the mission policy, with the preparation of new reading primers in vernacular, but they were not convinced.
When Margaret wrote her report for the Synod meeting in June 1962, she explained, among other things, that she had visited all seven of the mission village schools, including the three in the remote Lai Valley. As well as the Circuit Training Institute at Tende, there was a mission school at Kamberep, Wombip, Semb, Yaken, Kip, Homep, and Tukup. She respected the pastor-teachers and said that they were doing their best but had neither training nor teaching materials. She wrote:
Seeing these schools makes me all the more convinced that this is a work that should be left for the trained government teachers to free our men of a burden which takes most of their time and has small results of value.
By the end of the Synod meeting, it was decided to close the little schools at Kip, Homep and Yaken but to keep the literacy classes. The village schools at Wombip, Kamberep and Semp were not to take new students but to keep the ones that they already had until they were ready to go to the school at Tende. They agreed, ‘In future, children from those areas are to be encouraged to attend the government schools at Map, Tulum and Bela’. They knew that they should not make big changes too quickly, or leave the students with no chance for any education. At that time the government schools were already full.
This did not mean that the Methodist mission was not interested in children or young people. All the pastors had classes for children and youth on Sundays. Some of their Sunday Schools were very big, with some of the teachers from the government schools helping to teach on Sundays.
By the middle of 1962, the teacher was feeling very discouraged about the school at Tende. When the students did their mid-year exams, the results were very disappointing. She told her parents, ‘At least I’ll be able to present the Inspector with an exam book even if the results are heartrending.’ Both the boys and the girls were causing trouble during the exam week.
Six boys were in trouble. Local people were preparing for a big, exciting sing-sing nearby at Map. Rees told all the students that they were to stay at school for their exams that week, and not go to see the sing-sing until Saturday. Six boys left school and went to watch the preparations for the sing-sing. Rees was very angry with them. At first, he told them that they had to leave school for good, and took back their school blankets. Although he changed his mind, and let the boys come back, the whole school was very upset about it.
Some of the girls were fighting. One evening, one of the girls called Endeto came crying to Margaret with her blouse torn in pieces. Several of the girls were very upset with each other. Then Endeto’s father Dus came with a heavy stick and hit Ting, who was fighting with Endeto. Ting hit him back. People were bleeding and screaming, shouting bad language at each other. No one was happy.
Their troubles were just beginning.
Sources:
John Rees, personal letter, 2 April 1961
Annual report 1961
Margaret Higman, personal letter 4 January, 19 January, 23 January, 25 March, 27 March, 29 March, 3 April,1962,
Margaret Higman, personal letters, 18 March, 29 March 1962
Margaret Higman, personal letters, 24 May, 31 May 1962
Margaret Higman, Education Report to Synod, 30 June 1962
Margaret Higman, personal letter, 1 July 1962
Margaret Higman, personal letter, 11 July 1962
Margaret Reeson 