Class struggles: Christchurch's unique obsession with its high schools

Tuesday, 9 April 2024

There’s a saying about how to get ahead in certain New Zealand cities: In Auckland, it’s who you know; In Wellington, it’s what you know; And in Christchurch, it’s where you went to high school. MICHAEL WRIGHT - who, since you’re asking, went to high school in Dunedin - tries to pin down the Garden City’s unique obsession with its secondary education.

Ross Preece clearly remembers his first day at Christchurch Boys’ High School. “We got the pep talk from the [deputy principal],” he says, “We were the era you had to pass the exam to get in. I’ll always remember this line. He said, ‘Gentlemen, you have joined the elite.’ He rattled off how many All Blacks and Cabinet ministers Boys’ High had produced and then he said, ‘You can be a congenital idiot and your father can buy you a place at [Christ’s] College. You have earned your place.’”

How much of that is true is debatable and, really, beside the point. One inter-school rivalry is pretty much the same as the next. Preece’s story speaks to a much broader and more baffling phenomenon: in a country, culture, and entire Western society obsessed with the right schools, the city of Christchurch somehow stands apart - more obsessed than everyone else. How is this possible? And how did such an obsession take hold?

The above anecdote is from 1972. One hundred years or so into the rivalry between the private Christ’s College and the public Boys’ High. By this point, the city’s fixation on where its teenagers spent the bulk of their weekdays was well-entrenched. Preece, who retired as principal of Ashburton College at the end of 2023, lays it out: “When I was at school they used to talk about the big six: there was Boys’ High, STAC, Christ’s, Girls’ High, St Margs, Rangi.”

Anyone who lives or went to school in Christchurch reading that quote won’t need any more information - or even the schools’ full names - to know what those institutions represent. But this sort of thing is true almost everywhere. Most cities have one cohort of schools - usually private and/or single-sex - considered ‘better’, and another - usually public and co-ed - considered ‘worse’. Christchurch just cares about its ones the most. “It’s ridiculous,” says Preece. “Christchurch is one of the few places where it’s still valid to ask what school you went to.”

Outsiders find this strange. When Ekant Veer, a University of Canterbury marketing professor, arrived in the city with his family in 2010 the subject came up … reasonably quickly. “It was almost the first thing people asked us,” he says, “Which school are you thinking? Which zone are you in? Our kids were 4 and 2 at the time and people were trying to make sure we were in the right zone and ready to get into the schools almost upon landing.”

Veer, who is originally from India, had relocated from Auckland, so was conversant in the distinctly Kiwi brand of educational snobbery. This was perhaps best exemplified by our fixation on the (now defunct) decile system: a rating out of 10 ascribed to each school as a socio-economic measure of the immediate area, but which parents came to view as a code for quality of education. “What Christchurch does is take that decile system and puts it on crack,” Veer says, “And makes people think it’s not just the right area, it’s the exact school and it’s the exact pathway. After observing this and seeing people talk about it, especially born and bred Cantabrians, the opportunities they feel the right school opens for you is huge. It’s a massive social signifier.”

Veer says he was once privy to this process in action. “I’ve seen it first-hand where someone was passed over for a job and it was given to a much younger male applicant who had very little experience and very little training but one of the interviewers said, ‘I went to the same school as him so I know he’s got good training, he’s got a good education’. Simple as that.”

Right, but this is STILL the sort of self-fulling prophecy you can imagine happening anywhere: a white male wears the right school tie to a job interview at the right firm and lands the right position to put him on an idiot-proof path to prosperity. Along the way he hires decent young chaps like himself who, of course, knew what tie to wear to their interviews. High schools carry disproportionate cachet in Christchurch because of something else - a Goldilocks effect, of sorts. A just-right blend of demography, geography and history.

The Goldilocks Effect

The oldest high school in Christchurch is Christ’s College. It was established in 1851, the year after Canterbury’s favoured creation myth - the arrival of the first four ships at Lyttelton. The rest of the ‘big six’ schools Ross Preece mentioned were all founded before the end of World War I. With a handful of exceptions, almost every other high school in the city - mostly public and co-ed - was built in the 1950s or 60s to accommodate the baby boom after World War II. The roots, traditions and old boys and girls networks of the ‘big six’ were well in place by then.

“In a young country, any traditions you can establish, they give you a strength of identity which you don’t have when you arrive in a country that is effectively, as a white settler community, starting from very little,” Lyttelton writer Joe Bennett says. “So any continuity you get after 25 years or so, it’s attractive to continue that because it gives you a sense of tūrangawaewae - feet on the place.”

Bennett arrived in Christchurch from the UK in 1987, a tardy colonist, to teach English at Christ’s College. One of the first things that struck him was the religious divide. His new school was firmly Anglican. “I was a bit surprised at the strength of feeling about religious camps. The first one was that kids at Christ’s referred to kids at St Bede’s as the doolans. There was a Catholic school down the road from where I went to school and it was sort of a post-religious society as far as we were concerned. There was no inter-religious animosity whereas here there clearly was.”

This was one of those evolutionary by-products of a century or more of ‘big six’ dominance. But something else was in play. In that same 100 years, Christchurch had forged a different identity to its civic counterparts in the North Island. Auckland was now an order of magnitude bigger and plugged into the South Pacific, while Wellington was burdened by the infrastructure of government. Christchurch, though a similar size to Wellington, remained a provincial town.

“And any provincial town is a market town,” Bennett says. “So you go back to that fundamental divide between town and country. Between an Aertech shirt and a white collar. Plus some marginal religious affiliations and the old Catholic-Protestant divide. I think that’s the nub of it.”

Christchurch was just the right size, just the right age and just parochial enough. Where Auckland and Wellington’s identities diluted the power of their otherwise comparable old boys and girls networks, Christchurch’s allowed them to flourish and six or eight or 10 of these lineages carved a path through the urban landscape. Other regional capitals like Dunedin or Hamilton might have shared that spirit, but they were smaller, and so lacked the critical mass of secondary schools required for it to fully manifest.

Soggies versus Syrups

No appraisal of the Christchurch high school industrial complex would be complete without a close interrogation of the duopoly at its core: Christ’s College and Christchurch Boys’ High School. The two magnetic poles around which the maelstrom coheres. So fevered is their rivalry that readers outside the city may already know something of it, like the raucous annual first XV match. Readers inside the city, meanwhile, will recognise the epithets at the top of this paragraph and their uncharitable origins.

The Boys’ High-College divide neatly captures the dichotomy that Bennett mentioned: town versus country. Trevor McIntyre, headmaster at Boys’ High for a decade until 2013, points out that Christ’s College has been a boarding school since the 1850s. Boys’ High was founded in 1881, and didn’t have a hostel until 1915.

“In the early days … those families [that] moved out to the farms and stations, for the sons to get educated they had to go to Christ’s College. They had no choice,” McIntyre says. “By the time Christchurch Boys’ opened their hostel those families were all very much Christ’s College families.

“Christchurch Boys’ … only catered for the families in Christchurch. And I supposed as young men graduated and … became lawyers and accountants and doctors and dentists their loyalty and that old boy network built.”

The landed gentry and the urban professionals. Time has marched on but a century ago things could be that simple. And, like Bennett says, any traditions you can establish in a young country tend to endure that much longer.

The children really are the future

Today, the landscape has changed. All of the above retains some currency but it mostly belongs to history. “That stuff is dying out,” says Ekant Veer, “But the people who are hiring now, they may be in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. They still hold that sentiment strong that certain schools are better than others.”

Veer’s kids attend Burnside High, which he tires of feeling he has to justify to other people as ‘because they’re very musical’ (Burnside’s music programme has a good reputation). They’re aware of Christchurch high school politics, he says, but unfussed. “They already know that this hierarchy exists in the minds of people. Do they care so much? No, they look for subversive ways to get around it… They’re going to a singing competition tonight. They’ve already got plans on how to make sure the boys from a certain boys’ school don’t feel that they can talk down to the girls in the girls’ school.”

And the landscape has changed another, more literal, way: The earthquakes displaced so much of Christchurch’s population that in 2019 the city’s secondary school zoning network was radically overhauled. Public co-eds like Hillmorton and Mairehau high schools drew a zone for the first time. All this to curb over and under-enrolment at schools, build a sustainable network and deliver equity for students. “It was an agreement to effectively maintain our rolls to a certain level,” says Phil Holstein, at the time the principal of Burnside High School and president of the Canterbury-West Coast Secondary Principals’ Association. “And also a commitment to taking in-zone students only. So when schools do that it drops the parental choice a little bit.”

“It is making a difference… All the co-ed state school [zones] are now joined together. The state single-sex [schools] sit above that and they’ve got their own zones. That to me is fantastic. That’s the way it should be.”

Holstein grew up in Christchurch, and knows first-hand the stigma of going to the ‘wrong’ school (in his case, Shirley Boys’ High). “When you were asked what school you attended there was a judgement made. We felt it.” As an adult he felt it while teaching and then leading at three state co-ed high schools: Hillmorton, Riccarton and Burnside.

“Parents often would ask questions,” he says, “[They’d say] ‘I’ll send my son or daughter here because I know that you are very strong in learning support. And then my other son is quite academic so he’ll go to another school.’ They’re as blunt as that… I’d say, ‘Hang on, why are you sending your other son to another school because you felt he’s more academic? We provide that as well.’”

These are the sorts of myths Holstein hopes the new zoning arrangement will help to dispel: Kids go to their local high school, the school community flourishes, good outcomes and reputation follow. Parents realise the school down the road is just as good as the ‘elite’ one across town. “You do a good job,” Holstein says, “They talk.”

This, then, would dismantle some of the real-world consequences of what is entirely a matter of perception. Real estate, for example. Trevor McIntyre remembers seeing one study during his tenure that calculated the premium for Boys’ High in-zone property at about $100,000. In a fierce market, parents went to outlandish lengths to secure a place for their son. “We did checks,” McIntyre says, “I got the staff that did the enrolments to set aside any that they thought might not have been kosher. During the year when I was heading home from work I’d grab a couple and call into the place just to check that little Johnny was actually resident there… One of the places I went to was an empty section.”

With any luck, Christchurch will one day suffer from nothing more than garden variety high school elitism. Then we will all enjoy the Boys’ High-College grudge match for the competing haka and the theatrics and declare that boys will be boys. It may take a generation for the city to recede into the pack, but if 170 years of progress is anything to go by, the day will likely come. Until then, if you’re from Christchurch, and you suspect you might still be giving undue weight to your secondary education, rest assured that you and your school are not special. You are fine. Christ’s College? Fine. Girls’ High? Fine. Te Aratai? Fine. Cashmere, Burnside, Mairehau, St Andrew’s, Shirley Boys’, Hornby, Ao Tawhiti, Hillmorton, Villa Maria, St Margaret’s? All probably fine.

If you’re still not convinced, ask yourself: would you be a markedly different person from the one you are today if you had gone to that other school? Unless the other school was a Buddhist retreat in the Himalayas, probably not. You went to the one you went to and it ends there. That can be a big part of your identity, or none at all, or somewhere in between. That’s fine, too. Remember that, Christchurch. The school you went to is not who you are and it’s All. Probably. Fine.