End of an era with the passing of Jack Shallcrass

Jack Shallcrass, educationist, humanist, and just a delightful charming human being passed away on August 13, at the age of 91. The last time I saw him, at the Pataka museum in Porirua last year he looked frail, but he still had his welcoming warm smile, and he greeted me, as he greeted everyone elese, with genuine pleasure, like a long lost friend.  Jack was one of the remarkable group of teachers at Wellington teachers' College in the early 1950s that included Walter Scott, Anton Vogt, Bill Renwick, John Drawbridge, Doreen Blumhardt, Pat McCaskill and the poet Arthur Barker. It was, I believe, the golden age of teacher training. Young people, mostly girls, and many from the country, were exposed top new ideas and challenged to think. Many had the first experience in their lives of listening to classical music, seeing serious art, reading contemporary literature. I believe that I was there not because the selection panel that accepted me as a student thought that I would make a great teacher, but because being a bit different, coming from a different, European, cultured background Walter Scott and others on the panel thought that I would inject something different, a cosmopolitan world view in the largely homogeneous student body. There were others who were there because of their different backgrounds, Mike (later known as Charles) Doyle, the poet, Cros Walsh, the crooner Ron Polson, Jenny Priestly, jeweller, writer and former head of the Arts Council, Grant Tilly, actor and artist. I was a writer, a fairly humble writer, contributing to the Literary Society and the magazine Ako Pai. Those were two stimulating happy years, and Jack, with his outgoing embracing, friendly personality was an important part of that scene. Those were the years when C. E. Beeby's educational reforms, and in particular, educational ideas were seeping into the school system. Treating children with respect, encouraging them to think and fostering their creativity was radical and resisted by many of the old guard teachers and principals. I, and I believe many others, struggled to implement in the classroom the ideas we learned at Teachers College. Many of us left teaching. Now, in my old age, and much more mature, teach in the Holocaust Centre as I would have liked to teach then. At the time, Jack Shallcrass and his colleagues inspired us to teach infused with his humanist values.