Education ‘inadequate’
Children in the. Cooperite communities should receive their education in an ordinary school, says a former sect member. Mr Mel Hansen, whose children were taught by the Cooperite school at Cust, said yesterday that he hoped the Ministry of Education’s investigation into the sect’s Haupiri schools would result in their closing, so the children could be educated elsewhere. Mr Hansen left the sect in 1981, and for the next six years helped others who left the sect adjust to the outside world.
He considers that the community has no grasp of reality, an attitude he says is fostered by the school. Mr Hansen believes that not enough is taught about the outside world in the sect’s style of education. Many people who had left the community had done so because they had become frustrated by the school. Although it was bound to teach core national curriculum subjects, it did the basic minimum to satisfy Government requirements and no more, in his opinion.