A Letter to the Teacher

Pioneering woman director Kathleen O’Brien looks at NZ Correspondence School education in this 25-minute National Film Unit short. Lessons are sent from the school’s Wellington base to far-flung outposts, for farm kids and sick kids, prisoners and immigrants, from Nuie to Northland. Letters, radio and an annual ‘residential college’ at Massey connect students and teachers. In a newspaper report of the time, O’Brien remembering being stranded at Cape Brett lighthouse “for four days without a toothbrush and wearing only the clothes she stood up in”.

The lessons have travelled many hundreds of miles so that small fry on a lighthouse can learn the three ‘R’s.

– From the narration

Key Cast & Crew

Kathleen O'Brien

Director, Writer, Editor

Ron McIntyre

Camera

Paul Ricketts

Narrator

Derek Wright

Camera