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”.

In the lonely homestead scattered along New Zealand’s rugged coastline, as in the remote England farms and high country sheep stations, children are being educated. This is their story: the story of the correspondence school pupils whose playgrounds are the rocky coastline, the native bush, the snow-clad mountain country; whose classroom is in the family living room or kitchen.

– From the narration

Key Cast & Crew

Kathleen O'Brien

Director, Writer, Editor

Ron McIntyre

Camera

Paul Ricketts

Narrator

Derek Wright

Camera