Toothbrush Drill - Maori Dental Care - circa 1940s

 Children participating in Toothbrush Drill, Te Kaha Maori School, Opotiki, circa 1944. Photo: Pascoe

The school that brushes its teeth together, reduces cavities together... Toothbrush drill seems to have been a device for promoting better dental care amongst school children in the 1940s.

Getting the equipment ready for the Toothbrush drill at Te Kaha Maori School, Opotiki, circa 1944. Photo: Pascoe

This Kid Got the Laughing Gas - New Zealand School Dental Service, 1940s - 50s

The Wellington Dental School Clinic, Willis Street, circa 1940s or 1950s.

The only reason this young lad could be smiling is the nurse just gave him a blast of the old laughing gas or she just gave him a clean bill of health.

The School Dental Nurse Program in New Zealand

School dental nurse and patient at Waipu school. Photo: John Pascoe, circa 1942. 

If you didn't drink your daily school milk, eat an apple, and regularly brush your teeth, a trip to the school dental clinic could mean some serious repair work. 

The New Zealand school dental service was a world-first, providing preventive dental care to primary school children from clinics located on school grounds. Rather than take the children to the dentist, the dentist was brought to the children. Considered impracticable by many, the service was largely ignored internationally until it began to receive some international interest for many decades until the 1960s and 1970s. Such is the price of succeeding by swimming against the stream and getting spectacular results.

Colonel (Sir) Thomas A. Hunter, Director of the New Zealand Army Dental Service in the 1914–18 War proposed the idea of a dental school program staffed by young women trained in preventive dentistry in 1921. In the same year, a dental school to train these dental nurses opened in Wellington.

With the election of the First Labour Government in 1935, the program was rapidly expanded with new facilities in Wellington and additional schools being opened in Auckland and Wellington in the 1950s. In the post-war baby boom new dental nurses could not be trained fast enough to tend to the growing student population until new hiring and the new schools were built.

The school dental nurse in her "whites" and red cardigan (at least that's how I remember them) and her clinic (a.k.a. "the murder clinic" to generations of kids) quickly became a part of the school community, though children tread rather warily when in the vicinity of the clinic lest they be summoned inside for one of their twice yearly check-ups.

This was no statist experiment in the compulsory torture of the young: parental permission was sought and widely given. By the mid 1970s, more than 60 percent of preschool children and 95 percent of primary school children were voluntarily registered (by their parents!) with the school dental service, underscoring the high participation rate by the community.

Significant improvements in dental health were registered over the longer term. For instance, in1925 there were 78.6 teeth requiring extraction for every 100 teeth that were restored. By 1974 this figure was reduced to 2.5 extractions per 100 restorations. Although the data is not to hand here (I haven't bothered to search for it), one can expect even further reduction occurred from the mid 1970s to the present. Thus, many young adult New Zealanders today retain a full set of teeth, many with few fillings, in strong contrast to the first half of the twentieth century when many of the same age cohort had lost many or even all their teeth by sometime in their twenties or thirties.

Although there may have been a tendency in past decades of the school dental service to "drill and fill", there has always been a strong emphasis on dental education to prevent cavities in the first place. Today the school dental nurse is known as a dental therapist.

For secondary school students, the First Labour Government in 1947 initiated dental benefits for those up to the age of 16 under the Social Security Act 1938, with the government sub-contracting treatment to be conducted by private dentists in their clinics.

Further reading on the history of the school dental service can be found in the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (1966) here. Apparently an entry on school dentistry aside from a brief historical entry here and there has not yet appeared in Te Ara the New Zealand Encyclopedia - the current digital encyclopedia project of the New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Te Ara is a fascinating and expanding project, proof of the potential of digital educational resources and that tax dollars can be very well spent when the private sector finds no profit in such a project. [End of editorial, heh!]

Free Milk in Schools Programme in New Zealand - 1937 -1967

Auckland school children knocking back half a pint, 1937

New Zealand's First Labour Government introduced free milk for children at school in 1937 to improve the health and welfare of young Kiwis. In the midst of the Great Depression, it didn't hurt to find a steady demand for surplus milk either. For a time during the Second War War, school children even received an apple a day.

School milk meant better bone & teeth development, as well as a "meal" in the stomach at time when widespread economic deprivation caused by the Depression meant many kids did not get full nutrition at home.

Between 1937-67, school children received a half pint bottle of milk during their morning class sessions. In an era before widespread refrigeration, crates of milk boats were often stored in a small slatted shed raised off the ground in some shaded spot close to the school gates. At least that was the case at the primary school I attended in the last years of the programme. Boys in standard 6 would pile crates on a hand cart and deliver the milk to each classroom, later collecting crates of empties to be returned to the shed for later pick-up by the milkman.

School milk was not to everyone's taste, especially on warm, sunny days when unrefrigerated milk would warm and start to turn. The crown of cream on top of the bottle's contents could also be a bit off-putting as it clogged one's way into the liquid below. 

In 1967, cost and some doubt about the health benefits of milk saw the end of the programme. In an age of "greater personal freedom", school milk gave way to expanded opportunities for private expenditures by ill-informed consumers in the guise of school children on soft drinks and junk food, the focus of "the concerned" shifting to childhood obesity and assorted ills. The more the wheel turns, etc, etc.

Better Britain - Cultural Cringe in New Zealand Schooling in the 1930s

As a British settler colony, New Zealand and New Zealanders sought to build a new, better Britain but were inextricably bound to "Mother England" as her farm and by blood ties. But this social conditioning, accentuated in the teaching of young New Zealanders in their schools was a process of denial: denial of their new land, denial of the Maori who they now shared this land with; and denial of their evolving roles as South Pacific Islanders. The result was a form of social schizophrenia and a cultural cringe. Novelist Robin Hyde summed up the situation nicely in 1938. 

From Robin Hyde's The Godwits Fly, chapter three, Bird of My Native Land:

"Sometimes in class Mr Bellew talked about the godwits, who fly every year from the top part of the North Island to Siberia, thousands of miles without a stop. They fly north, they fly north.… They lined a dell one night with secret olive wings, and next morning were gone. Mr Bellew said, with melancholy satisfaction, ‘And the eye of white man has never looked upon their flight.’

Something there had been, something delicate, wild and far away. But it was shut out behind the doors of yesterday, lost beyond the hills, and sticking a dead twig of it into a hole in the playground, or a rotten poem in the school journal, only made it sickly and unreal. You didn't really have to think about it—Maoris, godwits, bird-of-mynative-land. Attending to it at all was a duty call to a sick-bed. History began slap-bang in England. ‘At the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, William of Normandy defeated King Harold.’ A picture showed King Harold very angry and frightened because William had tricked him into taking an oath on the bones of the Saints. You were sorry for him and didn't want him to be beaten, but of course he was; especially you wished the arrow had hit him anywhere but in the eye. Normans in England said ‘Bœuf’ and ‘Mouton’ at first and the old Saxon tongue struggled and died out, till nobody understood it, any more than people here understood Maori.… You had to know that much, or you failed in your examination.

You were English and not English. It took time to realize that England was far away. And you were brought up on bluebells and primroses and daffodils and robins in the snow—even the Christmas cards were always robins in the snow. One day, with a little shock of anger, you realized that there were no robins and no snow, and you felt cheated; nothing else was quite as pretty. The tall sorrel heads of the dock-plants were raggedy under your hands, and the bush of daisies with brown centres stuck out from under the bedroom window, its roots somehow twisted into the asphalt of Calver Street."

Full text available at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre.

Frighteningly, this "being English, yet not being English" message persisted in the New Zealand school system well into the late 1960s, if not beyond, given this blogger's experience as a school pupil in that era. Thankfully, some progress has been made in the last couple of decades in developing a stronger emphasis on New Zealand's own culture, politics, history, and science in its educational institutions.

But the jury must still be out for some years to come on the success or otherwise of this process, especially in an era where a narrow policy objective of commercialism is used to drive the educational system at all levels. One god may simply have replaced another.

Learn to Count in Maori

Instructional video from TalkMaori, via YouTube, on learning to count in Maori:

Tahi, rua, toru..