The Opening Ceremony

There had in fact been an Auckland Technical School as early as 1888. An advertisement in the Auckland Star of March that year announced classes in Applied Mechanics and the Steam Engine on Wellesley Street. The teacher was a Mr Walter I. Robinson. At a prize-giving it was noted that practical education was not inferior to literary education and that "it was absolutely necessary that our youth should have the opportunity of becoming inventors and discoverers".

By 1894, clearly not having established a workload allocation policy for himself, Mr Robinson was teaching architectural drawing and construction as well as applied mechanics. Having developed some twenty-first-century marketing expertise, his new advertisement noted optimistically that "First Class Honours" were available in these subjects. By now Mr Robinson, with remarkable foresight, was suggesting that a School of Design should be established in Auckland.

Mr Robinson has disappeared from the formal history of AUT, which officially starts with the opening ceremony in 1895 in a new three-storey school on Rutland Street, formerly Foster's Boot Factory. Reading the Star's report of the ceremony, the gap of 105 years between the opening of the school and the establishment of the university does not seem quite as great as you might imagine.

The school was formally opened by the President of the Council, Sir George Maurice O'Rorke, MP for Manukau, in front of a large gathering of what were described as influential citizens (an old-fashioned term for "stakeholders").

Sir Maurice (before he was knighted, he was George) noted that a technical school had been discussed for many years, notably with Auckland University College, the Grammar School and the Board of Education. The Board of Education thought technical education might be a supplement to the "scientific teachers and well-stocked laboratories of the University College". The University College thought it would be good for people who wanted to go to night school, that is, the working classes. The Grammar School, while claiming to want to help, "entertained a delicacy lest the new School should encroach on the proper functions of academic education".

The school was founded on a public subscription (what we would now call sponsorship) that had raised 120 pounds, matched pound for pound by the government. A humble beginning, commented the Star, contrasting the sum with the much bigger amounts spent on technical education overseas.

A hundred students had enrolled for freehand drawing; algebra and geometry; mechanical drawing and machine and building construction; coachbuilding; architectural drawing; wood carving; plumbing; cookery; and dressmaking. In modern parlance: engineering, hospitality, design and fashion.

Sir Maurice went on to explain the meaning of technical education. There was, he asserted, no antagonism between technical and general education. Indeed, he would go a step further: if students did not acquire some technical education, their progress in life would be impeded at every turn. Of his audience he said that "they were men who brought their practical knowledge to bear on the subject and lifted the subject out of the hand of theorists and breathed the breath of life into it".

He did think there could be strong links with the University College, with students from the school able to go on to the university to "reap the advantages of an academic education that was imparted by gentlemen: the professors of physics, chemistry, electricity, botany, geology, agriculture and astronomy".

Showing a distinct lack of understanding of branding, mission or strategic development, he concluded: "I entertain no hope that the school is going to strike out any new path for itself, or that it was to become a shining light in the firmament of technical education." Though, like many after him, he did advise everyone connected with the school to look to America, Europe and Australia for inspiration.

I entertain no hope that the school is going to strike out any new path for itself.

A few weeks earlier the subscribers to the Auckland Technical School Association had held their first general meeting, with the Mayor presiding: in effect, AUT's first strategic retreat. After a great deal of time discussing the purposes of the school, a constitution was adopted in what was called a "slightly" amended form. The amendment was "to confine the object of the institution to provide technical education merely and eliminate from the syllabus all those subjects included under the term 'general education'". A reminder that apparently minor events, slight amendments and, particularly, long meetings can change history.

The late nineteenth century was, of course, a very different context. But for those who believe a changing world is a twenty-first-century monopoly, the 1895 advertisement for the Technical School appeared next to another noticing the great success of a wondrous new invention, the typewriter, which had caused a "revolution" among businessmen "who are no longer the slaves of the pen". Sedately reminiscent of the hyperbole around the iPad, the Auckland Star had remarked twenty years earlier that "in this age, when practically there are no bounds to the flight of inventive genius, our American cousins have accomplished great things, including the writing machine, a very ingenious apparatus and a perfect substitute for the pen, meeting the necessity of the age".

Looking back at that opening ceremony is an interesting, sometimes salutary, reminder. We are always surrounded by the echoes of our history, not always clear and loud but part of the fabric. We ourselves are mostly the footnotes of the next century. That is no cause for existential angst; it is how history works. Without the millions of footnotes, the heroes (and villains) would get nowhere. And the world was changing just as much a century ago, and undoubtedly the century before that. Yet for all the huge changes to the school, the university and the society around them over the last hundred years, some things change slowly, if at all.