What has been produced is not a "history curriculum" as such. What has been produced is a perspective on history that is fundamentally based on Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory assumes the following.
1. That the primary driver of human action
is the pursuit of power
2. That power has been almost exclusively
exercised by people of European descent
3. That the people of colonised lands were
not materially benefited in any significant way by the process of colonisation
4. That colonisation displaced a near
utopian existence with an existence of institutionalised oppression
5. That this oppression remains embedded
in every aspect of social and institutional life and is the ultimate cause of
all disparity
6. That the solution is decolonisation
7. That any arguments to the contrary are contaminated by privilege and must be immediately invalidated and driven mercilessly from the public domain
We should not be concerned that there are controversial ways of looking at history, debate is the lifeblood of the historical method. But alternative perspectives can be deliberately suppressed for personal or political gain, and in order to advance one perspective alone, creating the impression that alternative perspectives are not credible. As a consequence, critical knowledge is cast to the wind, perspectives become untethered from the events which gave rise to them, and the deliberate selection of some facts, and denial of others, can create questionable conclusions, unbalanced views, and unjustified causes.
History is more an art than a science. Being open to alternative perspectives forces the consideration of inconvenient facts. This is how ideas are sifted, shaped, refined, tested, some last and some don't. Legitimate historical inquiry is a natural bulwark against extreme ideas and intentional manipulation. Of course, history practiced legitimately is something of a rough and tumble exercise, you can be confronted with perspectives you find offensive, and you may have to concede or modify a position in light of new facts. But there are nearly always reasons why some facts are left out, or understated, and why some are included, and sometimes overstated. When critiquing a historical perspective, it is often a very good starting point to ask yourself precisely which critical information is left out, there is always a reason for this.
In short, to engage in history properly is to willingly expose your primary assumptions (and prejudices) to the light of alternative perspectives.
With respect to colonisation, we are never told that intertribal slavery existed in almost every colonised land prior to colonization, or that the earliest slave traders were not the nations of Europe, or that tribal groups often lived in perpetual fear of their more powerful and ambitious neighbours, or that colonisation was sometimes a lifeline to smaller tribes fearful of annihilation at the hands of larger tribes.
We are not told that traditional societies were generally highly stratified, with almost no upward mobility, that tribal life was often brutal and short, that cannibalism was sometimes practised, that pantheistic and spiritualistic religions made people fearful, that primitive and labour-intensive technology exposed people to a life of toil, and regularly to the vagaries of famine.
We are not told that sometimes the colonising powers were very reluctant colonisers, that a piece of land purchased by a settler may have been paid for at least a dozen times to multiple owners, that missionaries and foreign service officials were often the most ardent advocates for the protection of indigenous people, that the punishment of indigenous children for speaking their native language at school was often at the behest of their parents.
We are seldom told that the anglo nations were the first in the world to legislate against slavery, that colonisation brought advantages ... more comfortable homes became possible with the arrival of nails, written language with the arrival of the alphabet, warm clothing and blankets with the arrival of textiles, better diets with the introduction of new crops, more accountability (and justice) with the arrival of a legal system, a more coherent set of propositional ethics with the arrival of Christianity. It is easy to trivialize these things from our twenty-first-century perspective, but these changes yielded no small gain, and help to explain the eagerness of many colonised people to engage with the colonisers.
Consideration of the bigger (and fuller) picture brings perspective.
Colonisation was often, and ultimately, a brutalising process, and the impacts of colonisation endure. But the history of the world is one of constant colonisation, of the over-layering of people groups, of subjugation and integration, and worse, over and over again. There are almost no exceptions to this. People moved when they needed to, and displaced others when they could. Stronger tribes prevailed, and weaker tribes were assimilated, enslaved, or exterminated. Similarly, the nations of Europe emerged from tribal beginnings and, as a result of often protracted territorial conflicts between these tribes, national borders emerged.
Colonisation is a manifestation of the outworking of universal principles, and reflects powerful human instincts to survive at a minimum, and to thrive at best. Judgment of historical realities needs to be tempered with a realistic, and balanced, vision of human nature, not a myopic and idealised one, and not one which attributes vice almost exclusively to some, and virtue almost exclusively to others. The proposed new curriculum is not a balanced presentation of the facts, but a cut-and-paste justification for an unbalanced and agenda-ridden view of history. Its core assumptions are selective and highly challengeable.
If anything, history teaches us that we are not so different from those who have come before us, or from those who inhabit a different part of our planet. We have similar motivations, good and bad. Individually, and collectively, we repeat the sins of earlier generations, nuanced and rationalized to our time and context, and commensurate with our ability to do so. We can be cruel when the opportunity for gain presents, when our interests are threatened, or when we are fearful. We sin against others, not always in equal measure, but we sin against them nevertheless. The same precipitating motivational drivers exist for us all, adjusted only to scale and circumstance. This should create within us a reluctance to point our fingers. It is sometimes right to seek redress, but we should be honest about the actions of our forebears too, we should not rest our arguments on convenient facts alone, and sweep inconvenient facts under the carpet.
Radical re-sets, always accompanied by a historical cut and paste exercise, usually do not go well, and can be ultimately catastrophic. The French, Russian and Maoist elitist revolutions were all attempts at sudden change. Books were burned, statues toppled, churches razed to the ground, and re-education, including radically different interpretations of history, became a paramount preoccupation. In Paris, the streets ran with blood, and a prostitute was carried to Notre Dame and invested as the new goddess of reason, in Russia, a man owning three cows instead of one could be dispatched to a Siberian gulag for his overt capitalism, and in China, countless people disappeared without a trace. Perhaps worst of all, in the grip of something akin to a mass psychosis, people began to turn on each other. Knowing what happens when ideas are pushed to (or beyond) their limits (which invariably happens when competing perspectives are disregarded) gives us a taste of how badly things can actually turn out. We could never end in such a place, how sure are you of that?
Repeated comments by the Maori Party, and others on the left of politics, that Maori were subjected to genocide, and a holocaust, are an object lesson in where you can end up when you play loose with the facts of history, and when you can come to believe your own lies. What do they know, if anything, of the experience of the Jewish people throughout the ages? To equate the planned, systematic extermination of six million Jews with the colonisation of New Zealand is unforgivably ignorant. Loose-lipped commentators in the United States have been stood down, and forced to apologise, for anti-semitic comments of lesser magnitude than this, and yet the New Zealand media have barely commented, or challenged, such baseless assertions, it largely passed without notice, more than once
In short, history is impossibly complex, as are the people it seeks to represent. As there is no truth, but many truths, there is no history but many histories. Thus what makes history exciting, is also what makes it prone to abuse. The new curriculum is not a history curriculum in any valid sense. It is a selective view of the past, based on questionable assumptions. The new curriculum seeks to enshrine Critical Race Theory as the primary lens through which we make sense of past and present realities. It silences dissenting views, narrows perspectives, pits people groups against each other, attributes vice to some and villainy to others, and contaminates our national consciousness.
Perhaps worst of all it contravenes the duty of all educators to ensure that their students have a right to their own worldview, to question without fear, to seek the fuller picture, to ascertain motive, and to weigh in light of broader considerations. In short, our students have a right to be free from indoctrination by those who have no tolerance for those who see things differently or who are easily offended.
Critical Race Theory is cleverly hidden throughout this insidious document but it is there nevertheless, the subtle twists of phrase, and the occasional concessions to good sense, make it all the more dangerous. All indications are that this government will muster every mechanism at its disposal to see that this document is implemented to the letter. Instructions to schools have been clear, and problematic books have already been removed from libraries.
Three Waters will not be this government's legacy, The Aotearoa NZ History document will be its true legacy. As they are consigned to the opposition benches, as they soon will, the left will console themselves that the seeds have been planted ... in our institutions, in our schools, and in the minds of the most impressionable, and it is only a matter of time before they will get to water these seeds again. With the left, it is always the long game that counts.
I would strongly recommend ‘The Uses and
Abuses of History” by eminent historian Margaret MacMillan for a fuller
explanation of the risks of doing history badly. And I would like, as a person
of part-Jewish descent, to recommend the following website to the Maori Party,
or anyone interested, for their education and edification: https://www.ushmm.org/
History done well is an adventure, if done poorly, it is best left alone!
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.
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8 comments:
When I last enquired the public submissions on the curriculum had not been released. Are they available now, and if so ho accessed. The msm has neither picked up on the unavailability nor the content. Any objective review of the latter would certainly not qualify for PIJFunding.
Afghanistan is one of the few countries which has avoided colonisation....
Haiti also shook it off long ago. (The inhabitants are not the original, but nor are fleet maori, and certainly not the present day cross breeds). I wonder if Maori Studies students are ever asked to describe Aotearoa (or whatever collective term they might have assumed) as it would likely be without colonisation. Would maori have contributed to the Battle of Britain and consequent defeat of Hitler? How would they have fared under him? Would they have allowed Aotearoa to be used as a base for the Americans? Would the Japenese have recognised their autonomy and stayed away?)
Irreversible damage.
Thursday, 5 Jan 2023
Terrific article Caleb. Thank you, I enjoyed it.
Most alarming is your planted seeds comment. I doubt there is a more effective “long game'' than indoctrination of the young, who soak it all up while their critical faculties are undeveloped. Combine the new history curriculum with the left’s associated tactics - te reo with our kids whenever practicable, matauranga accorded equal status to western science in our classrooms, tikanga included in our LLB’s core subjects - and one realises what a formidable foe Labour’s strategists are. Which is why the widespread assumption that Labour is going to lose the election is dangerous. That assumption will induce complacency. People are scared to speak their minds: they’re subconsciously looking for an excuse to stay out of the fight.
So how best to attack the biassed history curriculum? I’d like to see your article reach the curriculum’s teachers Caleb, if a surreptitious pathway could be found. Referring any critique of the curriculum to the Ministry of Education or the teachers’ unions would be futile: anyone not toeing the line is long-gone from the former, and the latter are incurably woke. That leaves the political right - National, Act and NZ First. None of these deals specifically with the history curriculum in their policies on their website. ACT’s education policy is concerned with the big picture - funding and structure. But in press releases ACT has been scathing about the curriculum and said it needs to be radically redrafted. I would like to hear ACT promise to withdraw the curriculum until that can be done. National might grudgingly promise something wishy-washy - say a review. I would not like to see NZ First garner more popular support by promising to tackle the curriculum, as a vote for that party is too likely to be wasted.
We hear a lot about 'decolonisation', but nobody seems able - or inclined, to specify what this would mean in practice. This is especially difficult, since calls for 'decolonisation' inevitably come from people with 'colunist' ancestors.
Why are journalists too spineless to ask such questions - perhaps their jobs would be at risk.
Hi Martin
The imagining decolonisation concept is one of the greater rorts of our time. It was promoted by the glib tongued Moana Jackson, whose captive audiences were ever eager to swallow his smooth utterences. Because usually in maori surroundings no direct challenging argument was ever heard by maori. Any questioners were terrified of cancellation, if not of on the spot assault. The decolonisation theme has been pushed on RNZ on many occasions. Always with supportive non challenging interviewers. There is a book on the topic; a best seller largely because of its price, and a necessary part of the standard brainwash of all Maori Studies students. Basically it involves imagining disregard for all the conventions of colonisation ie civilisation, and effectively grants the right to do as one pleases. Like ram raiding, analogous to pre colonial inter tribal raids. More senior maori interpret it as repudiation of unmixed colonist descendants governing with regard to recognised principles of civilisation, democracy, and racial equality.
Somewhere in our history, or perhaps in spite of it, lies the sort of truth. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that all truth passes through three states. First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident. At least 80 books of New Zealand's history have been removed from libraries, schools and universities, no doubt because they do not react favourably with the current leftist agenda. In 1832, just 8 years before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, about 1000 Maori from the Waikato descended upon 600 Patupaiarehe, who lived peacefully at the confluence of the Ongarue and Wanganui Rivers at Taumarunui, and killed most of them, took their bodies down to the river and washed them, cooked, and ate them. The Wanganui River ran red with their blood. Let the truth be told!
Kevan
I think if NZ First or anybody said they will tackle the Maori nonsense in full they will get enough votes to make a difference. What a superb article. It makes me very sad to know I cannot share it with my family as they just tell me they are worried for me as I am so right wing!
Hopefully the worm is turning with some journalists in the MSM and we can get more investigative articles appearing. What turncoats, traitors and wimps our heads of journalistic enterprise are in NZ to not stand up for first principles of journalism.
MC
Yes, thank you Caleb. While the partnership / co-governance nonsense is a major concern to our nationhood, this surely should be our biggest worry as it is far more insidious and cancer like. It must be stopped and it behoves us all to demand it.
Please spread the word readers.
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