Who could blame them for such strong language?
Luxon’s Government is not just turning the clock back on progressive education with its “Teaching the Basics Brilliantly” policy. It is doubling down by reintroducing charter, or ‘partnership’ schools.
Teaching the Basics Brilliantly proposes a radical return to classroom teaching. An hour a day will be spent on each of reading, writing and maths.
Imagine the horror in progressive educational circles at such structured barbarism. It’s enough to send shivers down the spine of any self-respecting 21st-century educator.
Marlborough’s Riverlands School principal Bradley Roberts pointed out that dedicating a whole hour to each core subject “is not how the education sector delivers the curriculum anymore.”
Indeed. Why focus on mundane tasks like reading and writing when the complexities of an ‘integrated’ curriculum have successfully navigated Kiwi students towards the bottom of the international rankings?
Roberts suggests state schools might resist the Government’s draconian return to focused learning. He could be right. After all, it must take schools years to integrate subjects so seamlessly that students can barely distinguish between them, let alone master any of them.
With an hour dedicated to core subjects, New Zealand might inadvertently halt its march towards educational oblivion.
Partnership schools are a further affront to modern educational progressivism. Lamenting the return of school choice, Mark Potter, the president of the country’s biggest education union, NZEI, said the policy would undermine public education.
Potter may have a point. Why risk giving parents educational choice when all students can languish uniformly under the same flagging system?
Associate Education Minister David Seymour calls partnership schools “an innovative education model” for disadvantaged children.
But Seymour’s proposal is bizarrely out of step with what the unions want. It’s like suggesting our one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t fit at all.
Just imagine schools setting their own curriculum, hours and pay rates, and being accountable for their results. They would have freedom to adapt to the needs of their students, rather than fitting into the Ministry of Education’s mould.
Little wonder Potter warns of the dire risks of innovation driving different outcomes.
As the country stands on the brink of change, we can only hope the spirit of educational stagnation will prevail. Otherwise, the reforms just might end up teaching Kiwi students to read and write.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was first published HERE
Teaching the Basics Brilliantly proposes a radical return to classroom teaching. An hour a day will be spent on each of reading, writing and maths.
Imagine the horror in progressive educational circles at such structured barbarism. It’s enough to send shivers down the spine of any self-respecting 21st-century educator.
Marlborough’s Riverlands School principal Bradley Roberts pointed out that dedicating a whole hour to each core subject “is not how the education sector delivers the curriculum anymore.”
Indeed. Why focus on mundane tasks like reading and writing when the complexities of an ‘integrated’ curriculum have successfully navigated Kiwi students towards the bottom of the international rankings?
Roberts suggests state schools might resist the Government’s draconian return to focused learning. He could be right. After all, it must take schools years to integrate subjects so seamlessly that students can barely distinguish between them, let alone master any of them.
With an hour dedicated to core subjects, New Zealand might inadvertently halt its march towards educational oblivion.
Partnership schools are a further affront to modern educational progressivism. Lamenting the return of school choice, Mark Potter, the president of the country’s biggest education union, NZEI, said the policy would undermine public education.
Potter may have a point. Why risk giving parents educational choice when all students can languish uniformly under the same flagging system?
Associate Education Minister David Seymour calls partnership schools “an innovative education model” for disadvantaged children.
But Seymour’s proposal is bizarrely out of step with what the unions want. It’s like suggesting our one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t fit at all.
Just imagine schools setting their own curriculum, hours and pay rates, and being accountable for their results. They would have freedom to adapt to the needs of their students, rather than fitting into the Ministry of Education’s mould.
Little wonder Potter warns of the dire risks of innovation driving different outcomes.
As the country stands on the brink of change, we can only hope the spirit of educational stagnation will prevail. Otherwise, the reforms just might end up teaching Kiwi students to read and write.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was first published HERE
3 comments:
Just imagine a positive improving out come how could anybody expect the Unions to agree to that?
Maybe they will loose some of their hold on the system and become redundant.
I enjoyed reading your article. It is heart warming to know there are smart and funny people on the side of right.
It is way past time in trying to reason with these idiots that populate the Ministry . unions and academia. Ridicule is a good idea. It is children's futures we are talking about and what else could be more important?
It would be a good idea for someone to do a TV comedy series on everyday in a NZ classroom.
Here is some material from real life examples. School notices are given out about a school trip on facebook which a proportion of the parents do not subscribe to. The notice is full of spelling mistakes and bad grammar which makes it hard to understand. Only a fraction of the class are prepared for the bus trip because they got jumbled messages from other parents about the time and day and whether to take lunch or not.
The bus trip was chaos because children were not told to stay sitting in their
seats. Some children received bruises when they fell over when the bus braked.
At the museum they received worksheets but half the class couldn't read it. But hey what does that matter because a trip to the museum is a holistic experience and it is best to learn about for example, the insects by doing and experiencing not reading about them. Touching pinchers , looking through multi-faceted insect eyes, hearing cicadas and smelling stink bugs.This is. motivating to a child rather than filling in boring worksheets. Children after all are naturally scientists and want to learn about creepy crawlies and this natural curiosity will allow them to develop an interest in this rather than having constricting teacher directions which forces them into understanding insects in an unnatural way. Any misguided attempt at forcing them into seeing insects in an authoritarian way like measuring them or learning their correct latin name will surely block their futures as etymologists. Studying insects is a very personal activity and only considering it with a developmentalist-relatavist-constructivist perspective can a child be removed from from goals prescribed autocratically from above.
There can not be anything much worse than text books designed by self-appointed traditionalists which force unnatural notions into a child's mind. The another really bad thing would be to quizz the child on whether they learned stuff at the museum. Is this up- to-date philosophy of learning successful ? You only need to look at the excitement on the children's faces when they watch a short video on parasitic wasps to see it certainly is. That proves it is successful. Numerous anecdotes from dedicated teachers who find this approach so much more rewarding
because they have no trouble engaging their students.
There is no follow up on the trip like writing a report or even drawing an insect because a trip to the museum is an experience not a stuffy academic exercise.
I forgot to mention in my above contribution about the nerdy boy on the school trip who did conscientiously fill out the worksheets . He was thoroughly ridiculed and bullied by the other boys and his sheets were taken off him.
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