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Wednesday, June 26, 2024

David Farrar: The Aotearoa Educators’ Collective


I had never heard of the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective, until they were quoted at length in this Newsroom article, criticising the Government’s curriculum refresh. I looked up their website and found this is their policy platform:
  • The primary responsibility for schooling is to create critical creative citizens invested in participatory democracy with capacity to combat social injustice.
  • Education should address long seated inequities and injustice through curriculum design.
  • Success at school cannot be reduced to achievement in literacy and numeracy
So they want schools focus on giving students the capacity to be social justice activists, and to deprioritise literacy and numeracy.

If they are unhappy with what the Government is doing, this can only be a very good thing.

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.

3 comments:

Barend Vlaardingerbroek said...

What we have been seeing for some time now is teachers becoming recruiters for fashionable causes. In my opinion it is, or should be, unethical for a teacher to use his/her position as an influencer of young minds to recruit children into his/her political or ideological cause(s). Youngsters do need to be taught about these in subjects such as Social Studies but the teacher should present a balanced view of the issue at hand and not a biased one reflecting his/her personal opinion. Parents have every right to complain when a teacher is clearly acting as a recruitment agent for a particular political or ideological cause.

Gaynor said...

I agree strongly with Barend. Indoctrination is unethical rather than teaching skills.

As an educator concerned about and seeped in literacy and numeracy teaching I cannot accept devaluing these.

What this group Aotearoa Educational Collective , (there's a Progressive statement for you) refuse to acknowledge is that effectively teaching the basics is how you produce social justice. That is what NZ excelled in before about 1950 with a world class class education system and acknowledged as the most egalitarian country in the world. This was the aim and product of traditional Scottish Education which promoted particularly and achieved Universal Literacy through intensive phonics aka Structured Literacy.

We now have, as a deep disgrace, the opposite with the longest tail of underachievement in the developed world. We need more emphasis on the basics and not clutter up the school curriculum with Marxist critical garbage which both produces and extols victim hood.

Of course we should have education that considers the underdog. That was always part of the NZ identity but the Marxist solution does not produce productive individuals but miserable underachievers on the path to either welfare or prison.

Anonymous said...

Truth in advertising: The Aotearoa Indoctrinators Collective.