The Minister of Education, Erica Stanford is determined to introduce a knowledge rich curriculum for all New Zealand students. What does this mean? First, it is a standardised curriculum which ensures that students across the country receive the same high-quality knowledge. That knowledge consists of academic subjects with content selected for its value and justified for its veracity. Furthermore, the content must be designed so that it is coherently organised and built progressively from the most basic to the more complex.
Second, it is about planning for teaching. It is here that teachers take the designed national curriculum and turn it into effective teaching plans suitable for their school and their students. The latest ideas from cognitive science about secondary mental abilities, time perception, memory load, and feedback are needed at this stage. They help connect the content to students’ thinking processes.
Third, both good curriculum design and planning for teaching set the foundation for the actual teaching. Many teachers know their subjects well and use teaching methods that best connect students to rich content. They will welcome a knowledge-rich curriculum because it is what they have taught for years. We know and respect those teachers. The real benefits will be for those teachers and students who have been disadvantaged by eighteen years of a localised curriculum.
This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generation. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s. However, its success is not yet assured. The professional class which benefited most from that post-war subject-based curriculum has worked tirelessly to dismantle the source of its privilege in a strange alliance of decolonisation and socialism.
This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generation. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s.
We can thank the recent secondary school incident for revealing what this alliance looks like in practice – a junior English class, a video playing, a teacher instructing how to analyse the video’s tone and mood. In the video, How colonisers went from learning to reo Māori to trying to exterminate it, students hear the authoritative voice of sociolinguist, Dr Vini Olsen-Reeder declaiming, Once the pakeha government was established here, from there the desire grew to exterminate the Māori people.
The video’s content is either wrong or seriously distorted. Such propaganda will be difficult to teach in a knowledge-rich subject that requires the selection of content to be justified. That’s the sticking point – who justifies the content? What criteria are used?
In the coming months, the public will be consulted on the draft English curriculum. This is right and proper – it is not a curriculum for teachers alone, but for the nation. It is here, in the national discussion about the subject of English that I predict a simmering conflict will surface. Some, like me, regard school English as the study of language and literature in the English language. For others, English is the tool of the capitalist coloniser, intent on locking the colonised into a permanent state of subjugation. Their demands are for the decolonisation, then indigenisation, of the entire education system.
It is unsurprising that English is at the centre of the gathering storm, although History and Science are not far behind. English has a very particular role – that of creating society’s cultural repertoire. When we study English at school we are taught, or should be taught, the content and conventions of our nation’s most widely spoken language. New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English. It is the language of the 19th century colonial era and of 20th century nation building. According to one secondary school principal, the most effective way to decolonise the nation is by removing English, that dangerous language of the Eurocentric coloniser from the school curriculum.
New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English.
If we agree that the subject is the study of English language and literature, then the content selected must be justified. A straightforward process, one might think. But no, at the very source of the creation and justification of academic knowledge is the wellspring of the conflict. It is in the nation’s universities that decolonisation and indigenisation are being promoted. School subjects which are drawn from university disciplines and accountable to their rules and methods, will be hostages to the unaccountable ideologies of our decolonising universities.
English as a school subject draws in the main from the disciplines of literary criticism (including Shakespearean studies), linguistics, sociolinguistics, and history. Decolonising those disciplines removes all means of accountability – those methods of empirical evidence, logical argument and ongoing criticism which ensure that disciplinary knowledge is always on trial and always subject to rejection, revision, or provisional confirmation. These methods are what gives the disciplines, and by extension those who practise them, authority and status.
Although Dr Olsen-Reeder does not identify himself in the video as a university lecturer, his title and sociolinguist label convey authority. Teachers and high school students are likely to take him at his word. If anything, thanks are indeed due to the secondary school incident mentioned above for providing us with a glimpse of a decolonised education system. It should alert us to the difficulties faced by those tasked with introducing a knowledge rich curriculum.
If you contribute to the consultation of the draft English curriculum, I ask that you justify what you want taught. The content must have value not only for its literary beauty, its grammatical precision, its vocabulary richness, but it must challenge students. When teachers introduce young people to abstract content beyond their immediate experience, the students develop the secondary cognitive abilities necessary for the complexities of modern life.
A decolonised curriculum does not provide quality content. Instead it locks young people into emotional responses. But emoting is not thinking. Abstract thinking develops only when students are confronted by complex content. A knowledge-rich English curriculum offers both that content and the development of the mental skills needed for the modern world.
Professor Elizabeth Rata is a curriculum expert and author of A Political Economy of Neotribal Capitalism. This article was sourced HERE
Second, it is about planning for teaching. It is here that teachers take the designed national curriculum and turn it into effective teaching plans suitable for their school and their students. The latest ideas from cognitive science about secondary mental abilities, time perception, memory load, and feedback are needed at this stage. They help connect the content to students’ thinking processes.
Third, both good curriculum design and planning for teaching set the foundation for the actual teaching. Many teachers know their subjects well and use teaching methods that best connect students to rich content. They will welcome a knowledge-rich curriculum because it is what they have taught for years. We know and respect those teachers. The real benefits will be for those teachers and students who have been disadvantaged by eighteen years of a localised curriculum.
This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generation. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s. However, its success is not yet assured. The professional class which benefited most from that post-war subject-based curriculum has worked tirelessly to dismantle the source of its privilege in a strange alliance of decolonisation and socialism.
This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generation. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s.
We can thank the recent secondary school incident for revealing what this alliance looks like in practice – a junior English class, a video playing, a teacher instructing how to analyse the video’s tone and mood. In the video, How colonisers went from learning to reo Māori to trying to exterminate it, students hear the authoritative voice of sociolinguist, Dr Vini Olsen-Reeder declaiming, Once the pakeha government was established here, from there the desire grew to exterminate the Māori people.
The video’s content is either wrong or seriously distorted. Such propaganda will be difficult to teach in a knowledge-rich subject that requires the selection of content to be justified. That’s the sticking point – who justifies the content? What criteria are used?
In the coming months, the public will be consulted on the draft English curriculum. This is right and proper – it is not a curriculum for teachers alone, but for the nation. It is here, in the national discussion about the subject of English that I predict a simmering conflict will surface. Some, like me, regard school English as the study of language and literature in the English language. For others, English is the tool of the capitalist coloniser, intent on locking the colonised into a permanent state of subjugation. Their demands are for the decolonisation, then indigenisation, of the entire education system.
It is unsurprising that English is at the centre of the gathering storm, although History and Science are not far behind. English has a very particular role – that of creating society’s cultural repertoire. When we study English at school we are taught, or should be taught, the content and conventions of our nation’s most widely spoken language. New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English. It is the language of the 19th century colonial era and of 20th century nation building. According to one secondary school principal, the most effective way to decolonise the nation is by removing English, that dangerous language of the Eurocentric coloniser from the school curriculum.
New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English.
If we agree that the subject is the study of English language and literature, then the content selected must be justified. A straightforward process, one might think. But no, at the very source of the creation and justification of academic knowledge is the wellspring of the conflict. It is in the nation’s universities that decolonisation and indigenisation are being promoted. School subjects which are drawn from university disciplines and accountable to their rules and methods, will be hostages to the unaccountable ideologies of our decolonising universities.
English as a school subject draws in the main from the disciplines of literary criticism (including Shakespearean studies), linguistics, sociolinguistics, and history. Decolonising those disciplines removes all means of accountability – those methods of empirical evidence, logical argument and ongoing criticism which ensure that disciplinary knowledge is always on trial and always subject to rejection, revision, or provisional confirmation. These methods are what gives the disciplines, and by extension those who practise them, authority and status.
Although Dr Olsen-Reeder does not identify himself in the video as a university lecturer, his title and sociolinguist label convey authority. Teachers and high school students are likely to take him at his word. If anything, thanks are indeed due to the secondary school incident mentioned above for providing us with a glimpse of a decolonised education system. It should alert us to the difficulties faced by those tasked with introducing a knowledge rich curriculum.
If you contribute to the consultation of the draft English curriculum, I ask that you justify what you want taught. The content must have value not only for its literary beauty, its grammatical precision, its vocabulary richness, but it must challenge students. When teachers introduce young people to abstract content beyond their immediate experience, the students develop the secondary cognitive abilities necessary for the complexities of modern life.
A decolonised curriculum does not provide quality content. Instead it locks young people into emotional responses. But emoting is not thinking. Abstract thinking develops only when students are confronted by complex content. A knowledge-rich English curriculum offers both that content and the development of the mental skills needed for the modern world.
Professor Elizabeth Rata is a curriculum expert and author of A Political Economy of Neotribal Capitalism. This article was sourced HERE
10 comments:
Thank heavens I am old enough to have been taught a reasonable standard of English allowing me to advance in the world -not stagnate in an ever increasing tribal based NZ.
An excellent post from Professor Rata, and one that gives us hope that New Zealand can regain the world-class education that it once had. Indeed, the curriculum should set the direction for student learning, provide guidance for schools and provide the necessary skills, knowledge and know-how at each year-level.
it should deliver rich content knowledge, for content richness is the soundest pathway for acquiring knowledge and complex skills. It should teach how to think, but not what to think in relation to social and political issues.
The national curriculum, including that for English, must be evidence-based, ideology-free and fully comparable with the best curricula of other nations. It must be so if it is to support fulfilling lives and rewarding careers. Otherwise, we fail in our duties to the children of New Zealand.
David Lillis
Sounds like a disaster in the making - where "Aotearoa" will be a tribal society disconnected from the rest of the world.
We can thank Mrs Rose Hipkins and her ilk at the NZCER for a 'decolonised' curriculum......we can also than Ms Ardern, Mr Chris Hipkins et al for there help in allowing this and we can thank our Mainly Socialist Media as accomplices in kind for this too.
Dr Olsen-Reeder's video’s content is not 'either wrong or seriously distorted' it is a total fabrication, a false flag and a delusion. Someone needs to ask how our government having spent multiple millions over the last 50+ years on the promotion/development of Te Reo Maori is in any way a form of extermination?
Lately the government has obligated itself to $43 million to the Kapa Haka festival Te Matatini.......go figure?
The problem of course is no one seems to have the leadership balls to question this outrageously false narrative.
It is left to people like Professor Rata to write articles like this that are then widely ignored by government, media and the citizenry because they are never published or spoken of by the weak people in government and media.
Another succinct and very important article from Professor Rata. It is vital that the curricula both for English, and for maths and the sciences, are firmly knowledge-based and give students a structured foundation on which to build further learning, free from imposition of cultural beliefs or propaganda. New Zealand's state education has slid a long way towards a dumbed-down system, heavy on indoctrination which ill equips students to undertake higher education, move to high-earning jobs, and help NZ to move more quickly to a high productivity economy.
John Raine
Hard to know the real intent of Minister Stanford. She states that she supports reform - but does not act against the indoctrination which is now deeply embedded in the system and witnessed by continued action re. co-governance special status for Maori etc.
Not reassuring.
Thank heavens for people like Professor Rata, who may yet prevent what appears to be a slow but sure descent into the third world for this nation. Perhaps we could start with English being declared the principal language of NZ? And rapidly follow with a comprehensive clean-out of all the seditious elements that now infest our educational establishments.
The real problem is the fact that even if this corrects the BS, we have one, maybe two generations that have been failed by the education system and dare I say indoctrinated with sh-one-tee. How can that be redressed? Frankly IMHO it cannot! Do these affected citizens have a case for a class action against those like the Hipkins/Ardern families - I would love to see that without the State footing the bill.
Elizabeth Rata is correct on all points.
I wish to divert completely. If there are to be any graphics and signwriting classes in the new curriculum I would recommend studying Colin McCahon. He had one painting titled “Teaching Aids”. Find it out there on Wiki. Sorry about that Colin.
In the 1870's not long after the Native Schools were set up, there were a number of petitions sent to the Govt. from Maori elders asking for regulations to be introduced that that banned Maori children being spoken to in Maori on school premises. They should be spoken to and taught only in English, because they believed that a knowledge of English to would better enable them to learn from the settlers and the wider world, and improve their changes of a better life.
One such petition in 1877 was signed by Wi Te Hakiro and 336 others.
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