Zoran Rakovic: The Real Equity Is Found in Equations

New Zealand’s education system must shift from ideology to inspiration. It’s time to teach STEM, creativity, and AI to prepare kids for the next century.

Our children deserve rocket fuel, not red tape. As the Ministry of Education clings to 19th-century grievances, the future is slipping through our fingers. This is a call to reclaim education for what it should be: a launchpad into the stars.

It is the 21st century. Our species has placed spacecraft into the distant reaches of the solar system. We have decoded the genome, sketched the outlines of consciousness, and invented machines that can write, calculate, and learn. We have begun to peer into the very origins of the universe. And yet, within our own classrooms, in our very homes, children are being marched backwards into the past—not to learn from it, but to wear it like a burden. This is not education. It is indoctrination masked as moral duty, and it is a betrayal of the human spirit.

Carl Sagan once warned us about the “combustible mixture of ignorance and power.” Today, that mixture is not found in the shadows of a dictatorship or in some smoky war room. It is quietly brewing in the bureaucratic offices of Wellington, within the Ministry of Education—an institution that increasingly treats young minds not as vessels of wonder and potential but as empty buckets into which approved dogma must be poured. This is not science. This is not wisdom. This is the 21st-century version of state control, dressed in the language of healing and justice but functioning as an intellectual straightjacket.

The education system in New Zealand—and elsewhere—is no longer simply failing our children; it is actively robbing them of their future. The emphasis has shifted away from equipping students with the tools to build the next century, and toward weaponising the past in a way that confuses guilt with knowledge, and conformity with understanding. When a child opens a textbook and learns more about historical blame than biological cells, when they can recite ideologies but not equations, when they are told how to feel rather than taught how to think, then we are not preparing them for the stars. We are chaining them to the soil.

This would be lamentable even in a static world. But our world is anything but. The acceleration of change—from AI to quantum computing to synthetic biology—is outpacing our ability to adapt. And yet, instead of reimagining our schools as launchpads into this brave new future, we have allowed them to become confession booths for inherited sins. We are not just losing time; we are losing the moral courage to imagine.

In a just society—one John Rawls might have dreamed of—all children would have the opportunity to flourish. Not according to the dictates of race, history, or inherited grievance, but according to the gifts of their minds, the curiosity of their questions, and the reach of their aspirations. A society governed by reason would place its educational efforts on the frontiers of knowledge, not the battlegrounds of cultural resentment. But ours is a system increasingly afraid of the future and obsessed with revisiting the past, so much so that it has turned the school into a sort of museum of grievance, with teachers serving as tour guides to injustices they did not cause and students as captive audiences forced to atone.

Meanwhile, the real questions go unanswered. How do we equip children to navigate a world where artificial intelligence might outpace human learning? How do we instil the scientific literacy needed to confront climate challenges, biomedical dilemmas, and the ethical puzzles of automation? Where are the physics classes that spark wonder? The coding lessons that unleash creativity? The philosophy discussions that cultivate doubt and humility in the face of great unknowns?

Hope, however, is not lost. It never is—not so long as the human mind retains its spark and its hunger for understanding. That spark is still alive, flickering quietly in garages, libraries, and the rare classroom untouched by orthodoxy. It lives in the quiet passion of a science teacher who dares to take the class outside to observe the stars. It lives in the child who builds a working model of the solar system out of scrap. It lives in parents who ask not, “What is my child’s grievance?” but “What is my child’s gift?”

What we need now is the courage to say: Enough. Enough of the guilt-mongering curricula. Enough of the bureaucrats who have never coded a line, written a poem, or built a thing, telling our children what is worthy of learning. Enough of the self-flagellating syllabi that teach students how to conform but not how to question. Instead, we must build a new vision for education—one worthy of the children we claim to love.

Let us begin by placing science and technology back at the heart of education. Not just as utilitarian tools, but as profound expressions of human curiosity and ingenuity. Physics, chemistry, biology, computer science—these are not just subjects; they are keys to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Every child, regardless of background, should have access to rigorous, inspiring STEM education from the earliest years.

Let us teach mathematics not as a drudgery, but as a language that allows us to model the world, to forecast pandemics, to design cities, to solve real problems. Let us treat coding as literacy and AI as the new arithmetic—skills that should be as fundamental as reading and writing. And let us do so not through dull, bureaucratic mandates, but through the cultivation of wonder. For when a child understands how a machine can learn, how an equation can describe a galaxy, or how a circuit can sing, that child does not just gain knowledge. That child gains agency.

But let us not stop at STEM. Creativity is not the opposite of science; it is its twin. In the years to come, the most valuable citizens will not be those who merely obey rules, but those who can reimagine them. We must build schools that foster creative thinking, encourage risk, reward originality, and allow students to fail, learn, and try again. Art, music, storytelling—these are not luxuries. They are the engines of empathy and imagination. An education that privileges compliance over creativity is one that raises citizens for bureaucracies, not democracies.

And above all, let us return to the principle that education is about empowerment, not control. The purpose of schooling is not to engineer the right kinds of citizens according to whatever ideological fad holds sway. It is to awaken the minds of young people, to help them discover their own voice and to give them the tools to make that voice count in the world. An education system that fears dissent is not education—it is programming.

The Ministry of Education, like so many organs of the modern state, seems more interested in compliance than curiosity. It speaks in the tones of concern but acts with the instincts of control. Its endless frameworks, competencies, guidelines, and cultural audits have become a fog through which little light passes. In the name of inclusion, it excludes the adventurous spirit of learning. In the name of history, it blinds us to the future. Its corridors echo not with questions but with paperwork.

And yet, we need not despair. Bureaucracies can be reformed. Institutions can be rebuilt. What matters now is that we start telling a new story. A story not of guilt but of possibility. Not of tribalism but of shared humanity. Not of educational systems built to remember grievances but of minds trained to reach for the stars.

This story begins at the dinner table, in the kitchen where a child wonders aloud how a robot works, and the parent doesn’t change the subject but helps them find out. It begins in the school that sets up a telescope, not a guilt trip. It begins with the teacher who refuses to read from the approved script and instead teaches the scientific method. It begins with the leaders who understand that the future belongs not to those who control minds but to those who free them.

Let us aim not just for the next exam, the next funding round, or the next political cycle. Let us aim for the 22nd century. For Mars, the stars, and beyond. For peace, built on understanding. For prosperity, built on innovation. For compassion, built on shared truth.

Let us build an education system worthy of our children, and of the universe we have just begun to explore.

Because somewhere out there—beyond the noise of our politics, beyond the pettiness of our quarrels—there is a galaxy waiting. And in it, perhaps, a child not yet born, looking back on Earth and wondering: Did they prepare me well?

We owe them an answer that begins with wonder, and ends with a telescope in one hand and a pencil in the other. Let that be the promise of our age: not to drag our children into the wounds of the past, but to launch them—truly launch them—into the uncharted realms of what it means to be human.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand—particularly in Christchurch’s earthquake recovery - while balancing life as a dad, granddad, and outdoor enthusiast. This article was sourced from his BLOG.