When my colleague Dr Michael Johnston took the stage at a national education conference late last month, he didn’t expect applause. Johnston, a cognitive psychologist and Senior Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, chaired Education Minister Erica Stanford’s Ministerial Advisory Group reviewing the primary-school English, maths and statistics curricula. He continues to serve on the Ministry’s Curriculum Coherence Group. He was speaking at UpliftEd, a conference organised by the Aotearoa Educators Collective.
Johnston went hoping for a genuine discussion about how to lift student achievement. Instead, he met resistance – not to his data or logic, but to what they implied. He was challenging dogma that has come to rule the education establishment like a faith – beyond question and immune to evidence.
Another colleague, economist and teacher Briar Lipson, faced similar hostility after publishing Education Delusion: How Bad Ideas Ruined a Once World-leading School System in 2020. The report exposed how progressive teaching fashions hollowed out what New Zealanders once took for granted – a world-class education built on knowledge.
Over two decades, New Zealand’s student outcomes have plummeted from world-leading to barely mediocre. Our Year 5 pupils now rank near the bottom among English-speaking countries in reading. Year 13 students stumble over the meaning of everyday words like “trivial.”
When the Labour Government piloted new literacy and numeracy standards in 2022, the results were sobering: only about two-thirds of students met the reading and numeracy benchmarks, and barely a third met the writing standard.
Stanford has launched two major reforms to reverse the slide. The first is structured literacy – systematic phonics and explicit teaching for Years 1–8. The second is replacing New Zealand’s National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA) with clear, coherent qualifications that employers and universities can trust – ending the credit-chasing that rewards fragments of knowledge over subject matter mastery.
Stanford’s reforms echo those led in Britain by Education Secretary Michael Gove and Schools Minister Sir Nick Gibb a decade ago. By mandating phonics, publishing detailed knowledge-rich curricula and insisting that exams reward substance over coursework, they turned England’s long decline in literacy into sustained improvement. New Zealand is now attempting a similar rescue.
I attended the August launch of Stanford’s proposed NCEA replacement. The people behind it are hardly extremists. The Minister’s Professional Advisory Group was chaired by Patrick Gale of Rangitoto College and included David Ferguson, former principal of Westlake Boys’. Distinguished educators from the mainstream of schooling, not radicals.
Yet they too have met hostility. Why? Because these reforms expose that our education decline is not a mystery. It is the predictable result of a philosophy that sounded humane but has proved disastrous.
That philosophy – constructivism, the idea that children learn best by constructing knowledge for themselves through exploration rather than being explicitly taught – didn’t appear out of nowhere. It descends from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher who imagined the child as a natural learner corrupted by adult imposition.
Then came John Dewey, the early-20th-century American educator, whose book Democracy and Education (1916) recast schooling as a social experiment in freedom and experience. And then Paulo Freire, the Brazilian theorist, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) turned teaching into a moral struggle against hierarchy.
Over a century, these ideas fused into what has become education orthodoxy in New Zealand: the teacher as “guide on the side,” the student as discoverer, curriculum as experience.
Constructivist approaches began as humane correctives to rote learning, born of a desire to make classrooms more engaging and inclusive. It sounds liberating because it borrows the language of respect – child-centred learning, student agency, discovery and creativity. Who could object? But a classroom is not a philosophy seminar. It’s a place where novices must become knowers. And here, romance meets the limits of cognitive reality.
The attraction of the romance is obvious. After all, children do learn to speak their first language naturally, so it feels intuitive that they should learn to read and write the same way. But speech is hard-wired into the human brain; writing is not. Reading is a cultural invention only a few thousand years old, and the brain has to be painstakingly retrained to link visual symbols with sounds and meaning. As neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has shown, those connections form only through explicit, systematic teaching.
Cognitive science is unsentimental. Working memory – the short-term memory system we use for thinking – has a very small capacity. It’s easily overloaded. We reason by drawing on what’s stored in long-term memory. That’s why novices don’t think like experts: they don’t yet know enough. For beginners, the most reliable route to understanding is explicit, cumulative teaching: show, explain, practise, check, then connect and apply.
E.D. Hirsch – author of Cultural Literacy and The Knowledge Deficit – put it bluntly: reading comprehension is domain-specific, you can’t “strategise” your way through words and references you don’t know. Dan Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist best known for Why Don’t Students Like School?, translated the research for teachers: skills ride on knowledge; “critical thinking” isn’t a free-floating technique. And cognitive-load theorists Kirschner, Sweller and Clark showed why minimally guided instruction fails novices: it collides with the limits of working memory.
None of this outlaws inquiry. In fact, inquiry remains essential when it’s built around the disciplines themselves. Students practise applying knowledge through experiments – but only after they’ve been taught it.
If the romantic model were only a style preference, we could shrug. But it defines what our children learn, or don’t. For twenty years, New Zealand has staged education like a play with no script – plenty of direction on “how to perform,” nothing about “what to say.”
The 2007 Curriculum enshrines “key competencies” such as “managing self” and “relating to others” but leaves teachers to decide what content to teach. The entire document runs to just 67 pages. For Years 12-13 history—two full years of senior secondary education – it offers just two bullet points: understand that historical events “are complex and contested,” and that “trends reflect social, economic, and political forces.”
What students actually learn – and how deeply they learn it – is a classroom lottery, dependent entirely on individual teachers and schools. In that vacuum, NCEA’s atomised credits have become the de facto curriculum for senior secondary students. Schools inevitably teach to discrete standards, each with its own assessment, encouraging short-term coaching and credit-collection over deep learning. We credential fragments and call it education.
The results are visible in every dataset and every classroom. When schools whisper content and shout competencies, affluent homes fill the gap and others cannot. Students from less advantaged backgrounds – disproportionately, though not exclusively, Māori and Pasifika – pay the highest price.
Lipson’s 2018 report, Spoiled by Choice: How NCEA hampers education, and what it needs to succeed, showed how NCEA’s credit-chasing design widened those gaps, rewarding fragmentation over mastery. We told ourselves we were being progressive. We were entrenching inequality.
It’s a classic example of what the sociologist Rob Henderson calls a “luxury belief” – an idea that flatters the educated classes while harming those who can least afford it.
So why the fury when evidence-based reform finally arrives? Because the debate is existential. Faculties of education, research agencies and unions have built careers and identities on the romance. To admit that novices need explicit teaching and a knowledge-rich curriculum would mean admitting that decades of teacher training and professional development were misguided.
Institutions rarely self-indict. And so technical reforms – phonics checks at twenty weeks, an hour-a-day on reading, writing and maths; a qualification that prizes mastery over accumulation – are met with cries of “Back to the 1950s!” and “Drill and kill!”
Strip away the noise and the reforms are unromantic in the best sense – they tell the truth about learning. Structured literacy doesn’t make readers; it makes reading possible. It teaches every child the code instead of assuming they’ll guess it. Comprehension then grows as knowledge grows. An hour-a-day on reading, writing and maths isn’t regression; it’s time on task for what unlocks the rest of life.
In secondary schools, replacing a blizzard of micro-credits with fewer, deeper assessments isn’t cruelty; it’s respect – for subjects, teachers, and students. One substantial internal task and one proper exam per subject, both marked to national standards, tell parents and employers something clear: this is what I know; this is what I can do. It also returns teaching time to teachers.
And teachers are not the villains here. They are the victims of bad training and worse ideas – expected to perform miracles in open-plan spaces with vague curricula and endless assessment. Give them a coherent map, evidence-based methods, practical materials, and honest assessment, and they’ll do what professionals do: they’ll deliver.
None of this is a right-wing crusade – as many of Stanford’s critics now claim. The knowledge-rich model is progressive in its effects, even if some of its champions sit on the centre-right. Insisting that every child, in every postcode, be deliberately taught the knowledge and vocabulary of the wider world is the most egalitarian demand you can make. When we stop treating knowledge as elitist, disadvantaged children stop being the ones locked out of it.
What’s truly reactionary is the status quo: a romance that flatters adults, feels kind, and leaves too many children unable to read fluently, write clearly, or handle basic algebra. We tried the experiment. It failed. The courageous act now is not to defend our priors but to face reality and change.
There will be pain. Change on this scale always brings disruption. When teacher education must include the science of learning and subject expertise, some programmes will need overhaul. Baselines may sting before they heal.
But the alternative is worse – to continue quietly wrecking futures. The victims don’t write op-eds. They just leave school without the words and numbers modern life demands. If your home can’t compensate for what school fails to teach, romanticism isn’t a kindness. It’s a sentence.
This is not a defence of any minister, and it’s not a policy manual. It’s an argument about reality. Children aren’t miniature adults. Novices can’t reverse-engineer literacy or calculus by discovery. Working memory is narrow; knowledge frees it. When schools teach content explicitly and cumulatively, curiosity expands rather than shrinks. When assessment rewards mastery instead of fragments, teachers teach and students learn.
New Zealand’s education establishment is fighting because these reforms expose that their romantic ideology – the idea that kids learn naturally without explicit teaching – has systematically failed. And the ones who paid were the children who needed school most.
That’s not a culture war. It’s a moral reckoning.
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 sourced HERE
Another colleague, economist and teacher Briar Lipson, faced similar hostility after publishing Education Delusion: How Bad Ideas Ruined a Once World-leading School System in 2020. The report exposed how progressive teaching fashions hollowed out what New Zealanders once took for granted – a world-class education built on knowledge.
Over two decades, New Zealand’s student outcomes have plummeted from world-leading to barely mediocre. Our Year 5 pupils now rank near the bottom among English-speaking countries in reading. Year 13 students stumble over the meaning of everyday words like “trivial.”
When the Labour Government piloted new literacy and numeracy standards in 2022, the results were sobering: only about two-thirds of students met the reading and numeracy benchmarks, and barely a third met the writing standard.
Stanford has launched two major reforms to reverse the slide. The first is structured literacy – systematic phonics and explicit teaching for Years 1–8. The second is replacing New Zealand’s National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA) with clear, coherent qualifications that employers and universities can trust – ending the credit-chasing that rewards fragments of knowledge over subject matter mastery.
Stanford’s reforms echo those led in Britain by Education Secretary Michael Gove and Schools Minister Sir Nick Gibb a decade ago. By mandating phonics, publishing detailed knowledge-rich curricula and insisting that exams reward substance over coursework, they turned England’s long decline in literacy into sustained improvement. New Zealand is now attempting a similar rescue.
I attended the August launch of Stanford’s proposed NCEA replacement. The people behind it are hardly extremists. The Minister’s Professional Advisory Group was chaired by Patrick Gale of Rangitoto College and included David Ferguson, former principal of Westlake Boys’. Distinguished educators from the mainstream of schooling, not radicals.
Yet they too have met hostility. Why? Because these reforms expose that our education decline is not a mystery. It is the predictable result of a philosophy that sounded humane but has proved disastrous.
That philosophy – constructivism, the idea that children learn best by constructing knowledge for themselves through exploration rather than being explicitly taught – didn’t appear out of nowhere. It descends from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher who imagined the child as a natural learner corrupted by adult imposition.
Then came John Dewey, the early-20th-century American educator, whose book Democracy and Education (1916) recast schooling as a social experiment in freedom and experience. And then Paulo Freire, the Brazilian theorist, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) turned teaching into a moral struggle against hierarchy.
Over a century, these ideas fused into what has become education orthodoxy in New Zealand: the teacher as “guide on the side,” the student as discoverer, curriculum as experience.
Constructivist approaches began as humane correctives to rote learning, born of a desire to make classrooms more engaging and inclusive. It sounds liberating because it borrows the language of respect – child-centred learning, student agency, discovery and creativity. Who could object? But a classroom is not a philosophy seminar. It’s a place where novices must become knowers. And here, romance meets the limits of cognitive reality.
The attraction of the romance is obvious. After all, children do learn to speak their first language naturally, so it feels intuitive that they should learn to read and write the same way. But speech is hard-wired into the human brain; writing is not. Reading is a cultural invention only a few thousand years old, and the brain has to be painstakingly retrained to link visual symbols with sounds and meaning. As neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has shown, those connections form only through explicit, systematic teaching.
Cognitive science is unsentimental. Working memory – the short-term memory system we use for thinking – has a very small capacity. It’s easily overloaded. We reason by drawing on what’s stored in long-term memory. That’s why novices don’t think like experts: they don’t yet know enough. For beginners, the most reliable route to understanding is explicit, cumulative teaching: show, explain, practise, check, then connect and apply.
E.D. Hirsch – author of Cultural Literacy and The Knowledge Deficit – put it bluntly: reading comprehension is domain-specific, you can’t “strategise” your way through words and references you don’t know. Dan Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist best known for Why Don’t Students Like School?, translated the research for teachers: skills ride on knowledge; “critical thinking” isn’t a free-floating technique. And cognitive-load theorists Kirschner, Sweller and Clark showed why minimally guided instruction fails novices: it collides with the limits of working memory.
None of this outlaws inquiry. In fact, inquiry remains essential when it’s built around the disciplines themselves. Students practise applying knowledge through experiments – but only after they’ve been taught it.
If the romantic model were only a style preference, we could shrug. But it defines what our children learn, or don’t. For twenty years, New Zealand has staged education like a play with no script – plenty of direction on “how to perform,” nothing about “what to say.”
The 2007 Curriculum enshrines “key competencies” such as “managing self” and “relating to others” but leaves teachers to decide what content to teach. The entire document runs to just 67 pages. For Years 12-13 history—two full years of senior secondary education – it offers just two bullet points: understand that historical events “are complex and contested,” and that “trends reflect social, economic, and political forces.”
What students actually learn – and how deeply they learn it – is a classroom lottery, dependent entirely on individual teachers and schools. In that vacuum, NCEA’s atomised credits have become the de facto curriculum for senior secondary students. Schools inevitably teach to discrete standards, each with its own assessment, encouraging short-term coaching and credit-collection over deep learning. We credential fragments and call it education.
The results are visible in every dataset and every classroom. When schools whisper content and shout competencies, affluent homes fill the gap and others cannot. Students from less advantaged backgrounds – disproportionately, though not exclusively, Māori and Pasifika – pay the highest price.
Lipson’s 2018 report, Spoiled by Choice: How NCEA hampers education, and what it needs to succeed, showed how NCEA’s credit-chasing design widened those gaps, rewarding fragmentation over mastery. We told ourselves we were being progressive. We were entrenching inequality.
It’s a classic example of what the sociologist Rob Henderson calls a “luxury belief” – an idea that flatters the educated classes while harming those who can least afford it.
So why the fury when evidence-based reform finally arrives? Because the debate is existential. Faculties of education, research agencies and unions have built careers and identities on the romance. To admit that novices need explicit teaching and a knowledge-rich curriculum would mean admitting that decades of teacher training and professional development were misguided.
Institutions rarely self-indict. And so technical reforms – phonics checks at twenty weeks, an hour-a-day on reading, writing and maths; a qualification that prizes mastery over accumulation – are met with cries of “Back to the 1950s!” and “Drill and kill!”
Strip away the noise and the reforms are unromantic in the best sense – they tell the truth about learning. Structured literacy doesn’t make readers; it makes reading possible. It teaches every child the code instead of assuming they’ll guess it. Comprehension then grows as knowledge grows. An hour-a-day on reading, writing and maths isn’t regression; it’s time on task for what unlocks the rest of life.
In secondary schools, replacing a blizzard of micro-credits with fewer, deeper assessments isn’t cruelty; it’s respect – for subjects, teachers, and students. One substantial internal task and one proper exam per subject, both marked to national standards, tell parents and employers something clear: this is what I know; this is what I can do. It also returns teaching time to teachers.
And teachers are not the villains here. They are the victims of bad training and worse ideas – expected to perform miracles in open-plan spaces with vague curricula and endless assessment. Give them a coherent map, evidence-based methods, practical materials, and honest assessment, and they’ll do what professionals do: they’ll deliver.
None of this is a right-wing crusade – as many of Stanford’s critics now claim. The knowledge-rich model is progressive in its effects, even if some of its champions sit on the centre-right. Insisting that every child, in every postcode, be deliberately taught the knowledge and vocabulary of the wider world is the most egalitarian demand you can make. When we stop treating knowledge as elitist, disadvantaged children stop being the ones locked out of it.
What’s truly reactionary is the status quo: a romance that flatters adults, feels kind, and leaves too many children unable to read fluently, write clearly, or handle basic algebra. We tried the experiment. It failed. The courageous act now is not to defend our priors but to face reality and change.
There will be pain. Change on this scale always brings disruption. When teacher education must include the science of learning and subject expertise, some programmes will need overhaul. Baselines may sting before they heal.
But the alternative is worse – to continue quietly wrecking futures. The victims don’t write op-eds. They just leave school without the words and numbers modern life demands. If your home can’t compensate for what school fails to teach, romanticism isn’t a kindness. It’s a sentence.
This is not a defence of any minister, and it’s not a policy manual. It’s an argument about reality. Children aren’t miniature adults. Novices can’t reverse-engineer literacy or calculus by discovery. Working memory is narrow; knowledge frees it. When schools teach content explicitly and cumulatively, curiosity expands rather than shrinks. When assessment rewards mastery instead of fragments, teachers teach and students learn.
New Zealand’s education establishment is fighting because these reforms expose that their romantic ideology – the idea that kids learn naturally without explicit teaching – has systematically failed. And the ones who paid were the children who needed school most.
That’s not a culture war. It’s a moral reckoning.
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 sourced HERE
5 comments:
Great article.
I had the misfortune to attend a secondary teacher's training college
in the 1990s when the constructivist approach to teaching Science was in full swing.
Instinctively it felt alien to me, but as I had had 15 years working as a scientist/scientific editor and not as a classroom educator, I was willing to accept that perhaps I was out of touch with modern, progressive teaching methods.
it didn't take me long in classroom settings to realise that my students preferred to learn the way I learnt... with well-prepared, directed lessons.
Discovery learning or self-directed learning with a classroom of novices is invariably an educational disaster for our children.
It may be a fun method to run for 1 period a term or for one small project each year to expose pupils to independent research, but if repeated too often or used as the main means of teaching, it signals a lazy teacher.
Home schooling has seemed to be the only sensible option for some time.
Surely there is potential for teachers who recognise the corruption and ineffectiveness of what we have now, for them to set up/join independent charter schools throughout NZ?
Like the msm, if they are not doing a professional job, educators in the current education 'system' will ultimately be rejected by their customers, the parents.
The customer will stop buying and look for better value alternatives.
They are currently an effective monopoly, destroying the fantastic potential of the majority of young people (hence NZ), in the name of their warped, blind ideology.
To add to Maggy Wassilief's comment above, 'learner-directed' learning doesn't and can't work at all in the case of science. Kids can't "think like scientists" because they don't have the deep knowledge base and higher-level reasoning abilities that scientists apply to their work. And what an El Dorado for litigation lawyers if kids are left to their own devices in a lab leading to injuries and worse.
I am not suggesting we go back to the days of school lab science being an exercise in 'proving' what the teacher or textbook had already told them - that's epistemologically unsound and we need to get young learners thinking scientifically which most certainly doesn't work by rigging experiments so they 'prove' a foregone conclusion. Guided Discovery is a good compromise. A hypothesis based on prior learning is arrived at through class discussion and is then tested using a procedure dictated by the teacher. (Incidentally, 99% of professional/industrial lab science works by applying established procedures to samples/specimens -the 'verification approach', while poo-poohed by many education types, is alive and well in real-world science.)
Alot of big word and obtuse theories mentioned in this article and comments.
But my secondary school science education was dominated by one of the scariest teachers you might ever encounter. He was a biology teacher but taught general science to the junior years.
The very first lesson he made it clear. We were not babies. He would dictate a summary of what we were to read and were also to make our own notes from the textbook. In half an hour he would return and guide us through any experiments.
He said we'd better get used to this style if we planned to go on with more study at university.
He was right. Those first few lessons cemented in place a method and discipline that extended beyond our education into the rest of our life.
Was he a good teacher? I don't know, but many graduates and successful or prominent NZERS certainly came out of that 3rd form class of 81.
NZ educational history does not center in the 1950s although about then the momentous event occurred that was to gradually destroy NZ's excellent standards - Scottish Traditional Liberal Education with focus on teaching the basics effectively in a structured way including intensive , phonics , was replaced by aggresive atheist ,Dewey's Progressive education. Education departments became distinct from education being a branch of philosophy and academics and theory with evolutionary foundations dominated over competent and experienced teachers. Many people fell for the innovation because of the persuasive rhetoric of Beeby and Fraser but many didn't. Those who were brave and self-sacrificing teachers often lost grading and promotion because they knew what was being introduced was harmful to children's learning and would bring about the demise of our excellent education. Often they secretly continued in class with 'the old school' methods.' They discerned the ideology behind progressivism was actually determined to undermine effective . learning and replace it with socialist ideas.
Now AEC ( Aotearoa Educators Clolective ) blatantly reveal they are Progressive -Marxist and quote comrade Freire. It all sounds so learned and clever . Equity and decolonistaion are the key words. Yet it was our traditional education in the past that gave us the most egalitarian of societies. This is an awkward truth for them surely.
These AEC and others in unions are ideologues and knowingly or unknowingly committed to destroying Western Culture. through the destruction of our children's education . As traditionalist , and highly successful headmistress. K. Burbalsinghe said recently ' Schools are not just contributing to the demise of the West , they are leading the charge'.
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