Caleb Anderson: The Unlearning of Education: How NZ Schools Lost Their Way

For decades, New Zealand boasted an education system that was world class—a place where foundational knowledge, critical thinking, and academic rigour, were paramount considerations.

Walking through a school today, however, it is hard not to feel a profound sense of loss. We have witnessed in real time the slow, methodical, deliberate, and calculated erosion of traditional academic standards. These have been replaced by a "child-centred" philosophy that, in practice, seems to focus on everything except the core disciplines of reading, writing, and mathematics.

The evidence of this decline is not hard to find, despite the best efforts of educational bureaucrats to obscure it. International benchmarks like PISA have shown a depressing, two-decade downward trajectory for Kiwi students. Our kids are slipping in science, math, and reading, performing at levels significantly lower than their predecessors at the turn of the millennium. When teachers themselves—a concerning proportion of whom are reportedly struggling with basic subject knowledge—are tasked with teaching a diluted curriculum, the result is predictable: a dumbing down of the entire education system ... from preschool to tertiary level.

A significant part of this decline stems from a misguided belief that "competencies" and "skills" are more important than deep disciplinary knowledge.

Education has been reimagined as a "journey of wellbeing and self-realization" rather than a rigorous pursuit of intellectual mastery. This shift has accelerated the rise of the NCEA "credit-counting" culture, where students can accumulate credits through often superficial tasks—participating in a group activity or filling out a basic form—rather than demonstrating comprehensive subject mastery.

Perhaps more contentious, but undeniably part of the equation, is the forced infusion of cultural elements into every facet of the curriculum. The push to integrate te ao Māori, while intended to be inclusive, has in many places gone far beyond fostering understanding. It has become a dominant, all pervasive, and often political, framework that takes precedence over core subjects and over deep learning.

When school boards are pressured to ensure their "local curriculum" reflects specific cultural worldviews, at the expense of traditional academic subjects, we lose sight of what schooling is for, and we enter the domain of indoctrination.

We disengage with deep learning.

This isn't to say that culture shouldn't be part of education. But it should never come at the cost of literacy and numeracy, of critical thinking, of open enquiry, and of the thoughtful application of content knowledge ... nor through the selective exaltation of one culture, via the denigration of another. A child cannot engage with complex history, scientific theory, or philosophical discourse, if they cannot read (and think) critically, or understand basic maths, especially where there is a pervasive and calculated disinclination to contextualize and relativise content.

Yet, the current trend is to focus on identity-based learning, leading to an impoverished education, a blindness to complexity and contradiction, and a susceptibility to indoctrination.

The result is a system where "Achieved" is treated as the new "Excellence," and where "Not Achieved" is increasingly rare, not because everyone is succeeding, but because the standards have been lowered to ensure that no-one fails. The consequence is a generation of school leavers who may have a strong sense of identity, and a preoccupation with projecting this, even at cost, but who struggle with the fundamental knowledge required to thrive in a rapidly changing, and increasingly unpredictable, global economy.

Recent praise-worthy moves toward "structured approaches" to reading and math is a much belated recognition that the "child-centred" (over knowledge-centred) approach has failed. Returning to basics is only the first step. We need to stop treating traditional education standards as outdated relics of the past. Academic rigour is not a dirty word; it is the key to ensuring that every child, regardless of their background, has the knowledge and skills to achieve their full potential, to participate in intelligent discourse, to be humble in the face of complexity, to know themselves more truly, and to constructively, and open-mindedly, engage with diverse ideas and people.

We have only just commenced the process of reversing the damage of the past twenty years. We must be unwavering in our resolve to remove the ideological and cultural padding from the curriculum.

There is much left to be done in the reinstatement of a knowledge first approach (prior to its application in context), and what has been done so far could too easily be undone. It is critical to bring a decisive end to the social experiments that have so impoverished and alienated, and to disengage with the architects, and activists, who championed this cause, and oversaw with glee, the displacement of common sense.

Should the left be returned to power at the end of this year, we can realistically expect a rapid reversion, and I suspect acceleration, of the social engineering of past decades, along with the continual denigration of potential and possibility, along with economic and social decline.

We owe it to future generations, and to our nation, to be up for the fight.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.