New Zealand once had one of the strongest education systems in the world. High literacy. High numeracy. High trust. Minimal bureaucracy. Teachers who taught. Students who learned. Parents who understood what schools were for.
That world is gone.
Today, we have:
- collapsing literacy
- collapsing numeracy
- ideological curricula
- teacher‑training programmes marinated in Critical Theory
- bureaucracies that grow while outcomes shrink
- a profession that confuses activism with education
Let’s trace the chain.
The 1980s: The First Drift — From Teaching to “Facilitation”
The first major shift came with the global rise of constructivism; the idea that students “construct” their own knowledge and that teachers should be “guides on the side.”
New Zealand imported this enthusiastically.
The consequences:
- phonics replaced by whole‑language
- structured maths replaced by “discovery learning”
- content replaced by “skills”
- teachers downgraded from experts to facilitators
The 1990s: The Bureaucratic Explosion
The 1990s saw the rise of:
- NZQA
- NCEA
- ERO expansion
- Ministry of Education growth
- endless frameworks, guidelines, and “strategies”
This era cemented the idea that process mattered more than outcomes.
The 2000s: The Ideological Turn — Critical Pedagogy Arrives
This is where the genealogy becomes unmistakably Marxist.
Teacher training colleges embraced:
- Paulo Freire (Critical Pedagogy)
- Henry Giroux (Critical Education Studies)
- bell hooks (intersectional pedagogy)
- Culturally Relevant Teaching
- Critical Literacy
- Post‑structuralist language theory
Education is not about knowledge; it is about “conscientisation,” raising political awareness, and challenging power structures.
This is how we ended up with:
- “other ways of knowing”
- “decolonising the curriculum”
- identity‑based teaching
- anti‑colonial framing in every subject
- teachers as activists rather than instructors
The 2010s: The Collapse Becomes Visible
By the 2010s, the results were undeniable:
- literacy plummeted
- numeracy plummeted
- international rankings collapsed
- teacher training quality declined
- NCEA became incoherent
- the curriculum became vague and content‑free
The Ministry responded with:
- more frameworks
- more “wellbeing” content
- more identity politics
- more “student‑led learning”
- more “inquiry learning”
- more “competencies” instead of knowledge
The 2020s: The Ideology Peaks — and the Public Notices
By the early 2020s, the system was fully captured:
- Critical Theory embedded in curriculum documents
- “decolonisation” as a core educational goal
- teachers trained in activism, not instruction
- literacy and numeracy at historic lows
- parents losing trust
- schools unable to teach basic reading
And this is the context in which Erica Stanford arrived.
The Stanford Reversal: A Return to Knowledge and Competence
Stanford’s reforms are not radical. They are a return to sanity:
- structured literacy
- structured maths
- knowledge‑rich curriculum
- clear expectations
- removal of ideological content
- accountability for outcomes
- ERO reports that actually tell parents the truth
They are not losing “best practice.” They are losing their worldview.
Why Teachers Are Reacting So Strongly
The teachers protesting Stanford’s reforms are not defending children. They are defending:
- Critical Pedagogy
- identity‑based teaching
- inquiry learning
- student‑led learning
- anti‑colonial framing
- post‑structuralist language theory
If you remove them, many teachers are left with nothing, because they were never trained in:
- phonics
- structured literacy
- explicit instruction
- knowledge sequencing
- cognitive science
- classroom management
- curriculum design
The Genealogy in One Sentence
New Zealand’s education decline is the result of: Constructivism → Bureaucracy → Critical Pedagogy → Identity Politics → Collapse.
Stanford is the first minister in decades to break that chain.
Where We Go From Here
If Stanford succeeds:
- literacy will rise
- numeracy will rise
- ideology will recede
- teacher training will be forced to modernise
- ERO will become honest
- parents will regain trust
The genealogy is clear. The question now is whether we have the political will to reverse it.
Colinxy regularly blogs at No Minister. This article was sourced HERE
9 comments:
A brilliant guide to the decline of NZ Education - and the dangers ahead if this reform is reversed.
You state: "This is where the genealogy becomes unmistakably Marxist."
Education in the former Communist countries, while somewhat affected by the prevailing ideology, maintained very high standards. What we have now is a postmodernist caricature designed and implemented by idiots.
How much of this is down to Rosemary Hipkins personal campaign to debase our education system ?
Anon@9.55 I'd suggest, quite a lot. Just look at her own son, everything he touches turns to the proverbial. Of course, she did teach him to talk and he certainly does that well enough, just a pity the outcome is much the same as his tactile proficiency.
Anonymous @ 9.45 am:
My links throughout the article make clear which version of Marxism I’m referring to. I’m not talking about Marxism-Leninism as taught in the old Eastern Bloc. I’m referring specifically to Critical Theory and its later synthesis with poststructuralism, the Western Marxist tradition that took root in universities, not politburos.
And this is the key point: Marxism is built on dialectical materialism. A Hegelian engine:
1. Thesis
2. Antithesis
3. Synthesis …with each synthesis becoming the next thesis in an endless ideological churn.
Why mention this? Because Marxism deliberately morphs. It is designed to mutate. The form taught in Soviet classrooms is not the form that later colonised Western humanities departments. The latter is the product of successive “revolutions” within Marxist thought: Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, the New Left, and finally the poststructuralist turn.
So yes, my critique of our education system is not about how Marxism-Leninism operated in communist countries. It is about the later Western mutations that have infected institutions here: Critical Pedagogy, Critical Curriculum Studies, Critical Education Studies, intersectional theory, and the postmodern Marxist hybrids that now dominate teacher training.
If you’re interested in the detailed genealogy, I have an entire backlog of articles at No Minister tracing the minutiae step by step.
I would like to see an article such as this distinguishing between levels of formal education (primary/lower secondary/upper secondary) and telling us much more about assessment and evaluation.
Lower and upper sec need to be discussed separately as lower sec is part of 'basic educ' (using UNESCO cut-offs) while upper sec is where we get subject track specialisation and high-stakes exit examination and certification that just about determine a young person's path in life.
Having a National Qualifications Framework is not a bad thing in itself - having an all-inclusive overarching qualifications framework is actually very useful. Neither is the NCEA in principle, although in practice it was a bit of a flop, despite sensible things having been done to it, such as reintroducing external exams.
It is often argued that strengthening an education system starts at the bottom and you work your way up. My counterargument is that if you tighten things up at the top end, you get a trickle-down effect as the standards required for qualifications such as UE put pressure on the lower secondary tier to raise their game, which in turn puts pressure on the primary tier to ensure basic skills are mastered.
I just love this as a summary.I have already read No, minister and filed it among useful reference articles for my possible proposed book on NZ literacy history.
I would argue the rot began in 1950 with Beeby and Fraser. This is when traditional intensive phonics was removed from the reading syllabus and replaced with emphasis on Whole Word reading in Janet and John. Reading is the quintessential element of education. There was according to literacy experts like NZ Prof.Tom Nicholson, no good reason educationally whatsoever for making this change. Pertinent was Beeby's affection for Progressive education, the brain child of American Fabian sympathizer, John Dewey, combined with Fraser's affection also for Fabian Socialism. He invited G. B. Shaw to NZ. to start the organization here.
Anyway the main characteristic , I think , of Fabian society is cunning gradualism. George Orwell wrote of the dangers in his famous novels as a warning of Fabianisms techniques - ' A wolf in Sheep's Clothing and a slow moving turtle . Fabianism began in 1848 and Orwell estimated it would be fully manifest in 1984.
In education no sudden changes were made to turn schooling from academic learning into a vehicle of social engineering as Dewey had planned but ever so gradually.
Fabianism had several tenets in common with Marxism hence creating an open door for that ideology to accelerate the course of the Fabian agenda in education, beginning in the 1970s.
Foundations had been laid decades before 1980 in the destruction of our excellent Traditional education
I challenge you on this one point, Colinxy . I understand Stanford aligns with Fraser. This is unfortunate, for my history given above.. The battle is Trad. vs Prog. education. Gaynor
Elizabeth Rata's take on all this would be interesting. Personally I cannot see major progress until the Year concept is abandoned and students streamed and failed by ablity as in the 1920s when solitary teachers acheived wonders with huge classes.Had the added advantage of no distraction by maori twaddle. Many Europen descended will have to learn to live or compete with Asian domination, just as maori who do not apply themselves have to accept the outcome, and not expect all to descend to their level..
Several simultaneous movements: the rise of social media with parents on their cell phones ignoring young children, these children crying 'look at me mommy', a background to the me-too narcissist movement. Declining educational standards happening in the USA too.... How many kids these days can read a 20 page book and in which countries?
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