Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 2/5/24

Ruckus over AUKUS – Labour demands Peters step down as Foreign Minister, but he still had the job this afternoon

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters was bound to win headlines when he set out his thinking about AUKUS in his speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs.

The headlines became bigger when – during an interview on RNZ’s Morning Report today – he criticised former Australian MP Bob Carr’s views on the security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Michael Johnston: How content-rich curriculum would help our children learn

During my years as an education academic, Professor Elizabeth Rata of the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland always stood out as a model scholar. She has always argued calmly for her ideas, using logic and evidence. And although she has been a frequent target of unfair personal attacks by ideological opponents, I have never known her to respond in kind.

I recently asked Rata for her view of the single most important thing we could do to improve our ailing education system. She answered without hesitation, “Reform the curriculum”.

Garrick Tremain: Teachers strike

 Here is Garrick Tremain's cartoon commentary on the education conditions! 

Michael Johnston: Tuning the curriculum upside down

New Zealand’s school curriculum has things exactly backwards.

Let me explain.

Acclaimed US psychologist Professor David Geary has distinguished two basic kinds of knowledge.

Point of Order: Champion of mātauranga Māori dabbles with a myth:

.....European navigators didn’t fear sailing too close to the Earth’s edge

Dave Armstrong, a columnist for state-subsidised Stuff, went out to bat for mātauranga Māori this week and to remonstrate with Richard Dawkins, the renowned British biologist, science communicator and atheist.

During his recent New Zealand tour, Dawkins had written an article for The Spectator about our government’s decision for Māori “Ways of Knowing” (mātauranga Māori) to have equal standing with “western’ science” in our education curriculum.

Armstrong challenged the renowned scientist’s critique:

Andrew Bolt: New Zealand to teach Maori knowledge as science equivalent

Sky News host Andrew Bolt says New Zealand has “a new green paper to supposedly decolonise” the education curriculum to teach traditional Maori knowledge as the equivalent of science.