David Lillis: Unpublished Paper on our National Science Curriculum

Nearly a year ago I wrote a piece for a special edition of a journal. It was submitted as a commentary rather than as a research paper, but was roundly rejected. In fact, the journal’s reviews of this piece were scathing in the extreme.

However, here I give this paper for those interested in discussions on New Zealand’s science curriculum. It is essentially the same as the original manuscript but slightly longer because the original limit of 3000 words precluded the inclusion of certain detail. It embodies only a few additional ideas and a light edit here and there for a public audience.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: School science – where we’ve gone wrong and what we need to do to get it right

It was one fine day in 1963 and Mrs Morgan, the teacher of my Standard 3 class, was in a particularly foul mood. She was an expert at wielding the strap and required little enough reason to do so at the best of times, and we were filled with trepidation. She told us with an angry leer that the education authorities had decreed that ‘science’ was to be taught from now on, and shared with us her considered professional opinion that this was ‘nonsense’. She ordered us to copy and memorise (the ‘or else’ needed no voicing) a passage she wrote on the blackboard. I remember it to this day – it was about the solar system and she underlined the new words such as ‘orbit’ and ‘axis’ (without explanations as to their meaning – indeed she told us not to ask questions).

A few days later she informed us triumphantly that there would be no more of this ‘science nonsense’ and that she would forget about testing us on that passage, which was just as well as none of us could make heads or tails of it. And that, dear reader, is a true and accurate record of my primary school exposure to science.

Jerry Coyne: A good summary of the mess that is science education in New Zealand

If you want to see what the government of New Zealand is up to with respect to science education, you can’t do better than listening to this video/slideshow by two exponents of the “we-need-two-knowledge-systems” view. I’ve gotten a lot of scary stuff from Kiwi educators in the last couple of weeks, but this one site sums up how science education in New Zealand is circling the drain.

Jerry Coyne: University of Auckland continues to promote indigenous ways of knowing....

.....while not allowing a promised debate between that and modern science

In July, 2021, a group of seven University of Auckland academics (two now deceased) published a letter in the Magazine “the Listener” saying that the local (Māori) “ways of knowing”, or Mātauranga Māori (MM), while of significant cultural, sociological, and anthropological value, was not equivalent to modern science. It was written because the New Zealand government and academic establishment was proposing to teach MM as coequal to modern science in the science classroom. (This plan is still going on.) Since MM is a gemisch of some genuine empirical trial-and-error knowledge with superstition, ideology, ethics, and undocumented tradition, the seven authors were absolutely right in asserting that that mixture of “ways of knowing, feeling, and living” was not equivalent to pure modern science.

Jerry Coyne: Could Mātauranga Māori advance quantum physics?

I suspect the answer to the title question is “No way!”, but the incursion of Mātauranga Māori (“MM”, or Māori “ways of knowing”) into New Zealand’s science is reaching ludicrous depths. Even in the U.S.A. we don’t see headlines like the one below. (Note that “complement” is misspelled as “compliment”.)

Why am I so sure this endeavor won’t work? Simply because there is nothing about quantum physics in MM, and I can’t envision any MM-derived insights into the discipline that could advance it beyond what modern physicists are doing already. Of course Māori physicists, like the one below, could well make contributions to quantum mechanics, but it’s hard to see that those insights would come from MM, a mixture of trial-and-error knowledge gained from living (gathering plants and fish), theology, superstition, tradition, and ethics.