Roger Childs: “Loaded” draft for consultation

No Significant Change Expected in the History Curriculum

There will not be any radical changes to the content and any additional content will be in line with what currently exists. Ministry of Education Report on the submissions to the Draft Curriculum for Year 1-10 students

The History Draft for Year 1-10 students came out in February and almost four months was allowed for submissions. But unfortunately this has proved to be a case of paying lip service to the process of public consultation, with no intention of making any significant adjustments to the document.

The draft, as many submitters and critics pointed out, was a highly flawed, uneven proposal riddled with factual errors and saturated with references to Maori history, heritage, tradition and knowledge. There were also serious omissions in the content, skills and understandings to be covered. But the Ministry didn’t want to know.

Roger Partridge: Unbalanced compulsory NZ history curriculum lacks humanity

Eighteen months ago, the Government announced a curriculum change making it compulsory for all schools to teach “key aspects” of New Zealand history. The Ministry of Education was tasked with creating a new curriculum to “span the full range of New Zealanders’ experiences… with contemporary issues directly linked to major events of the past.”

Asking the Ministry of Education to draft a compulsory New Zealand History curriculum for school children was always fraught with risk. 

The Ministry has disavowed knowledge-based curricula – to the extent that the much-vaunted National Curriculum fits on a scanty 64 A4 pages. It covers the entire social sciences for years 1-13 in a single page.

James C. McCrae: Acts of War? Or War Crimes?

The revision of history continues. The City of New Westminster has taken down the statue of British Columbia’s first chief justice, Matthew Begbie. According to the Vancouver Sun, the statue was “a symbol of the colonial era and a grave injustice.” 

Prior to becoming B.C.’s first chief justice, Matthew Begbie was the colonial British judge who presided at the murder trial of six Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin) Chiefs.

Let’s try to understand this. The six chiefs were hanged in the colony of British Columbia, in 1864, three years before Confederation and seven years before British Columbia became part of Canada. The chiefs had been convicted of murder. British Columbia being British, not Canadian, they were tried and hanged under British law. They had slaughtered 19 innocent civilians, some of whom who were involved in the building of a wagon road, a project that had been underway for two years.