The Minister of Education, Erica Stanford is determined to introduce a knowledge rich curriculum for all New Zealand students. What does this mean? First, it is a standardised curriculum which ensures that students across the country receive the same high-quality knowledge. That knowledge consists of academic subjects with content selected for its value and justified for its veracity. Furthermore, the content must be designed so that it is coherently organised and built progressively from the most basic to the more complex.

Second, it is about planning for teaching. It is here that teachers take the designed national curriculum and turn it into effective teaching plans suitable for their school and their students. The latest ideas from cognitive science about secondary mental abilities, time perception, memory load, and feedback are needed at this stage. They help connect the content to students’ thinking processes.

Third, both good curriculum design and planning for teaching set the foundation for the actual teaching. Many teachers know their subjects well and use teaching methods that best connect students to rich content. They will welcome a knowledge-rich curriculum because it is what they have taught for years. We know and respect those teachers. The real benefits will be for those teachers and students who have been disadvantaged by eighteen years of a localised curriculum.

This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generation. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s. However, its success is not yet assured. The professional class which benefited most from that post-war subject-based curriculum has worked tirelessly to dismantle the source of its privilege in a strange alliance of decolonisation and socialism.

This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generation. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s. 

We can thank the recent secondary school incident for revealing what this alliance looks like in practice – a junior English class, a video playing, a teacher instructing how to analyse the video’s tone and mood. In the video, How colonisers went from learning to reo Māori to trying to exterminate it, students hear the authoritative voice of sociolinguist, Dr Vini Olsen-Reeder declaiming, Once the pakeha government was established here, from there the desire grew to exterminate the Māori people.

The video’s content is either wrong or seriously distorted. Such propaganda will be difficult to teach in a knowledge-rich subject that requires the selection of content to be justified. That’s the sticking point – who justifies the content? What criteria are used?

In the coming months, the public will be consulted on the draft English curriculum. This is right and proper – it is not a curriculum for teachers alone, but for the nation.  It is here, in the national discussion about the subject of English that I predict a simmering conflict will surface. Some, like me, regard school English as the study of language and literature in the English language. For others, English is the tool of the capitalist coloniser, intent on locking the colonised into a permanent state of subjugation. Their demands are for the decolonisation, then indigenisation, of the entire education system.

It is unsurprising that English is at the centre of the gathering storm, although History and Science are not far behind. English has a very particular role – that of creating society’s cultural repertoire. When we study English at school we are taught, or should be taught, the content and conventions of our nation’s most widely spoken language. New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English. It is the language of the 19th century colonial era and of 20th century nation building. According to one secondary school principal, the most effective way to decolonise the nation is by removing English, that dangerous language of the Eurocentric coloniser from the school curriculum.

New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English.

If we agree that the subject is the study of English language and literature, then the content selected must be justified. A straightforward process, one might think. But no, at the very source of the creation and justification of academic knowledge is the wellspring of the conflict. It is in the nation’s universities that decolonisation and indigenisation are being promoted. School subjects which are drawn from university disciplines and accountable to their rules and methods, will be hostages to the unaccountable ideologies of our decolonising universities.

English as a school subject draws in the main from the disciplines of literary criticism (including Shakespearean studies), linguistics, sociolinguistics, and history. Decolonising those disciplines removes all means of accountability – those methods of empirical evidence, logical argument and ongoing criticism which ensure that disciplinary knowledge is always on trial and always subject to rejection, revision, or provisional confirmation. These methods are what gives the disciplines, and by extension those who practise them, authority and status.

Although Dr Olsen-Reeder does not identify himself in the video as a university lecturer, his title and sociolinguist label convey authority. Teachers and high school students are likely to take him at his word. If anything, thanks are indeed due to the secondary school incident mentioned above for providing us with a glimpse of a decolonised education system. It should alert us to the difficulties faced by those tasked with introducing a knowledge rich curriculum.

If you contribute to the consultation of the draft English curriculum, I ask that you justify what you want taught. The content must have value not only for its literary beauty, its grammatical precision, its vocabulary richness, but it must challenge students. When teachers introduce young people to abstract content beyond their immediate experience, the students develop the secondary cognitive abilities necessary for the complexities of modern life. 

A decolonised curriculum does not provide quality content. Instead it locks young people into emotional responses. But emoting is not thinking. Abstract thinking develops only when students are confronted by complex content. A knowledge-rich English curriculum offers both that content and the development of the mental skills needed for the modern world.

Professor Elizabeth Rata is an international curriculum expert. She is a co-author of Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Turn. Springer.  

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74661-1.

Cover photograph of Peter Fraser by S P Andrew Ltd: Portrait negatives, reference 1/4-020106-F, Alexander Turnbull Library Collection. Available at https://natlib.govt.nz/records/23146991. Used with permission of the National Library of New Zealand.

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The result of parliament’s failure is two versions, one of Articles – the ‘Articles Treaty’, the other of Principles – the ‘Principles Treaty’ – and the consequences – a racially divided country and a group asserting co-governance rights.  How did it happen?

The 1840 Articles Treaty has a Preamble and 3 Articles that reflect the ideas, motives, and actions of the time. Similarly the Principles Treaty is of its time and place – the 1980s. The cause of enormous confusion and conflict is because the treaty today has the words of 1840 (whether in Māori or in English) but the meaning is late 20th century ideology.

The meaning of the 1840 Treaty exists in the Articles. Article I recognised British sovereignty. Article II recognised the rights of Māori to hold or dispose of property. Article III recognised Māori as British subjects. In start contrast, the inventors of the Principles Treaty have, after decades of uncertainty, finally settled on the so-called core principles of partnership, active protection, and redress, despite these words not appearing in the Articles.

The word ‘principles’ first appeared in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act. In that legislation, ‘principles’ referred directly to the meaning, value, and purpose of the Articles. The word ‘principles’ was tied to the Articles. It had no referent outside those Articles. It did not state the word ‘partnership’, nor was active protection and redress mentioned or implied.

Three events detached the word ‘principles’ from the Treaty Articles, leading to decades of meaning creation. They are the 1985 Treaty of Amendment Act, the 1987 Court of Appeal’s ‘akin to partnership’ statement, and the insertion of undefined ‘principles’ into legislation from 1986.

The Articles-Principles detachment occurring in these three events was crucial to today’s invented treaty. It enabled the principles to acquire a different meaning, value and purpose – a new referent. To reflect the word’s new power, it was given a capital ‘P’. From that time treaty revisionists of all ethnicities talked excitedly about the ‘Principles’ as though they had always existed. Like sacred text, the meaning was lying in wait in the Treaty runes. It would be revealed by those who now interpret the Word to the World – the lawyers who are the modern secular priesthood.

As the practice of legislative insertion and legal interpretation gained momentum so too did an acceptance of the erroneous belief that the Principles had authority. An authority conundrum was created. It is reasonable to believe that insertion into legislation is the act of authorisation.

After all, members of parliament authorised the insertion. However they failed to define the Principles despite numerous and ongoing insertion. It was left to activist judges, officials and retribalists to take on the monumental task of deciding what the Principles were to mean.

In a democracy, parliamentarians represent us, the people. Yet does this authority have legitimacy when our representatives did not know what the Principles meant when they were inserted into law?

A vacancy of meaning, especially when concealed by righteous language, opens up opportunities for those with vested interests to insert their own meaning.  In inventing and consolidating the Principles, advocates for a kinship-based political structure have used traditional ideology to provide a timeless, spiritually authorised quality to their very time-bound interests. The erroneous partnership Principle is given the greatest weight, opening up a wide backdoor to power. Tribal corporations can now move beyond their economic interests to demand political power – to be entrenched first as co-governance, then as tribal sovereignty.

How do you get people to believe in an invention and then to agree to its consolidation in legislation? Retribalists simply used age-old strategies.

The first strategy laid the groundwork by creating alliances with those in government and the professions, particularly in the judiciary. It didn’t matter if the alignment proved to be incompatible – such as that between a racialised retribalising movement and emancipatory feminism. As a temporary alliance it served its purpose with many feminists proving to be ardent retribalists. Some later retreating in silence, unable to resolve a dilemma created by mistakenly defining equal rights and justice in identity terms. In this way, feminism was ousted by gender identity politics and women’s rights were side-lined.

The second strategy is to ride on the back of current intellectual movements. Using postmodernism’ mystifying and irrational idea that reality only exists in language means that if one say something is the case then it is – especially if it is said in the loud and certain tone of the righteous with prayers adding the gravitas of sacred authority. If it is stated that the Treaty has Principles, then it is for the secular priests to reveal that truth.

This emperor’s new clothes strategy was supported by the righteousness of Cultural Marxism, a thriving ideology in university social science and education faculties and in government departments staffed by those with postmodern degrees. Although the nonsensical conflation of culture and materialism would have Marx turning in his grave, it gives social justice intellectuals a site on the moral highground from where they can do well by doing good.

The third strategy, the language game, rests on this irrational intellectual bedrock.  Controlling the language that can be used when talking about the Treaty ensures that thought itself is restricted in both its expression and, more seriously its very development.  How can alternative ideas be developed if they cannot be spoken?  Even more seriously, once language is couched in moral terms then criticism is excluded.

The rapid inclusion of the word indigenous into New Zealanders’ everyday language from the 1980s shows how effective this method is.  Belief in a treaty partnership requires partners who are to live in a permanent relationship.  Differences are emphasised, sometimes even created, and commonality rejected.

Embedding one of those partners in the status of indigeneity with the other partner an intruder into Arcadia expands the moral distinction into a timeless mythical realm.  Romantic evocations of the evil coloniser and the indigenous colonised provide a more seductive narrative for the nation’s collective memory than the more prosaic fact that, from the thirteen century to the present, all New Zealanders are settlers.

Our history is one of waves of settlers. It is a shared experience that trumps an arbitrary division into the indigenous on the one hand and all other settlers on the other. But language control is most successful when it evokes the sacred. The word indigenous does this with its suggestion of a mythological connection to the land and its creators. Those who resist the language game are accused of refusing not only the word, but the Word as revealed truth. Those who insist that truth lies in reality – that the 1840 Treaty didn’t have Principles and that we are all settlers, no matter the time of arrival, are silenced by accusations of racism. Far better to be silent than to bear the racist taint suggestive of a profoundly immoral character.

It is in the revelation of sacred meaning that the fourth strategy has proved to be most effective. Today’s secular priests – the activist judges, tribalist law professors, and lawyer-politicians – have claimed the authority to interpret the truth from the Treaty runes. They have won the age-old battle between the World and the Word in securing doctrinal supermacy. Made vulnerable by their commitment to the Word and their role as its interpretors to the World, lawyers tend to believe that if it is said, and especially if it is said in legislation, then it must be true. That revealed Word is now the authority.

But tribalist intellectuals, activists and lawyers aside, the group most to blame for the invention of the Principles Treaty are our Members of Parliament. The inclusion into legislation of a statute without legislators knowing what it meant is an unprecedented failure of political representation. Compounding the failure by continuing to insert the Principles does not make up for that failure. Repeating an error does not diminish or remove it, rather the error is consolidated.

The initial authority for inclusion was not given by the people. Until this occurs, or if the people refuse to authorise the inclusion, the Principles do not have the authority claimed for them. They should be removed. In the end, legitimacy is decided by the people if democracy is to work.

Those who have done well out of the invention of Treaty Principles will object to their removal. They will use the loud voices and threatening tactics that have proved so effective and led to widespread entitlement. They will be shameless in calling on the democratic ideals of universal human rights to justify a racialised future.

But an unsettled and messy time is democracy in action. Indeed a degree of conflict is to be expected given the current mess.  But the message for legislators is clear. They act on behalf of the people. They must know what their legislation means before laws are passed. Officials and lawyers then interpret the law. They do not create its meaning in undertaking that interpretation.

It is in discussion with the people that our parliamentary representatives assure themselves and us that they know what they are talking about. The discussion about whether we want Treaty Principles may be four decades late, but it must happen for the sake of New Zealand democracy.

I identify three possible choices. The first is continue with the 1980s’ invented Principles Treaty knowing it justifies co-governance and will lead to the irresolvable conflict between a kinship-based polity and a universal democratic one, one justified in a racial division of people into indigenous and non-indigenous.

The second choice is to value the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi as one of the country’s most significant historical documents, but one with no practical relevance to a modern democracy.

The third choice is similar to the second but treasures the symbolic value of the historical document within the nation’s collective memory. It is to regard the principles (lower case ‘p’) mentioned in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act as referring directly to the Articles but with no meaning or application beyond those Articles.

Democracy is not just arriving at a decision. It is the act of rational communication that enables the decision to be made. For this to happen, language must be pulled apart so that meaning is exposed, and with it, the intentions of the user. There can be no language priesthood, no sacred words, no moral highground.  Those who have controlled treaty language have controlled meaning for too long. It is now time to talk critically about the Treaty.

When Alice told the Mad Hatter that she didn’t think, his reply was – then you shouldn’t talk. But we must talk, the alternative is silence – and anger. So let us follow the March Hare’s advice – say what we mean. Language has three components – words, meaning, and the explicit connection of the word to its meaning.  Ideology intrudes in the vacant space when words are detached from their meaning. That has been the case with Treaty talk since the 1980s.

Let us insist on democracy’s rational communication in all its complexity and disturbing power so that we know what we mean when we speak and we can justify the meaning in explicit argumentative logic. Let us insist that our parliamentary representatives do the same.

(Note: The ideas in this commentary are based on my article: Rata, E. (2004) ‘Marching through the Institutions’: The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi. Published in Sites, New Series, Winter, Volume 1, No. 2 https://sites.otago.ac.nz/Sites)

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Dear Prime Minister Hipkins,

We, the undersigned, draw your attention to two major problems in the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum Refreshpolicy and in the associated NCEA qualification reforms. These problems were created during your tenure as Minister of Education and can only be solved by calling an immediate halt to the radical initiatives causing the problems. Because the matter is of such urgency, this letter is an open one and will be made public.

The first problem is the fundamental change to the purpose of New Zealand education contained in the Curriculum Refresh document, Te Mātaiaho: The Refreshed New Zealand Curriculum: Draft for Testing, September 2022.

The second problem is an effect of the first.  It is the insertion into the curriculum of traditional knowledge, or mātauranga Māori, as equivalent to science. 

Problem 1: Changing the purpose of New Zealand education

Since the 1877 Education Act, the purpose of education has been to build our nation upon the accumulated knowledge of humanity.  The intended benefits of this universal education system are numerous.  Six generations of New Zealanders are educated; a robust economy is developed; stable democracy is secured through secular institutions – all enabling the social cohesion of a multi-ethnic population with different backgrounds but united in its commitment to our nation.

The Curriculum Refresh has abandoned this goal of unity. Instead, the democratic idea of the universal human being upon which the education system was founded is replaced with a localised system that classifies children into racialised groups with, as the Curriculum Refresh states, ‘diverse ways of being, understanding, knowing, and doing’. (Our emphasis).

The ‘Kaupapa Statement’ that guided the Curriculum Refresh development makes this revolutionary new purpose perfectly clear:

We are refreshing the New Zealand Curriculum (the NZC) to better reflect the aspirations and expectations of all New Zealanders. The refresh will adorn our ākonga with a 3-strand whenu (cord). This korowai will be layered with huruhuru (feathers) representing who they are, who they can be, their whakapapa, and their connection to our whenua (lands). The whenu tying it together is made up of whānau (family), ākonga, and kaiako (teachers) working as partners to use and localise the NZC. The refresh will ensure that the NZC reflects diverse ways of being, understanding, knowing, and doing. It helps us inclusively respond to the needs of individual ākonga, who are at the centre of all we do. Ākonga will be able to see their languages, cultures, identities, and strengths in what they learn at school. This will empower ākonga to go boldly into an ever-changing future and contribute to local, national, and global communities. This vision will primarily be realised by kaiako and school leaders, in partnership with iwi and their school communities. However, it will be important for all New Zealanders to be part of this journey and help create multiple pathways towards equity and success for all ākonga. (Our emphasis.)

A racialised curriculum

After classifying children racially, the Curriculum Refresh embeds this identity categorisation.  We are to be recognised in the education system as either Māori or not.  Yet the reality is that modern individuals choose which identity matters to them, a choice informed by personalities, capacities, interests, goals, family, communities and heritages, and likely to change during the lifespan as circumstances change.  At school we share the identity of pupil and student. 

In contrast, the culturalist ideology now informing education policy places our identity as an ethnic one, a view that risks perpetuating fixed racial stereotypes.  More seriously, it links culture to race, a link justified by the belief that how individuals think, behave, and relate to others is pre-determined by their genetic ancestry. 

This race-culture link is seen in the Kaupapa Statement that ‘Ākonga will be able to see their languages, cultures, identities, and strengths in what they learn at school’. It is a pre-modern race ideology that will destroy our modern future-oriented education system and should be seen for the revolution it is.

Problem 2:  The effects of radical change

The second problem to which we draw your urgent attention is the effects of this radical transformation of New Zealand education.  They include ‘culturally responsive pedagogies’ – the idea that diverse way of ‘being, knowing, understanding and doing’ require different learning approaches. An example of this is the misguided belief that Māori- and Pacific-heritage children learn better in groups.  Literacy too is under attack by those seeking to ‘decolonise’ reading and writing – see  https://nzareblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/22/maori-literacy/

The knowledge equivalence error

We draw your attention specifically to the effect on the curriculum caused by the false claim that traditional knowledge and modern science are equivalent (mana orite).  This is damaging, not only to science education within New Zealand but to our nation’s international reputation. 

The damage occurs in two ways.  First, the interweaving of mātauranga Māori across the science curriculum forces a comparison between the two knowledge systems in ways that do justice to neither.  Traditional knowledge has its own value and purpose and belongs in curriculum subjects such as social studies, geography, and literature.  But it is not science and does not belong in the science curriculum.

Second, the NCEA Reform and Curriculum Refresh bring pseudoscientific ideas into science due to the poor transposition of some concepts from mātauranga Māori.  For example, the NCEA Chemistry & Biology Glossary introduces the idea of mauri as a relevant concept in biology and chemistry. It defines mauri as:

The vital essence, life force of everything: be it a physical object, living thing or ecosystem. In Chemistry and Biology, mauri refers to the health and life-sustaining capacity of the taiao, on biological, physical, and chemical levels.

Vitalism, the idea of an innate ‘life force’ present in all things, has surfaced in many cultural knowledge systems, including European, but has been soundly refuted and is not part of modern science.  Inserting mātauranga Māori into the science curriculum will, not only lead to confusion in our schools and for our students, but will destroy our nation’s reputation for quality science.

A scholarly account of the difference between mātauranga Māori and modern science which compares the properties of each knowledge type, their differences, their relationship, methods and procedures for their development, and policy implications is available on pages 13-21 in  https://www.hpsst.com/uploads/6/2/9/3/62931075/2019nov.pdf

Please halt the Curriculum Refresh

Asserting that the Treaty of Waitangi is ‘a fundamental component of our constitution’,  Te Mātaiaho: the Curriculum Refresh’s radical goal is to ‘foster the next generation of Te Tiriti partners by moving beyond the rhetorical notion of “honouring” Te Tiriti to giving effect to it’ (p. 5).  

But the status of the Treaty is subject to unresolved political contest.  It is undemocratic to engineer a revolutionary constitutional change through the educational curriculum. 

We ask for the restoration of an academic curriculum and qualification system based on the democratic principles of universalism and secularism; a system that enabled generations of New Zealanders to acquire the universal knowledge of humanity.  It was the reason for the nation’s successful education system that has lasted nearly one hundred and fifty years. The transformative Curriculum Refresh will undo the principles and practices that made such success possible with dire consequences for New Zealand’s future. 

Prime Minister Hipkins, the Curriculum Refresh and the NCEA Reforms were developed on your watch as Minister of Education.  It is, therefore, incumbent on you to repeal them before irrevocable damage is done to our country.  As Prime Minister, you are certainly in a position to do so.

Signed

Professor Elizabeth Rata, Director of the Knowledge in Education Research Unit, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland.

Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, Director of the Centre for Theoretical Chemistry and Physics, Massey University Auckland.

Dr Raymond Richards, Research Associate (retired Senior Lecturer in History), University of Waikato.

Dr David Lillis, Retired Senior Academic Manager and Senior Lecturer in Statistics and Research Methods.

Cover image by Tim Foster at Unspash, https://unsplash.com/photos/cRDUjKh6Xj0

The post Letter to the Prime Minister: What’s Wrong with the Curriculum Refresh appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Revolutionary moves to decolonise mainstream education are outlined in two Ministry of Education documents. 

‘Te Hurihanganui  A Blueprint for Transformative Systems Shift’ confidently asserts that ‘through decolonisation of the education system Māori potential will be realised’ while the Curriculum Refresh also prescribes a hearty dose of the same medicine.  

Decolonisation, according to Te Hurihanganui ‘means recognising white privilege, understanding racism, inequity faced by Māori and disrupting that status quo to strengthen equity’. There will be opportunities for an expansion of the decolonisation cadre as ‘Māori exercise authority and agency over their mātauranga, tikanga and taonga’. 

The Curriculum Refresh, meanwhile, proposes that ‘knowledge derived from Te Ao Māori will sit at the heart of each learning area, along with other knowledge-systems that reflect the cultural uniqueness of Aotearoa New Zealand.’

Decolonisation is a key strategy of He Puapua’s ethno-nationalism agenda. Political categories based on racial classification are to be inserted into New Zealand’s institutions. In education this means that the universal, secular system set up by the 1877 Education Act will be replaced with a radically different system based on two racial categories – Māori and non-Māori, despite the fact that such categories deny the reality of both New Zealand’s multi-ethnic population and Māori  multi-ethnicity. According to 2018 census over 45 percent of those identifying as Māori also identified with two ethnic groups with approximately 7 percent identifying with three ethnic groups. Some Māori families have a parent who does not identify as Māori. 

While decolonisation is underway in all the nation’s institutions, education is the key ideological institution. The Curriculum Refresh’s ‘other knowledge-systems’ approach re-defines academic knowledge as just another knowledge-system, rather than what it actually is – the universal knowledge developed across the disciplines and altered for teaching at school. 

Destroying confidence in the science-culture distinction, a distinction which is one of the defining features of the modern world, will be decolonisation’s most significant and most dangerous victory. According to the International Science Council, science is ‘the systematic organization of knowledge that can be rationally explained and reliably applied. It is inclusive of the natural (including physical, mathematical and life) science and social (includingbehavioural and economic) science domains . . .  as well as the humanities, medical, health, computer and engineering sciences.

In contrast, culture is the values, beliefs and practices of everyday life – the means by which children are socialised into the family and community. For a Māori child, this may well involve immersion in marae life – or it may not.  But the experiences of everyday life should not be confused with the ideology of cultural indoctrination, what I call culturalism or traditionalism and others call decolonisation. It is this ideology which is permeating the government, universities and research institutes, the Royal Society Te Apārangi, and mainstream media. Here we are presented with an idealised Māori culture of what should be, not what it actually is.  

Indeed, the spiritual is a central theme in decolonisation. The belief is promoted that Māori are a uniquely spiritual people with a mauri or life force providing the link to their ancestors – the  genetic claim for racial categorisation. Political rights for the kin-group are justified in this claim.

However the evidence does not support an idealised picture of Māori spirituality. According to the 2018 census 53.5 percent of those identifying with Māori ethnicity had no religious affiliation. The number identifying with Māori religious, beliefs and philosophies is small and declining, from about 12 percent in 2006 to 7 percent in 2018. As more Māori enter the professional class it is likely that this trend will continue. 

Given that over 50 percent of Māori already have no religious affiliation, it is doubtful that there is a constituency for a spiritual-based education. This is where decolonisation plays its part with Te Hurihanganui and the refreshed curriculum promoting the ideological version of culture. Those hesitant Māori who are suspicious of the ideology will be outed as ‘colonised’, in obvious need of decolonisation. Those who are now racially positioned on the other side, officially the non-Māori, will require decolonisation to ensure support for the new moral and political order. Numerous consultants are already on hand to provide this profitable reprogramming service. Intransigent dissenters, who determinedly refuse the correct thinking will be ostracised as fossilised racists and bigots.  

The tragedy is that this decolonising racialised ideology will destroy the foundations of New Zealand’s modern prosperous society. The principles of universalism and secularism are its pillars in education as elsewhere. Academic knowledge is different from cultural knowledge because it is universal and secular. We could certainly live without this knowledge – our ancestors did,  but would we want to? 

The formidable task of acquiring even a small amount of humanity’s intellectual canon is made even more complex and remote because abstractions are only available to us as symbols – verbal, alphabetical, numerical, musical, digital, chemical, mathematical – creating two layers of difficulty. While it is unsurprising that the much easier education using practices derived from action rather than abstraction is more attractive, to take this path, as teachers are required to do, is a mistake.

We humans are made intelligent through long-term systematic engagement with such complex knowledge. Yet decolonisers reject the fundamental difference between science and culture claiming instead that all knowledge is culturally produced, informed by a group’s beliefs and experiences, and geared to its interests. Indigenous knowledge and ‘western’ knowledge are simply cultural systems with academic education re-defined as the oppressive imposition of the latter on the former. 

What is deeply concerning is the extent to which this ideology is believed by those in education and uncritically repeated in mainstream media. A secondary school principal is quoted describing the ‘dangers of prescribing a powerful knowledge curriculum’. Such an ‘Eurocentric’ approach is ‘a colonial tool of putting old western knowledge ahead of indigenous communities’ rather than an emancipatory knowledge that liberates Westernised, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, African and indigenous groups.  Elsewhere another teacher goes further, calling educational success ‘white success’ and in opposition to succeeding ‘as Māori’ – which, to follow this logic, would mean not learning English or reading. There can be only one solution in this scenario – replace the oppressor’s knowledge through the comprehensive decolonisation programme now revolutionising New Zealand education. 

It does however put limits on how it is included. Students can be taught in social studies, history, and Māori Studies about the traditional knowledge that Te Hurihanganui describes as the “rich and legitimate knowledge located within a Māori worldview’. But this is not induction into belief and ideological systems. The home and community groups are for induction into cultural beliefs and practices.

What about the proto-science (pre-science) in all traditional knowledge – such as traditional navigation, medicinal remedies, and food preservation? This knowledge, acquired through observation and trial and error, as well as through supernatural explanation, along with the ways it may have helped to advance scientific or technological knowledge, is better placed in history of science lessons rather than in the science curriculum.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. Its concepts refer to the theorised structures and properties of the physical world, its methods are those of hypothesis, testing and refutation, its procedures those of criticism and judgement. 

The inclusion of cultural knowledge into the science curriculum will subvert the fundamental distinction, one acknowledged by mātauranga Māori scholars, between naturalistic science and supernaturalistic culture. Ironically, decolonisation ideology is justified using the universal human rights argument for equity. But the equity case misrepresents the problem. As with all groups, it is not ethnic affiliation but class-related cultural practices that are the main predictors of educational outcomes. Māori children from professional families are not failing. Rather it is those, Māori and non-Māori alike, living in families experiencing hardship and not engaging in cognitive practices of abstract thinking and literacy development, who are most likely to fail at school. This is not inevitable. Education can make a difference to a child’s life chances but it requires all schools, Māori medium immersion and mainstream alike, to provide quality academic knowledge taught by expert teachers. 

Te Hurihanganui’s claim that ‘the Blueprint is based on evidence of what works for Māori in education’ gives no indication that the evidence is seriously compromised. Are Māori students in full immersion Māori education (MME) more successful than those in mainstream schools? At first glance this claim does appear substantiated. In 2020, 83.7 percent of Māori students in MME attained NCEA Level 2 compared to 71.8 percent in English medium education. However the numbers of students in each school type reveal a different picture. According to 2021 figures, 8,056 (4.3 percent) of Māori students attended Māori immersion schools where 51 percent or more of the instruction is in the Māori language. Another 29,499 Māori students (15.7 percent) are in mixed medium education with varying degrees of Māori language immersion or instruction. A full 80 percent (150,318 Māori students) attend English language or mainstream schools. 

Given the sizeable difference between the numbers of Māori students in mainstream schools and those in full and mixed immersion education combined, any comparison should be considered unreliable, even meaningless. In addition, a nuanced comparison would need to compare the NCEA Level 2 subjects taken by Māori students.  The extent of abstraction in a subject creates varying degrees of difficulty, something found, for example, in the difference between physics and communication studies. 

Do parents of Māori children want a decolonised cultural-based education system? Here too, the evidence suggests otherwise. Under 5 percent of Māori students attend full immersion education where over 50 percent of instruction is in the Māori language. Even the flagship kohanga reo is in long-term decline from a peak of 767 kohanga in 1996 to 434 in 2021. 

The 1990 Education Act established kura kaupapa Māori recognising its founders’ aims – to increase Māori achievement, to contribute to the revival of the Māori language, and to produce bilingual and bicultural citizens for New Zealand. 

However the citizenship aim, one based on the democratic principle of the universal human being, cannot be met by a decolonising agenda. The universal and secular principles of the 1877 Education Act were intended to create a collective consciousness – the People of New Zealand as the Act’s title states – for a racially and culturally diverse population. 

The exemptions in the 1877 Act reveal a fledgling liberal culture, a mix of idealism and pragmatism now recognisable as a distinctively New Zealand character. Parents who objected to Protestant history lesssons could remove their children from class. Māori opposed to government provision were exempted from compulsion. Private and church schools were permitted and a pragmatic accommodation for the country’s climate and geography, and for the regular outbreaks of disease, can be seen in flexible attendance regulations. 

The separation of public and private, of society and community, makes room for both science and local culture. (The recent commonplace practice of using ‘community’ for ‘society’ is one of a number of indications that the separation is being undermined.) Valuing culture and devaluing science in a merger of the two fatally undermines the universalism and secularism that creates and maintains a cohesive society out of many ethnicities and cultures.

Decolonisation will indeed divide society into two groups – but not that of coloniser and colonised locked into the permanent oppressor-victim opposition used to justify ethno-nationalism. Instead one group will comprise those who receive an education in academic subjects. These young people will proceed to tertiary study with a sound understanding of science, mathematics, and the humanities. Their intelligence will be developed in the long-term and demanding engagement with this complex knowledge. It is to be hoped, though this cannot be assumed, that they will have the critical disposition required for democratic citizenship, one that is subversive of local culture and disdainful of ideology.

The second group comprises those who remain restricted to the type of knowledge acquired from experience and justified in ideologies of local culture. Distrustful of academic knowledge as colonising and oppressive, ethnically-based cultural beliefs and practices will provide the community needed for social and psychological security. In this restricted world they are insiders. And as there are insiders, there must be outsiders – in traditionalist ideologies these are the colonists who are seen to have taken everything and given nothing.

A revolution is coming. The government’s transformational policies for education make this clear. It will only be stopped by a re-commitment to academic knowledge for all New Zealand children, rich and poor alike, within a universal and secular education system. Colonisation is not the problem and decolonisation is not the solution.

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Co-authors are Emeritus Professor Robert Nola, Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, and Professor Garth Cooper

Many New Zealanders were startled to hear of the government’s He Puapua plan for iwi co-governance of the nation by 2040. The July 2021 publication of the document, ‘Te Pūtahitangi, A Tiriti-led Science-Policy approach for Aotearoa New Zealand’ reveals one of the strategies for He Puapua’s implementation.  Stating that “the call for a Tiriti-led science-policy approach is timely”, Te Pūtahitangi, supported by the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, will insert mātauranga Maori into all areas of science, including the school and university currricula, research funding and science policy. With the same speed as the other He Puapua ‘reforms’ the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment is already proceeding with the Future Pathways Te Ara Paerangi Green Paper to establish the “tiriti-led system” advocated by Te Pūtahitangi .

According to Te Pūtahitanga “Mātauranga Māori is the Māori knowledge ecosystem underpinned by kaupapa and tikanga Māori”. Tikanga is defined as “the customary system of values and practices that have developed over time and continue to evolve and are deeply embedded in the social context”. The document distinguishes mātauranga Māori from science in its reference to “Aotearoa’s rich knowledge systems – Western science and Mātauranga Māori”.

Te Pūtahitangi contains two foundational errors. The first is the premise of an ‘equivalence’, or ‘ōrite’ between the traditional beliefs and practices and modern science. While traditional beliefs and practices are valued for many reasons, such understandings – as many leading Māori intellectuals insist – are not science.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. In contrast traditional thought employs supernatural explanations for such phenomena with the proto-science (or pre-scientific) knowledge acquired from observation and experience providing ways to live in the environment. This includes the knowledge which enables ocean navigation by the stars and currents, efficacious medicines from plants, and social structures based on kinship relations and birth status.

Methods differ too. Science requires doubt, challenge and critique, forever truth-seeking but with truth never fully settled. In contrast traditional understandings require respect, even reverence from adherents. Change to tikanga comes from changes to the social context within which, as Te Pūtahitangi notes, tikanga is “deeply embedded”. Indeed it is that context which ties the beliefs and practices to a specific people and their ancestral traditions. Science is not constrained in these ways. It develops from the systematic criticism and refutation of its ideas. 

A second error in the Te Pūtahitanga document follows from the knowledge ‘equivalence’ error. This is the false characterisation of science as ‘Western’. But science rejects the authority of culture, and accepts only argument and evidence. It is universal, a fact shown by its rich history. ‘Zero’[MU1] , for example, was used first in Mesopotamia and India and discovered independently by the Mayans. Science belongs neither to the ‘West’ nor to any ethnic group.

As educators we are committed to the success of our Māori students. As scientists we know that equating mātauranga Māori with science will not produce this success. The academic education which does prepare young people for university is the study of mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, languages, literature, history, geography, and the arts. In acquiring understanding of the knowledge which belongs to all humanity young people also acquire the critical thinking required for democratic citizenship.

The aim of Pūtahitanga is to connect mātauranga Māori and science for use in policy. Science can inform policy as we see with Covid-19 and global warming. But policy informing science is a recipe for misinformation and the loss of scientific integrity, something seen in Stalinist biology, Nazi physics and Christian creationism.

Just as He Puapua proposes radical changes to New Zealand’s constitutional governance, so do Te Pūtahitangi’s proposals signal radical change to the relationship of science and policy along with all areas of education. This is a matter requiring robust discussion without fear or favour.

The header image for this article was taken from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/Bt9y47d1e6k).

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