National’s shallow and extremely visionless education policy refers to developing a world class education system. What a farcical comment that it is.
New Zealand used to have just that (especially in primary schools), until successive neoliberal governments, first Labour and then National, destroyed it. Educators from around the world used to visit New Zealand in order to learn from it, and there were a number of New Zealand primary teachers who were recognised internationally.
One of these was Elwyn Richardson (never heard of him say the National Party) whose teaching in a small Northland school raised primary education to a level that is impossible under today’s narrow achievement focussed requirements. This is well described in his very readable book ‘In the Early World,’ and also in this video ‘The Song of the Bird’.
Another internationally renowned New Zealand teacher was Sylvia Ashton Warner (never heard of her say the National Party), who spent much of her career working with Maori children. This was captured in her book ‘Teacher” and her teaching techniques are still recognised internationally. In 1985 a biographical movie “Sylvia’ was made about her work and life.
Note that her teaching also had nothing in common with National’s education policies, now and back through the last few decades. Should National win the election, is anyone prepared to place a bet on overseas educators dashing to New Zealand, to check out our new teaching programmes?
Ah say the National Party, as there weren’t any national achievement standards back in Elwin’s and Sylvia’s day, how do we know the children were achieving? Things would have been much better if our 2023 policy had been in effect.
Back in those enlightened times, New Zealand always featured near the top of the international tests (which I personally think have little value) that National is now referencing as proof of our failing education system.
The introduction of the so-called ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’ by David Lange (Minister of Education as well as Prime Minister) was the death knell of New Zealand’s progressive and world renowned primary education – yet another destructive move made by the Fourth Labour government.
Having won the 1990 election, the incoming National government and new Minister of Education Dr Lockwood Smith finished the job off and left a smoking ruin of primary school education. Smith’s main claim to fame as Minister of Education was to come a couple of years later when he climbed out of a window to avoid a group of university students who were protesting his university education policies.
Under Smith’s watch the whole primary school curriculum was replaced, with the new documents including defined achievement objectives for every year level of every subject – it was calculated that this meant that teachers had to assess children over 1200 different achievement objectives. Teachers had to spend all their time ticking boxes rather than actually teaching. You will, of course, have noted that these achievement objectives were just another reworking of National’s fixation with standards based education.
To make life even harder, National restructured the Education Review Office (ERO) to focus on ‘accountability’ – schools also had to tick off a wide range of policy requirements, none of which had anything to do with providing high quality learning for children.
ERO worked under an unusual and later discredited ideology that schools that were accountable (i.e., having policies in place for every conceivable part of a school’s operation) would automatically result in quality education. The policy demands were such that it was common for schools, about to be subjected to an ERO inquisition, to contact their neighbouring schools to borrow policies. Very accountable.
So, as you can see, National’s latest education policy is but a continuation of their past efforts.
Once the Key led government was elected in 2008, it was too late to stop them from implementing their National Standards policy, as well as ACT’s ideologically deficient charter schools. This time we must make sure that National and ACT do not get the chance – New Zealand children’s educational future depends on this.
My next article will explore the primary education of the pre-Tomorrow’s Schools era, so you can see what has been lost.
What I don’t see in the article are any constructive ideas to sort out the mess Labour has created with the new syllabus.
So maybe you should address what is in front of you rather than bagging National’s proposal to begin to fix what is patently a national disaster.
If you follow what I’ve been saying the disaster is mainly due to National education policies over a few decades.
Our education system has been going down the gurgler for decades with both National and Labour presiding over it. It’s a multifactorial problem:
>The rise in solo parenthood and open-ended welfare has given rise to a dysfunctional underclass of children who are basically screwed from the day they’re born. No education system can fix them.
> The school classroom has become the last bastion of unionism with the left intent on maintaining a one-size-fits-all remuneration system that befits the Soviet Union and drives away talent, especially male talent.
> Anyone with real-world competence in maths, science or technology is going to be picked up by the burgeoning tech industry. So, this part of the syllabus is taught by the semi-competent.
> The education system has been forced by successive governments to become the mother, father, social worker, psychologist and policeman, instead of focusing on their prime role. It’s a dumping ground for bad ideas.
Ensuring that every subject in the curriculum, including maths, promotes radical gender ideology, and serves as instruction in Maori language and culture, is down to the present government. National is of course ducking the issue, however there is a lot of merit in its focus on core competencies.
Don’t forget the destruction made by Nat Merv Wellington who held back our potential to use computers. He was famous for a tantrum when he threw his suitcase at people who did not agree with him.
From memory Merv Wellington’s other claim to fame was to insist on schools flying the NZ flag every day. Yet another impressive National Minister of Education.
Be interesting to see if the new education policy falls into the same trap as Nationals one did.
What do the users and beneficiaries off the education system want.
What go parents want
What do students want
What do private employers want
What do public state servants want
What do university professors want
etc.
Unless you step back and ask those people what they want, any Labour education reform will be as bad as Nationals was.
Unless your education system turns out productive, tax paying members of society, that society will fail big time (one could argue it already has).
So lets see what academia comes up with in the next education reform installment. Bet a pound of butter to a knob of goats s##t it will not address the needs of society. Will it be ideology and self aggrandisement by the proponents, with no real world application for the betterment of society?
Or something that will drag our sorry arses into the 22nd century.
Me, learner much at schools.
I fought it were learneded. Silly bugger me.
I know there a are a good many people that think these sort of policies improve education – let’s call those people believers or perhaps idiots. If you can’t measure what’s important make important what you can measure. Most of us work for people like this.
Then there are those that know full well these steps won’t work yet implement them because of the ‘benefits’ they provide – less people wanting to teach (and less teachers to pay) and a less educated populous that is easier to control. Let’s call them ‘leaders of the major political parties’.
I honestly don’t see any of the current parties providing any hint that things will improve. Maybe these articles could investigate the policies of some of the minor parties (and no, I’m not going to vote Green no matter how much money they will plough into education. Education isn’t education if you seek to control how people think).
Overworked and under paid that is the cry of the teachers on strike . They must be listened too by which ever party get into power. Education is the only way out of the social decline that mirrors the decline in educational standards. It goes against the grain for me but as there are so many struggling parents free breakfast and dinner of good food must be budgeted in . This will need to be in place before we will get better outcomes at the coal face of learning.. The food will be an incentive to attend school and once there smaller classes taught by happy teachers will get them involved and want to attend . I like the sound of Nationals policy but it should be up to the experts whomare the Teachersdoing the work.
Labours education system is diabolical – I’m not sure Nationals can get any worse so I think rather than bagging National maybe look at the colossal mistakes from Labour’s education policy.
Go back to before 1984, teachers were high achievers themselves in schools and and they taught the syllabus from a national book that had the curriculum.
We need to bring the national book curriculum back for traditional morning lessons and then have the afternoons to concentrate on other things like art, sports and music.
It is not rocket science.
Too many consultants in the ministry of education, that come up with absolute garbage constantly like 8 ‘strategies’ for addition etc. Now parents have to pay to find out the amazing strategy of working out numbers in columns via number works and private tuition!!! That is how everyone used to learn maths, not exactly a new concept. Education is getting excited now and planning more ‘hub’s’ to roll this amazing strategy out!! No wonder they can’t afford to pay the teachers with all the managerial overload ballooning.
Grifters paid by the ministry of education that are posting dribble on social media, such as NASA is only just catching up to Maori Science – too many people posting for the NZ woke audience and funding, who have no subject knowledge and ‘teaching’ others based on an ideology that makes NZ an international laughing stock.
Of course big business loves it all, as then there are no experts available and NZ now pays big sums to get nothing done, but since nobody knows any better – all ok – just keep putting up taxes and selling off assets, repeating the same mistakes such as building in flood plains or engineering that is more woke than accurate being the norm now.
Having a decent education system that works for everyone is one of the few ways to get New Zealand out of the mess it is in. Currently we are creating too many useless people without skills or a future. AI will shake a lot of things up and many jobs will never be the same again. We need adaptable & skilled people, and we can’t just import these while dumping our own young people on the scrap heap.
Things have to change, but all we seem to do is make it worse, accepting failure & mediocrity. We need to do better.
Or are we happy just having largely useless meat bags, that can just be used to do jobs we are too cheap to mechanize, and importing more if our own are too lazy/useless/expensive to get the job done?
NZ had the worst brain drain in the world in 2010, but gave up and stopped measuring the brain drain to Australia in 2019.
NZ, New Zealand brain-drain worst in world
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/7973220/New-Zealand-brain-drain-worst-in-world.html
Statistics New Zealand no longer measuring ‘brain drain’ to Australia
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/03/statistics-new-zealand-no-longer-measuring-brain-drain-to-australia.html
NZ brain drain which used to be a topic of interest each election has instead been sidelined for the past 15 years while politicians gone on a mass immigration ‘body shop’ that instead of getting high level skills here, somehow instead netted foreign pensioners, terrorists, high needs grifters, scammers, exploiters, gullible victims of scams, cash tradies who speak zero English and variations of the above, ever since with predictable results.
When a large potion of the 1 million people coming to NZ turn out to be depressed or a criminal type drug smuggler, or entire families being welcomed into NZ on wages that are well below the poverty line, no English skills, it’s pretty clear there is going to be a hell of a lot of social and skill problems on their way.
Even the overseas students seem to be completely gullible which does not bode well. Todays headline of a foreign student who managed to be scammed out of $42k when he applied for a job on seek. The idea of having to pay to work and put so much cash into a crypto account (which he was interested in) didn’t raise any red flags. No doubt he will get a wonderful job at Waka Kotahi when he graduates.
Now government departments are just making up statistics (which is fine), they can’t even measure correctly any more, seemingly more interested in concentrating on blowing vast sums on mega mergers/re naming of government departments and the army of managerial consultants – from health care, water, to polytechs.
Te Whatu Ora admits figures used by Health Minister are ‘not accurate’
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/485599/te-whatu-ora-admits-figures-used-by-health-minister-are-not-accurate
NZ has become a country that celebrates incompetence and grifters and doesn’t care if things don’t work anymore, they will be paid regardless, in fact more profit for big business when things don’t work as then they never leave!
NB That $420000 scammed student was being paid to put false reports for hotels he allegedly stayed at onto the internet – giving them 5 stars and a favourable comment. He was to be paid in crpto. The fact that he was scamming the future customers who were thinking they were reading a personal experience review did not strike him. Scamming a scammer is an example of our present system working well for those participating on a wealth accretion basis
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/487195/hotel-review-scam-student-loses-42k-works-48-hour-weekends-after-putting-parents-landlord-in-debt.
He had to pay out real money however from $190 to $800? to establish his bona fides perhaps. But he was as green as he was cabbage looking as the poms used to say. We should be operating under stricter rules but hey they are a dirty word to neolibs and freemark..s – it’s a free society you can almost scam whoever you like at will; choose your mark!
If teachers prior to 1984 were indeed high achievers themselves in schools, how in the 2020s can high achievers be attracted to teaching? By promising they’ll all have books, like recipe books to follow, ‘paint-by-numbers’ education?
By promising them the resources to do the job? Including support to deal with the sorts of behavioural issues evident in the 2020s?
By treating them as professionals and trusting them to do the job? Or by having them kow-tow to every Tom, Dick and Harriet who didn’t have the interest, the ability, the will, the balls, or the social sense to take up the job, who think they know more about doing it?
We say we want our best and brightest to be teachers. We do. Our best and brightest soon see that the system expects drones. The likes of Elwyn Richardson, Gordon Tovey and Bruce Hammonds are needed but certainly would be out of place.
Note that her teaching also had nothing in common with National’s education policies, now and back through the last few decades. Should National win the election, is anyone prepared to place a bet on overseas educators dashing to New Zealand, to check out our new teaching programmes?
I would bet that already there is a hefty component of profit-business interest in our education systems, especially from USA interests. If National get in, there will be more, business offering to run schools, probably teaching children on rows of computers* and content to suit the mindless, soulless, careless, incurious wealthy who just want to replicate a system that has depressed us into a class-ridden mercantile-oriented society, All the Enlightenment ideas and care for humanity that Booth of the Salvation Army tried to bring forth and Ruskin and the right to learn reading and also thinking is disappearing. Many people don’t read at all, or they don’t bother with books, as a printed medium, everything is done through a central system of electronics, not diversified but captured thought, information, and the images that show us what we are. Do we know what we are? Do we understand existentialism or all those other ways of considering our lives. Do we know how to discuss the matters that religion brings us face to face with? Do we get a chance to discuss thoughtfully and not heatedly with a desire to slash and burn unfamiliar ideas. In the absence of such thought and discussion we can be picked off by the evil predator beings that grow and infect the space in our minds which are unschooled in the contention of ideas, and don’t foresee the outcomes of the precepts being followed. (Existentialists also ask questions about free will, choice, and the difficulties of being an individual.
https://bigthink.com/thinking/10-schools-of-philosophy-and-why-you-should-know-them/
* Put this in your mind as the image of this teaching of the young.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeUVPAyntCY
Self- centredness rules with the wealthy. It seems as if achievement and access to much money destroy parts of our brain. The university trained only learn their own specialty and consider experimenting with the world and on people are okay – it’s great to go to space and have spy satellites, to drop a nuclear bomb to save a hundred lives of their own people by acting out a vengeful God.
That’s why Humanities has been dropped down the list of must-haves in NZ universities; and philosophy is not taught in primary schools though anybody who appeals as earnesly religious often can get in and put forward their own prejudices and distortions of the good values to virgin minds attempting strength with nobility! Beliefs are necessary for us – we must have some form, values and structure in our lives for our minds to hold onto, work towards and unite us. We are educating for 20th century society with ambitions to all middle class levels. Now we need to teach values, skills, starting in primary. Give preactice to organising projects within the school that the children run. Set the children up to be well educated, and competent in their own lives, learning cooking for health, gardening for food, music for joining in leisure, skills for earning a living in an interactive society and be ready for life at 14 years. And have to work before they get to get higher education, know something about their society and being an ordinary citizen.
Much of our present education doesn’t teach anything that is applicable to the life available to the student who will likely be unemployed; the students know this and don’t want to waste their time. Give them achievable goals and a belief in a future of being a fully integrated human in society, and all will change. But note this from the ‘American Physical Society’:
The results of this survey indicated that 72% of the population believed in a god or a higher power, 15% were agnostic, and 13% were atheist (with a 3% margin of error). According to a report by the American Physical Society, religion may die out in New Zealand and eight other Western world countries.
Irreligion in New Zealand – Wikipedia
wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Irreligion_in_Ne
Sorry this is so long but I feel our human specialness and fine intelligence is being twisted, dried up, misunderstood, and peeled off us like the outer skins on an onion. And onions are apparently very good for health. (Your extraneous bit of trivia for today.) We are good to have around when we are not in a decayed state, personally and collectively. Can we who understand this keep the spirit alive and find a way past the caverns of Mordor or whatever. Can we use our clever minds as we would in a computer game?
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeUVPAyntCY
.Surely it is what do the students need to face and fashion the future. The past has made a pigs muddle of everything. The young won’t be able to be and do right all the time, but it would be a change to see a mix of principles and pragmatism brought together in a rational and visionary way, with the young asking meaningful questions and getting answers they could debate and from there help fashion the curricula they need without bullying from either class or whatever sex.
IIRR Maris O’Rourke saying way back when government opened up to private that she had to wait to give ministerial advice until all the lobbyists left, which meant at one time waiting till 11 pm. She wojld have been a good servant to Education I think. But there are multiple agendas now.
If reinvention were an art, Maris O’Rourke would be considered a master.
From engineer to education executive to poet, she’s made each transition seem easy and has been successful at all.
Ms O’Rourke, from Auckland, made her most dramatic career change in 2012, when she quit education consulting to take up writing full-time.
Before that she had several high-profile, high-paying positions, including New Zealand Secretary of Education and Education Director at the World Bank.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/working-out-if-its-time-for-a-change/
NZ education policy is that every single subject from mathematics to physical education is permeated with extremist gender ideology, and every class must provide instruction in Maori language and culture. It could be that this focus compromises the learning of less exciting skills like the three Rs. https://stovouno.org/2023/04/02/the-function-of-nz-education-is-woke-indoctrination/
That is middle class stuff, probably emanating from pakeha. Maori tend to be outcome-based, doing things right but linked to good outcomes. That’s how it seems to me to be the thinking, I fear that outcomes from the present wave of emotional puritanism will have some backward results.
I guess the emotional puritanism comes from your first point re: business and education are diametrically opposed in nature when it comes to financial outcomes. I see education as a workhorse harnessed to the machine which never considers the tired horse’s need for a rest, water, hoof check and a good rub down. The machine doesn’t care, because it is a machine, to be plugged in to and fed massive data hauls benefitting all government departments and connected agencies that feed from them.
We are that workhorse; sincerely and honestly assessing the sincerity and honesty of that machine we so eagerly welcomed into our stables is now imperative, thank you, Greywarbler.
Agree with your points gin hag – what do people need to know for their life purposes in this country and the world. particularly as it changes. Even more because of changes that business brings about without thought of real outcomes,now introducing tech into everything and pushing the human to the sidelines – how far will they shoulder us aside? just for its own satisfaction, which can never be achieved no matter what the cost to humanity… it’s a vast, greedy maw, devious, with no values.
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