The 2007 New Zealand Curriculum allows teachers and schools to decide what to teach. In this localised curriculum there is no prescribed content, no nationwide standardisation nor effective quality control. The result is increased inequality. Students in schools committed to high quality academic subjects continue to achieve. Students in schools that offer little more than socio-cultural beliefs and practices are denied the education needed for full inclusion in modern society.
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 benefitted most from that post-war subject-based curriculum has worked tirelessly to dismantle the source of its privilege in a strange alliance of decolonization and socialism.
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.[1]
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 [2], the most effective way to decolonise the nation is by removing English, that dangerous language of the Eurocentric coloniser from the school curriculum.
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 [3]. 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.
References
[1] The video posted on youtube is titled ‘How colonisers went from learning to reo Māori to trying to exterminate it’
A comment made by Dr Vini Olsen-Reeder, 1 minute 40 seconds, into the video states
“. . . ka tipu mai i reira tetahi hiahia ki a mate te tangata e ki enei i Maori.”
The youtube translation of the phrase is “. . . from there the desire grew to exterminate the Māori people
I suggest that a more accurate translation is “. . . from there the desire grew to exterminate the people who spoke Māori”.
[2] Collins, S. (2020, October 6), 'Child-centred' teaching blamed for NZ's educational decline, New Zealand Herald. cited in Rata, E. (2021). Curriculum design in a bicultural context, Special Issue (SI) – “International Perspectives on the Curriculum: Implications for Teachers and Schools” British Education Research Association (BERA)’s Research Intelligence. BERA Research Intelligence Special Issue #148 August, pp. 22-23.
[3] Te Kawehau Hoskins (2021, June 11). Universities must ‘indigenise’ to meet Māori agendas, Newsroom.
This article was first published on Open Inquiry
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