Chris Baillie
ACT Education spokesperson and former teacher
The Government’s New Zealand history curriculum threatens to indoctrinate students in left-wing ideas and requires a radical overhaul.
The draft New Zealand history curriculum, which is out for consultation until 31 May, requires students to learn a narrow set of highly political stories from our past.
Jacinda Ardern promised a history curriculum that would promote a “better New Zealand that we can all be proud of and which recognises the value of every New Zealander”.
The draft curriculum’s “three big ideas” completely fail to achieve that.
One of the big ideas, that “Maori history is the continuous history of Aotearoa New Zealand”, excludes most New Zealanders from its narrative.
Another, that “colonisation and its consequences continue to influence all aspects of New Zealand society”, is dismal, depressing, and incorrect, casting some groups as villains and others as victims.
Not only that, the draft curriculum pushes left-wing narratives about the welfare state, gender identify law reform, and “cultural appropriation’.
It leaves out or brushes over economic and constitutional change, and New Zealand’s role in international relations.
ACT says the New Zealand history curriculum should be radically redrafted to give an honest and inclusive account of who the New Zealand people are.
If students are to be taught New Zealand history, they deserve an honest account of who we are as a nation.
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