History access

Your article ( NZ Herald, December 21) about preparations for the compulsory teaching of our history in 2022 raised important questions about its successful implementation.

Colonisation’s mechanisms and effects are fundamental to understanding its positive and negative legacy. As the foremost exponent of “settler colonialism”, Australian Patrick Woolf once said, that particular variety that depends on expulsions of indigenous population has had generational ripples we’re still dealing with.

Our 1890s law, breaking up land estates, meant we have traditionally been compared with Australia and South Africa. But our success in setting up a widely accepted Treaty process, despite compensating for only around 5 per cent of taken land value, also gives us mediation credentials for record-suppression or in-denial countries. As per Israel’s chief archivist Yaacov Lozowick finger-pointing his own government in 2018.

Making the subject student-friendly and teacher-friendly also requires ministry-led secondments to produce regularly edited, lesson-friendly IT clips, graded for level and ability. That would mean a regular secondment system, not leaving it to individuals or subject-associations. Plus a senior-school semester system enabling compulsory, universal and interesting teaching of civics possible — as well as other humanities choices that commentators such as Simon Wilson have been promoting — so far, unsuccessfully.

Steve Liddle, Napier.