NZ Wars deserve to be taught
The issue of New Zealand history being taught in New Zealand high schools is one that has attracted as much heat as light lately. Why are students studying this and not that? Why are educational authorities seemingly so resistant to change? Whose history is being taught and what impact does this have on our collective understanding of our past and ourselves?
As someone who elected to study history at high school, these are issues I feel as though I should have a definite opinion on. There can be little doubt as to the majority view, or at least what is taken as the majority view, attracting headlines and expressions of liberal sentiment.
To clarify my thinking, I decided to give my old high school history teacher a call. Who better to ask than someone from the ‘‘chalk face’’, a professional who taught with skill, wit and understanding for three decades or more?
Mike Burr’s precise recall of the fifth-, sixth- and seventh-form syllabus from the early 1980s served to refresh my memory. He was predictably articulate as to why Tudor and Stewart history was favoured at seventh-form level over a New Zealand option that existed even then, some 34 years ago. Rotorua Boys’ High did not have the texts and study guides for such a programme.
Later in his career, when Mike shifted to Taranaki, the opposite was true. After professional development that reflected and complemented his own master of arts thesis on the New Zealand Wars, he taught New Zealand history 1840-1920.
In the current climate, the teaching of Tudor and Stewart history has been criticised as though it were the scholastic equivalent of all those bodiceripping television series, an irrelevancy disconnected from the pressing issues of the moment or simply an uncomfortable reminder of cultural roots no longer much cherished in a country mindful of its Pacific location. Against this shallow populism, Mike’s views are refreshing.
He argues that the value of the study is ‘‘to acquaint students with the story of the journey from medieval personal to recognisably modern constitutional monarchy’’ providing ‘‘an introductory look at the political traditions of the Western democracy’’. Moreover, ‘‘we ought not to forget that what happened in Britain between 1558 and 1689 laid the foundations for what happened in the New Worlds of both hemispheres and in postindependence ex-colonies all over the place’’.
Given his research interest into the New Zealand Wars and subsequent forays into historical fiction in the same area, Mike’s attitude toward the clamour for curriculum reform is worth noting. He is suspicious of any teaching of history that lacks intellectual rigour, or is bound to predetermined themes in the manner of ‘‘the bastard child known as social studies’’. To teach the New Zealand wars ‘‘so we can self-flagellate’’ about how Ma¯ ori were wronged is to yield to a populist sense of ‘‘what everyone knows’’, to reduce complex issues to crude generalisations.
As he notes in his thesis introduction, ‘‘the struggles of the 1860s were not merely Ma¯ ori versus European, for many Ma¯ ori fought for the white man and one or two white men fought for the Ma¯ ori ... neither were they civilisation versus barbarism, for atrocities on both sides not withstanding, the protagonists often found occasion to honour each other’s bearing, dignity and courage ... they were, in short, nothing that falls readily into discernible categories of black or white, right or wrong, good or bad’’.
If the New Zealand Wars are to taught – and he is in favour of this as much as the next historian – Mike argues they should have done so in a wider context, similar to the one that underpins the study of the Tudor and Stewart eras. His suggestion for this again warrants quotation: ‘‘[T]he evolution of a nation from colonial beginnings to membership of the world community and involving such things as the economic bases of existence at varying stages, the social, political and sporting context of what it is to be a Kiwi, the struggle for the franchise (viz Chinese as well as women) and a more in-depth frame for what you studied as New Zealand foreign policy from colony to ballsy member of the UN.’’
It is doubtful that such a focus would satisfy the agendas of those making noise around these issues. Perhaps my old teacher is another of yesterday’s men, to be condemned for his age and skin colour. For me, he is still the master, a man not given to suffer fools, bend to trends or let politics get in the way of the truth.