Children must know New Zealand’s story
What is it about our history that the Ministry of Education does not want the subject included as a compulsory curriculum topic?
The New Zealand History Teachers’ Association is the latest group to ask for New Zealand’s colonial history to be compulsorily taught in all schools but has been fobbed off with what association chairman Graeme Ball has called a cop-out.
In response to the request Ministry of Education deputy secretary Ellen MacGregor-Reid said the New Zealand curriculum was a flexible framework that allowed schools to deliver lessons relevant to their communities.
What that means is anyone’s guess but she said the ministry did not set out compulsory lesson plans that all schools must follow but expected all schools to teach about the Treaty of Waitangi, Ma¯ ori history and the New Zealand Land Wars.
The significance, interpretation and application of the Treaty of Waitangi are enshrined in the national curriculum, but only as an achievement objective in Level 5 Social Science which is applicable to Year 9 or 10 students only.
That is clearly far too late to start on such an important subject.
Last year St Paul’s Collegiate Head of History Defyd Williams was one of several academics and educationalist who also called for the full details of the New Zealand Land Wars to be taught in schools but received little in the way of meaningful support.
American school kids begin learning their history from day one as do children in English and Irish schools.
Some of us were taught selected parts of English history only, which had little if any relevance to us, but nothing of our own.
We were encouraged to be proudly British but being New Zealander was never mentioned.
We commemorate the New Zealanders who served England in the South African War of 1900, the First World War of 1914-1918, the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 and armed conflicts in Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and other places since but we seem strangely reluctant to teach about our first war and the only one we fought at home.
It was also the first time Australians and New Zealanders fought side by side; some 55 years before the Anzac tradition was born at Gallipoli.
Over the course of the initial Taranaki and Waikato campaigns 1800 Ma¯ ori and 800 Europeans were killed and total Ma¯ ori losses over the course of wars which spread to the East Coast of the North Island may have exceeded 2100 from a total population of about 120,000 people.
Today only a few battle sites have been preserved and only a few monuments and gravesites are known while the names of most of those who fought and died have all but been forgotten.
By contrast the American Civil War of the 1860s is remembered throughout the United States with monuments, parks, reserves and even full dress re-enactments.
Having recently spent a month in the UK and Ireland I was impressed with the detailed knowledge and pride those people had in their very long history going back almost 2000 years.
It is a history overflowing with violence, treachery, bloodshed and religious bigotry which far surpasses anything which ever happened here. Yet they are proud of their history, tragedies and all.
A campaign by Otorohanga College students resulted in October 28, 2017 being set aside as the first annual New Zealand Land Wars Day. The Treaty of Waitangi of 1940 and the New Zealand Land Wars which erupted 20 years later however are only two small, if dramatic and tragic, parts of our colonial history.
In addition to those regrettable and tragic events, which we should learn from, there is much more to celebrate and be proud of.
The meeting of two such very different cultures was almost guaranteed to result in violent confrontation.
Such events have happened in almost every other part of the world under similar circumstances.
That we survived at all and grew into the prosperous nation we are today is testimony to the courage and tenacity of Ma¯ ori and those who followed them here.
We are still far from the perfect nation, as no such nation exists, but without knowing the facts of our colonial history, warts and all, we have little chance of addressing the remnant issues we have inherited from the past.
It is no wonder we hear such ill-informed and ignorant commentary every time the details of a Waitangi Tribunal hearing are announced.
How can anyone be expected to understand the complexities of the issue if the underlying history is not known?
In a vacuum of reliable and fact-based knowledge, misinformation and bigotry grow like mushrooms in a dark place.
Our children and grandchildren have an undeniable right to be taught their complete history as a compulsory subject at an early age.
It is unacceptable to deny them that right.
How can anyone be expected to understand the complexities of the issue if the underlying history is not known?