Dame Whina vs The Avengers
banal travails of Ho¯ ne Heke or James Busby have?
The recent move to make the teaching of our history to children compulsory has nothing to do with the noble aspirations of pedagogy, however.
The submission to the select committee that came up with this new legislation contains the word Ma¯ ori 32 times in a mere six pages and makes it clear that the purpose of teaching history is to shape how children see our past so that they can become ‘‘more effective treaty partners’’.
In a memo to the Associate Minister of Education, Kelvin Davis, the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education went further.
‘‘To build a Treaty-based nation we need everyone to understand the Treaty, its history, and the perspectives of the diverse people who keep the Treaty alive as Treaty partners.’’
This raises the question; what if there are historical facts that would undermine building a Treaty-based nation?
Graeme Ball is the chairman of the New Zealand History Teachers’ Association and instigated the petition to Parliament for compulsory history education.
He recently declared: ‘‘People who have particular views on issues around the treaty or Ihuma¯ tao… that are a bit negative, they’re perfectly understandable, those views, because they’re based on ignorance. It’s not their fault.’’
If you want to teach history to achieve an outcome, such as a more liberal approach to the Treaty, then you are not a historian. You are a propagandist, and the fact that your cause is noble does not change that designation.
Our children are going to be given a politically correct and sanitised history. A bland rendition of heroic suffragettes, valiant failure in the Dardanelles and why the 19th Century land confiscations are responsible for the evil things Roger Douglas did.
Rather than indoctrinating today’s children to win tomorrow’s cultural wars perhaps we can introduce them to the works of George Orwell, where an alert student might stumble upon one of his more insightful quotes: ‘‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’’
If you want to teach history to achieve an outcome, such as a more liberal approach to the Treaty, then you are not a historian.