Some teachers ‘wilfully blind’
Elton Rikihana Smallman asks why the seminal event of our history – the New Zealand Wars – isn’t a core school subject and how that could change.
A hard core of history teachers refuse to teach the country’s colonial history, say two academics.
They’ve labelled those teachers ‘‘wilfully blind’’ and unprofessional and the pair are calling for a survey to find out how much New Zealand history is being taught and to what level.
University of Canterbury senior lecturers Dr Richard Manning and Garrick Cooper, who call the schooling system racist for not teaching New Zealand’s colonial history, said the government needed tools to audit schools.
‘‘What Richard found is that history teachers are opting out of teaching New Zealand colonial history and now the Ministry [of Education] and the Government won’t survey its teachers to find out who is choosing teaching that stuff and who is not. We need more data on that as a very first step,’’ Cooper said.
On Thursday, Manning and Cooper made a submission to the Ma¯ori affairs select committee hearing into teaching history in schools.
It was in response to a New Zealand History Teachers’ Association campaign to ‘‘adopt an activist approach’’ to teaching our colonial history.
‘‘People out there don’t want to teach New Zealand history because it is seen as Ma¯ ori stuff,’’ Manning said. ‘‘You can go right back to the Taha Ma¯ ori and the curriculum reforms and I think people need to remember, as early as 1984, all round the country, Ma¯ ori students on a set day walked out of their classes in protest because they couldn’t see their reo or their Ma¯ ori histories reflected in the curriculum.
‘‘That was 1984, we are still having this debate. It’s wrong.’’
Manning and Cooper said schools were failing to meet the requirements of the Education Act and a slew of policies that compel the teaching of New Zealand’s history.
‘‘They don’t have to create any new legislation for this to happen,’’ Cooper said. ‘‘There is already existing legislation that, if followed, we wouldn’t be talking about this. It would already be happening.’’
Even then, at the coal face, teachers were failing to meet their own professional standards by not teaching the subject.
There was a hard core of resistance, Manning said. Even the association had about 20 per cent of its membership fail to give its campaign support.
‘‘If you’ve got teachers out there saying we don’t teach it, it’s too hard and it’s too scary and it’s not this and it’s not that, they are failing to meet these standards,’’ Manning said.
‘‘While there are a lot of good teachers out there, irrespective of their ethnicity, who are doing their best to meet these professional standards, there clearly appears to be a hard core of history teachers, especially, who refuse to budge. They want to stick with their Eurocentric curriculum and that’s not good enough.
‘‘I would call it a wilful blindness,’’ said Cooper. ‘‘Rather than having to deal with difficult issues and being complicit in colonial enterprise and racism, it’s better to be blind.’’
Teaching history is nonprescriptive, Cooper said. Under Department of Education rules, schools can choose what is taught and what is left out.
And there is no data. That needs to change, but it will take political will to make it happen, Manning said.
‘‘That’s not a ministry’s responsibility – they set policy. It’s not NZQA’s responsibility. It’s actually ERO [Education Review Office] going into schools and the legislation needs to be refined,’’ Manning said.
‘‘Would it be that hard for ERO, as part of their brief, to go into schools to ask for evidence that this is really happening? For the Government to say we don’t survey, well, that’s just disingenuous – because ERO goes in and schools are audited on student achievement against literacy and numeracy. Why not history?’’