‘Reframes history’: fears Māori knowledge diluted in plan to revise New Zealand curriculum

Original article by Michelle Duff in Wellington

As cows grazed sleepily in a nearby paddock, then-14-year-old Leah Bell watched as a local Māori elder cried.

She was standing at the site of the massacre at Rangiaowhia, where Māori were deliberately burnt to death by the British crown in 1864. The site was just down the road from her Waikato high school. But she had never heard about it; in history, they’d been learning about the American civil war.

That “shameful” realisation led Bell and her classmates to organise a 13,000 strong petition to parliament in 2015, as part of a groundswell of young people pushed for the teaching of accurate New Zealand history, including the wars over land, in schools. This was made compulsory in 2023.

Now, the government wants to rewrite the history curriculum, removing and revising Māori history content and cutting some Māori words and references to the country’s foundational document, the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) from the overall syllabus.

Teachers, principals and academics are among the critics of the government’s planned reforms, which they say erases Māori knowledge and re-introduces rigid and outdated education methods.

“It’s deeply alarming,” says Bell, 26, who is of Pākeha (European New Zealand) – descent and is now a masters student in Māori and indigenous studies at Waikato University. “Why are they trying to reframe this history? We need to grapple with it.”

The proposed curriculum covers students in primary to junior high, aged between 5 and 14 years old. Those who have helped to write or oversee the changes say it’s a long-awaited move to a “discipline-driven” approach, which will lift school results and “rebalance” the curriculum.

Yet many see the changes as politically-driven and part of what they say is a wider attack on Māori language and culture in schools. It comes as more than 200 schools petition the government to reinstate a rule for school boards to ensure Māori was included in classrooms, and after Māori words were scrapped from some early readers.

‘Eurocentric’ focus

Work on a new curriculum had begun under former prime minister Jacinda Ardern, and a “refreshed” English and maths curriculum was released late last year. But the release of a final version of these subject areas last month-along with drafts of overarching documents and social sciences, which includes history-has caused distress.

Māori educators who worked on drafts say it is “unrecognisable,” dropping Māori themes, words, and references to the country’s foundational document. New Zealand history will still be taught, but has been re-written in a way that’s eurocentric, says Nepia Mahuika, an associate professor in history at Massey University.

“It doesn’t critique nationalism as you would expect in social sciences histories, it removes Māori content and replaces it with a world focus. We’ve always been skeptical of when you work with the state and what happens to indigenous histories, and you can see why.” Teachers and unions say the draft, out for consultation for six months, contains too much prescriptive content, with higher academic expectations at younger year levels.

Education minister Erica Stanford told the Guardian she “absolutely rejected” assertions it was sidelining Māori.”

“Social science needs to include New Zealand history, world history, geography, civics and financial literacy. It’s quite a big learning area … what we found was that the previous government’s history curriculum was so encompassing that there was no time to do anything else.”

Overall the curriculum was too vague, lacked consistency, and was not “knowledge-rich,” she said.

New Zealand pupils had “tanked” in OECD education rankings over the last 20 years, and this was designed to lift attainment, she said. Māori knowledge remained throughout, improved results showed her structured literacy approach was already working.

“The core tenet of the treaty is that we raise Māori achievement, and nobody has been able to do that. That is my responsibility.”

But part of the coalition government’s agreement with the libertarian ACT party included a policy to “rebalance” the curriculum. In a statement on social media, ACT leader David Seymour applauded the changes, saying the curriculum had been “fixed.”

“The Marxist ‘big ideas’ such as ‘Māori history is the foundational and continuous history of Aotearoa New Zealand’ and ‘The course of Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories has been shaped by the use of power’ are GONE. In their place is a new and balanced History Curriculum.”

Paul Moon, a professor of history at Auckland’s University of Technology, agreed the re-write was more holistic.

“There was a monolithic view of what colonisation is, which was Pākeha coming here and taking over the political institutions of the country and dominating pretty much everything. The very broad brushstroke good v bad view of things is not helpful, because it’s not real. It’s not as simple as it was made out.”

‘Going back to the past’

For many on the frontline, still negotiating pay and conditions and now tasked with introducing a new curriculum next year, there is disillusionment.

At Mt Cook School in Wellington, principal Adrianne McAllister, of Te Aitanga o Mahaki descent, said it felt as if they were battling a barrage of change that amounted to an erasure of Māori. She was worried about students at her school, who she said learned best when they saw themselves reflected.

“Whose knowledge is this? We want kids to be critical thinkers, to dissect information. We know this one-size fits all approach doesn’t work. It’s like going back to the past, and it didn’t work then. It’s just draining, and it breaks my heart.”

Others see this as a deliberate step backwards, one that has happened before.

“We were finally breaking the cycle of historical amnesia about our country’s past,” pre-eminent historian Vincent O’Malley said. “And now we’re putting it all at risk.”