It’s been more than two years since it was announced New Zealand history would be taught in schools. At last, the final curriculum is out, but what will students actually learn about and how will they learn it?
In 2019, the Labour-led Coalition Government announced a sea change in how schoolchildren in Aotearoa would learn about history.
From 2022 onwards, it promised every student from Year 1 to Year 10 would learn about their own country’s history.
It was a fraught process which stirred up considerable chagrin from historians and teachers.
It’s a bit behind schedule, but last week, the final curriculum was released to the public.
The curriculum, by its nature, is a broad and sweeping document, and there’s a lot of nebulous, high-minded talk of ‘principles’ and ‘underlining concepts’ – all of which is to say, it’s difficult to write down on a piece of paper exactly what a student who’s starting Year 1 in 2023 will know about Aotearoa’s history in 10 years’ time.
And it’s important to point out that schools and teachers have considerable licence in how they teach subjects like history: schools are being encouraged, for example, to incorporate their own region’s history into classes, which brings natural variation between towns, cities and schools.
Victoria University of Wellington Professor of History Charlotte Macdonald, who co-convened a panel which critiqued the draft curriculum, says this gives teachers the freedom to tailor the topics they choose to the students in their class, and to take advantage of the wealth of historical sources at their disposal.
“One of the things I think people don’t realise is what brilliantly deep resources we have in terms of newspapers, for instance.
“Newspapers have been printed and produced … from the early 19th Century, including quite a big collection in te reo Māori.
“A great portion of those newspapers are available in digital format through Papers Past.”
It hasn’t been plain sailing though: the ACT Party strongly criticised the curriculum, saying it was divisive and oversimplified, focused too heavily on colonisation, and painted a picture of a country with clear goodies and baddies.
In an on-air editorial, Newstalk ZB’s John MacDonald acerbically outlined some of the criticisms he’d heard: for example, that the curriculum could be summarised in three words: ‘white man bad’.
Macdonald says that perspective both misreads how the curriculum is written, as well as downplaying the gravity of the effect colonisation has had on Aotearoa.
“I don’t think anybody could look at the history of Aotearoa New Zealand and say colonisation is not a central part of our history. To say there’s too much of it is not a fair statement. It’s there, it’s part of something broader, it’s been absolutely determinative in how our history has unfolded. It’s critical that it’s there.”
Macdonald says colonisation wraps up a whole set of things: power relations, wars and dispossession of land.
“Those are real things that happened. They are catastrophic in their impact.
“[But] colonisation is also about the arrival of Europeans, coming to create new societies,” she says.
“It’s not about saying one lot are wrong and one lot are right, one lot are guilty and one lot are not. It’s about understanding how these events happened together. How people who might’ve been acting without a sense of coming to do injustice were part of a power system that was in itself unequal, and therefore had an unjust outcome.
“The purpose of studying history is to understand those structures, and the factors that drive those, in which the lives of individuals and communities are caught up and shaped and formed.
“The end result isn’t to put people in the dock and say, ‘Were you right or wrong’? It’s to understand how that happened. And in understanding how that happened … is how we can then live together understanding and knowing that and reckoning with it.”
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