Mary Chamberlain, group manager or curriculum teaching and learning with the Ministry of Education.
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Classroom Controversy
by Rebecca Macfie
The new national curriculum introduces lofty aims of ensuring children learn how to think rather than to store up facts. But will it make them any better educated?
Here’s a vexing question for the start of the school year. Will the new national curriculum result in: a) smart, adaptable, competent youngsters primed to cope with a fast-changing 21st century, or b) a generation of kids who know how to work the latest technology, but have precious little general knowledge?
The correct answer, of course, is that it all depends on whom you choose to believe. Here’s Judy Hanna, principal of Mangere Bridge School and immediate past president of the primary-based Principals’ Federation: “We’re living in a different world this century. For children who start school today, the jobs for them have not been invented in many cases. I have a granddaughter – she’s only two and a half – and I would be really happy for her to go to any school in New Zealand that is teaching this new curriculum, because it’s going to equip her for the world she’s going to live in, not the world I lived in.”
Hanna, who was on the national reference group that oversaw the development of the new curriculum, says there are educators in the UK looking to New Zealand’s latest round of reform and saying, “Oh, if only we could have this, what wonderful things we could do.”
Now listen to Roger Moses, headmaster of Wellington College. He argues that the new curriculum, like its predecessor, is founded on a suite of false assumptions – that process matters more than content, that transferable skills matter more than knowledge. “Our youngsters of today are in extreme danger of being almost emasculated from the roots of their culture, and I don’t know that this particular [curriculum] goes a long way to helping that … Knowledge is being debased, and seen as less and less relevant.”
Moses, a member of the Education Forum lobby group, says the new document reveals yet again how susceptible our school system is to the latest educational theory. Remember Donald Graves and process writing, anyone?
Parents ought not to feel bad if they don’t have a clue what Hanna and Moses are on about. The launch of the curriculum late last year could easily have escaped notice amid the pre-Christmas frenzy. And, with its long list of eye-glazing imperatives – schooling will have “future focus”, kids will “learn how to learn”, they’ll be empowered, enterprising, connected, creators of knowledge, who are positive in their own identities, etc, etc, etc – there’s a fair chance that, for most, it slipped by in a fog of irrelevance.
Except that it’s anything but irrelevant. The New Zealand Curriculum 2007 – a slender 44 pages, plus nifty fold-out Achievement Objectives – mandates what, and how, kids will learn at school from its implementation in two years’ time.
The last curriculum framework had been in service barely a decade before it was subjected to a “stock take” and the long, slow, labour-intensive (15,000 people were involved, according to official estimates) process of forging a replacement began.
The previous 1993 curriculum had marked a new direction for New Zealand schools, away from a focus on content and activities to one based on “outcomes”. The old syllabus documents were thrown out and replaced with voluminous subject-based curriculum statements. Student progress was measured in “levels” (a kid in Year 6, for instance, might be anything from the top end of Level 2 to the bottom end of Level 5), subjects were carved up into “strands”, and learning was ticked off against hundreds of “achievement objectives” that spelt out what students were expected to be able to do. Periodically, the Education Review Office (ERO) would check up on schools – with particular emphasis, until the government ordered it to retract its teeth in the early part of this century, on compliance with the achievement objectives.
It all promised a brave new world where students would become “independent and lifelong learners” and schools would have flexibility to “design programmes which are appropriate to the learning needs of their students”, according to a 1993 paper by David Philips, of the Ministry of Education’s research division.
Instead, many teachers felt tied up in knots by the requirement to deliver on endless achievement objectives. Complaints from stressed teachers struggling to deliver an overcrowded curriculum became commonplace. Says Lester Flockton, emeritus director of Otago University’s Education Assessment Research Unit (EARU), it was a curriculum “a mile wide and an inch deep”.
So, does the new document bury this unhappy phase in New Zealand’s educational history? Not really – but it introduces some important refinements. For starters, it’s much shorter. Core academic subject requirements are boiled down to brief summaries of one or two pages. Among the expectations in science, for instance, is that schools will teach about the “composition and properties of matter, the changes it undergoes, and the energy involved”; maths must include “recognising and using the properties and symmetries of shapes and describing position and movement”.
The much-loathed achievement objectives are still there, but there are fewer of them, and teachers are given permission to pick and choose the ones that suit their programmes and students.
Schools won’t have to religiously cover the whole curriculum – they can do less, but in more depth, depending on where their students are at.
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