Elizabeth Rata

https://sites.google.com/view/lilburne-rata-archive-nz/home

The Lilburne Rata Archive of New Zealand Education is a collection of school syllabus documents and associated classroom material from the 1870s to the 1970s. Our main aim in compiling the Archive was to address the lack of historical records available to curriculum researchers. We wanted to know exactly what was taught in New Zealand schools and to

capture the daily lives of teachers and pupils. Feeding that aim was our desire to provide material that will enable contemporary oral accounts, many passed down the generations and accepted uncritically as true, to be independently verified by historical documents. It is for private study, research and teaching.

Overall, the documents do show that a society’s memory of the past may not always be as the records show. That collective memory may often include the exceptional, the dramatic and the disturbing. In contrast the Archive provides a more settled picture of life in the classroom for generations of teachers and pupils since the 1870s. It reveals the many dedicated teachers who used teaching methods such as ‘praise’ that we would consider progressive today.

Significantly too, despite the hardships experienced by families, especially on the 19 th century and during the 1930s’ Depression, New Zealand children reached a high standard of literacy and numeracy. What does stand out from reading the huge range of material in the Archive is

the national commitment to education, a commitment from Māori and non-Māori alike and clearly visible from as early as the 1870s.

The material was collected by Katie Lilburne under the direction of Professor Elizabeth Rata.

Katie was a Bachelor of Education student at the University of Auckland and a University Summer Scholar. In the summer of 2021/2022 she travelled to many parts of New Zealand visiting libraries, museums, historical villages and archive offices in the search for historical

syllabus documents. These covered a wide range of material, from official syllabus documents to teacher lesson plans as well as fascinating personal accounts of life in the classroom. We wish to thank the librarians and archivists, many of whom are volunteers, for their practical assistance in locating the material but in particular for their enthusiasm for our

project. Without their generous help we would not have such a range and quality of curriculum records.

The Archive has been compiled in digital form in order to make it easily accessible for academic researchers, students and the general public.

You can locate documents and information from the 1870s-1980s through the Archive Drive itself. Alternatively you can use the Spreadsheet to help you narrow down some more specific options.

https://sites.google.com/view/lilburne-rata-archive-nz/home

We are keen to continue building the Archive and welcome any contributions. If you have anything you would like to add to the archive don’t hesitate to email Katie Lilburne at lilburnearchivenzed@gmail.com or Elizabeth Rata at e.rata@auckland.ac.nz

LEGISLATION AND HONOURING THE TREATY OF WAITANGI

Introduction

My name is Elizabeth Rata. I am a professor of education at the University of Auckland. This  submision draws on my expertise in education and in Treaty of Waitangi politics.

My submission proposes a way for New Zealand to honour the Treaty of Waitangi within the secular framework of liberal democracy. It requires removing the Treaty from legislation so that those who wish to honour it may do so in civil society.

I recommend that Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) 2025  is altered according to the FOUR recommendations I propose below in order to achieve this aim.

SCHOOL BOARDS OBJECTIVES SECTION 127(2)(e)

Section 127(2)(e)

“The Bill amends the objectives for school boards in governing schools by—

• making educational achievement the paramount objective (the highest-priority objective), while retaining the other objectives as supporting objectives (objectives that are essential and support the paramount objective); and adding a new supporting objective . . .

• repositioning the requirement that schools achieve equitable outcomes for Māori students in the supporting objective relating to Te Tiriti o Waitangi to increase its visibility . . .”

“Section 127(2)(e), which provides that, in meeting its paramount objective in governing a school, a board must ensure that the school gives effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, including by—

(i) achieving equitable outcomes for Māori students; and

(ii) working to ensure that its plans, policies, and teaching and learning programmes reflect local tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori,and te ao Māori; and

(iii) taking all reasonable steps to make instruction available in tikanga Māori and te reo Māori;”

My Argument

Section 127(2)(e) does not in fact reflect the intended paramount objective of the amended legislation; that of ensuring achievement. The inconsistency between intention and purpose makes Section 127(2)(e) not fit for the intended paramount objective. It should be removed from the Bill.

The inconsistency is created by an erroneous connection. Section 127(2)(e) connects giving effect to the Treaty in the ways described in the Bill to achieving equitable outcomes for Māori students. ‘Giving effect’ will require School Boards to adopt culturally responsive/ knowledge systems[i] education (Māori ways of doing, being, and knowing – tikanga, matauranga, te ao Māori). However culturally responsive/ knowledge systems education does not lead to educational achievement although it may have social and cultural benefits.

Comments to support the argument

Culturally responsive/knowledge systems education has been promoted in Ministry of Education policies[ii] since 2003 as the evidenced-based solution to educational under-achievement. The 2020 policy Te Hurihanganui A Blueprint for Transformational Systems Shift was intended to place “knowledge derived from Te Ao Māori” in the curriculum using an “other knowledge-systems”, i.e. a knowledge relativist, justification. This long-term ideology-driven policy development culminated in the 2022 Refreshed Curriculum.

The claim that culturally responsive/knowledge systems education leads to achievement is unsubstantiated. There are no longitudinal studies tracking student progress over time using reliable quantitative methods[iii]. Instead advocacy studies[iv], where the outcome is pre-determined, assert that culturally responsive/knowledge systems education leads to achievement. The claim is promoted by authorities such as the Ministry of Education, the New Zealand Council for Education Research, and radical academics. It is repeated uncritically in the media and accepted as fact[v].

The failure to conduct longitudinal studies from 1990 when kura Kaupapa Māori education was legislated means that many students, including Māori, have been subjected to a lengthy education experiment that is likely to embed disadvantage because it limits access to academic subjects in the sciences, arts and humanities. Culturally responsive/knowledge systems education has no support from international educational theory and cognitive science[vi]. An unaccountable experiment of such magnitude is unconscionable given the consequences for the two generations of students who have been the recipients of the experiment.

The Coalition Government has intentionally replaced culturally responsive/knowledge systems education with knowledge-rich education[vii] in order to meet the paramount objective of educational achievement. Knowledge-rich education acknowledges that educational achievement is the result of many factors[viii] but the following are essential: a national standardised high quality subject-based curriculum, direct instruction by teachers using cognitive science methods, well-managed schools, and committed parents.

Knowledge-rich education takes into account the two main purposes of schooling – to transmit knowledge and to socialise students into modern society. The purposes merge in the secular socialisation practices of the mainstream state school where a knowledge culture embraces students of all backgrounds.

Because liberal democracy provides choice for parents who wish a specific form of socialisation for their children, there are alternatives to state-funded secular education. Charter Schools with an iwi approach and kura kaupapa Māori are already available for those who wish their children socialised into te ao Māori. Such specific socialisation must be augmented by the provision of an academic curriculum in order to ensure educational achievement and entry into modern pluralist society.

Argument Summary

There is no educational justification for the Bill’s asserted and unsubstantiated connections between the Treaty, equitable outcomes, and achievement in Section 127(2)(e). The ways in which the Section requires giving effect to the Treaty are inconsistent with the Bill’s paramount objective of education achievement. For that reason Section 127(2)(e) should be removed.

RECOMMENDATION 1

Remove Section 127(2)(e) from the Bill.

SECTION 9: HONOURING THE TREATY

I recommend repealing the Bill’s General Policy Statement,  Section 9 and those Sections which give effect to Section 9, for example Section 4.

General Policy Statement —–“The Education and Training Act 2020 (the Act) establishes and regulates an education system that—honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi and supports Māori-Crown relationships.”

Section 9 Te Tiriti o Waitangi

“(1) The main provisions of this Act that recognise and respect the Crown’s responsibility

to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi are—

(a) section 4, which states that the purpose of this Act includes establishing

and regulating an education system that honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi and

supports Māori-Crown relationships.” (and other Sections as noted in the Bill)

My Argument

The belief that the Treaty should be honoured is held by an unknown proportion of the New Zealand population. These people may believe that to remove the Treaty from the Bill is to dishonour it. However that is not the case. It is possible for the Treaty to be honoured and to remove it from legislation. The remainder of my submission addresses this paradox.

Comments to Support the Argument

Belief and Legislation

To honour or not to honour follows from what one believes the Treaty means. Some New Zealanders believe fervently that the Treaty must be honoured. Others do not – equally fervently. For some the Treaty is our nation’s founding document. Not so for others. It is a sacred covenant with a timeless spirit for some, but merely an historical document for others. Some believe it is the nation’s constitution. Others believe it is not. As with all beliefs, there is no proof either way, no right or wrong. You either believe or you don’t. 

When a belief is inserted into legislation however, the belief acquires the status of doctrine. It is then treated as if it were a true fact. The belief in its new form as true fact is regulated through policy and practice. The belief now has power. Adherence is required even from those who do not subscribe to the belief or who are opposed to it. In this way, institutionalising beliefs undermines the state’s secular bedrock. 

‘To give effect to . . .” is the phrase in the Bill which requires that adherence.

“Giving effect to the Treaty” may affect individuals’ employment conditions or professional status. At that point, the belief, the law and individuals’ freedom are in direct conflict. There are numerous examples of this conflict[ix]. I predict many more unless the Treaty is removed from legislation.

Lessons from New Zealand History

We would be wise to look to history to see how parliamentarians dealt with the issue of belief and legislation. In 19^th century New Zealand, the issue had the potential for serious conflict between Christian religious denominations. In  the 21^st century, the issue concerns race and the Treaty – also with potential for division and conflict.

Nineteenth century parliamentarians secured a tolerant and united civil society and state institutions which gave effect to the foundational democratic principles of universalism, freedom, and equality. They understood that when divisions are institutionalised, they are made permanent but when those same divisions are shifted to civil society with its plurality of beliefs and opinions, they are defanged. Civil society is forced to deal with difference by individuals exercising tolerance.

A unified and peaceful nation was created by making the state secular, a remarkable achievement that we are in danger of losing.

The 1877 Education Act captures the wise and foresighted intent of our ancestors.

Secular Education

Section 84(2) of the 1877 Education Act states:

“The school shall be kept open for five days in each week for at least four hours, two of which in the forenoon and two in the afternoon shall be consecutive and the teaching shall be entirely of a secular character.”

The final decision to legislate for a secular education system was seen as neither pro-Christian nor anti-religion. It was a decision for tolerance with beliefs to be accommodated in civil society at large, not authorised by the state to be practised in state institutions.

In typical liberal style which tends to stretch the principle of freedom as far as is tolerable, ways were found to accommodate religion in education while at the same time ensuring that state schools were secular. [x]

1. Choice was, and continues to be, provided – private and religious schools, integrated schools, kura kaupapa Maori, special designated schools, charter schools; and at tertiary level – seminaries, wananga, and private institutions.
2. Communities could, with the School Committee’s agreement, provide religious education when the school was officially closed – known as the Nelson System.
3. The 1964 Education Act allowed for the social studies curriculum to provide instruction about but not in[xi]the various worldreligions.

Honouring tradition

The nation’s Christian heritage is honoured by maintaining some traditional rituals at state events where the spiritual realm is evoked to recognise the enormity of death and disaster. Examples are the appeal to the Christian God in the National Anthem and Christian prayers at Anzac Day. Because the rituals express tradition, non-believers tend to accept them. Attendance at these events is voluntary.

The Treaty of Waitangi could be honoured in the same way. Ceremonies and rituals commemorating traditions which link to the Treaty provide occasions for honouring this major event in the nation’s heritage. Waitangi Day and Matariki are national events of this type. As with religious rituals, non-believers who prefer to recognise the ritual for the evocation of tradition rather than the expression of belief may choose to attend.

Civil society is where the Treaty can be honoured by those who believe it is sacred and timeless, just as the Bible is honoured by those who believe in the Christian faith. But when the Treaty is institutionalised through legislation it becomes an object of division and conflict.

A secular state enables social cohesion by not including beliefs in state institutions. The right to hold and practise beliefs is legislated but not the beliefs themselves.

RECOMMENDATION 2

Remove the Bill’s General Policy Statement and the Te Tiriti o Waitangi Section 9(1)(a).

RECOMMENDATION 3

Remove Section 127(2)(e) as a consequence of deleting Section 9.

RECOMMENDATION 4

Part 4 Section 281

Include the term ‘institutional neutrality’ (meaning ‘secular’ in modern parlance) to support the freedom of expression and academic freedom provisions for universities. This supports Recommendation 2 above. Deleting the Bill’s General Policy Statement and the Te Tiriti o Waitangi Section 9(1)(a) will strengthen Section 281’s intention.

A university cannot be secular or neutral if it must give effect to the belief in honouring the Treaty.

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[i] ‘Knowledge systems’ is the latest way to refer to the knowledge relativism promoted by postmodern academics since the 1980s. It is more correctly ‘belief systems’ but the word ‘knowledge’ reinforces the error that there is no universal way of understanding and explaining natural phenomena. In education policy, the term mana orite promotes this so-called ‘knowledge equivalence’ with heritage groups having their own knowledge systems. Modern science is falsely described as a cultural knowledge system, that of the ‘West’.

I have used the rather elongated term ‘culturally responsive/knowledge systems education’ to capture both the curriculum and pedagogy – both what is taught and how it is taught.

[ii] Ministry of Education reports promoting culturally responsive/ knowledge systems education include:

Bishop, R., Berryman, M., Tiakiwai, S. and Richardson, C. (2003). Te Kotahitanga: The Experiences of Year 9 and 10 Maori Students in Mainstream Classrooms. Report to the Ministry of Education. Wellington: Ministry of Education.

Ministry of Education (2009). Ka Hikitia – Accelerating Success. The Maori Education Strategy 2008-2012.

Ministry of Education Ka Hikitia – Accelerating Success. The Maori Education Strategy 2013-2017. Wellington: Ministry of Education.

Ministry of Education (2015). Ka Hikitia in action – kia rewa ki runga

Ministry of Education (nd). Kia Eke Panuku: Building on Success. Culturally responsive and relational pedagogy.

Ministry of Education (2020). Te Hurihanganui A Blueprint for Transformative Systems Shift

Ministry of Education (2022). Te Mataiaho: The Curriculum Refresh.

[iii] Longitudinal studies are required to find reliable quantitative evidence about students who under-achieve.

Ministerial Curriculum Advisory Group Report (MAG) (2024) Appendix 2: Standards of Evidence, pages 34-38. “The MAG will consider only studies that use quantitative measures of learning, preferring those with psychometric properties that have been shown to be valid.” (p. 34).

It is negligent of the Ministry to have not conducted a longitudinal study of the various iterations of culturally responsive/ knowledge systems education. Such research would have provided actual evidence.

Longitudinal studies are the international ones (PISA and TIMSS) which show the decline of NZ education in Maths, Reading and Science since 2003. Other OECD countries show a similar decline – all of which moved to a mixture of constructivism, student-centred, 21^st century ‘learnification’ approaches combined with a less rigorous subject-based curriculum. Some of these countries are, like NZ, now adopting a knowledge rich curriculum and explicit teaching methods. See Rata, E. (Ed). (2024). Research Handbook on Curriculum and Education. Edward Elgar Publications.

Figure1: New Zealand PISA2022 trends in mean achievement of mathematics, reading literacy, and sciences, in Nuijinsing, J., Rata, E., Vanhees, C., Geudens, A., Surma, T., and D. Muijs, D.  (in press). Re-imagining the Curriculum: A Case Study of the Knowledge Turn in New Zealand and Flanders. In Swift, D., and B. Barrett (Eds.), Knowledge Production and Exchange in Education: New Perspectives from Social Realism for Curriculum and Professional Practice  Routledge.  (7th Cambridge Symposium Volume) 

[iv] See Fortune, K., Durie, K., Palmer, G. (2024). Ma mua ka kite a muri, ma muri ka ora a mua – “Equity” in kura mana Māori Motuhake, a literature review commissioned by the Ministry of Education and conducted by The Wahanga, NZCER’s Kaupapa Māori Research Unit. It is almost impossible to conduct studies into Māori education without taking an advocacy approach. Research ethics approval, research funding, and publication in New Zealand journals are tightly controlled by Kaupapa Māori advocates, including those on the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. As a result the very limited number of publications that are critical of political advocacy in education are mainly international publications.

[v] It is not possible to evaluate claims that culturally responsive/ knowledge systems education leads to achievement for Māori students without taking account of (at the bare minimum):

• The number and type of schools which practise this form of education and how it is understood and implemented
• Comparisons between Māori students in culturally responsive/ knowledge systems education with those in mainstream schools which follow a subject curriculum
• The backgrounds of Māori students including socio-economic status, parental education, and other factors known to affect student performance

In addition, anecdotal accounts of individuals who are regarded as ‘success stories’ for culturally responsive/ knowledge systems education need to take into account factors which led to the success. For example, what subjects were taken at school? The extent of abstraction in a subject creates varying degrees of difficulty, something found, for example, in the difference between physics and communication or culture studies.  Was the achievement measured by NCEA standards or by University Entrance? Was the post-school career path made available on merit or by affirmative action policies such as Te Rautaki Ao Takitaki: The stars that guide us’ (2022-2025), a Parliamentary staff hiring policy requiring competencies in te ao Māori.

[vi] Tim Surma, Claudio Vanhees, Michiel Wils, Jasper Nijlunsing, Daniel Willingham, John Hattie, Nuno Crato, Daniel Muijs, Elizabeth Rata, Dylan Wiliam, & Paul A. Kirschner. (2025). Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Turn. Springer.  

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74661-1.

Rata, E. (Ed.), (2024). Research Handbook in Curriculum and Education. Edward Elgar Publishing. 

[vii] Ministerial Curriculum Advisory Group Report (MAG) (2024)

[viii] Ministerial Curriculum Advisory Group Report (MAG) (2024)

Surma et al (2025 – see endnote v

[ix] Employment conditions are compromised when prayers/ karakia and other forms of spiritual evocations are held during working hours. For example, the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Auckland, where I am employed begins Faculty meetings with a prayer despite being a secular institution. This practice is commonplace in the public service and in education. Professional status may be affected, even to the extent that practising licences are withdrawn. Janet Dickson’s challenge to the the Real Estate Authority’s mandatory requirement of Treaty training is the most egregious example of the pusillanimous response of many professional bodies to ideological pressure.

[x] Although state schools remain secular to this day the requirement is weakened by the changes to the exemptions.

The 2020  Education and Training Act 2020 states that Teaching in State primary and intermediate schools must be secular (Section 97)

(1) Teaching in every State primary and intermediate school must, while the school is open, be entirely of a secular character.

There are two limited exemptions in state schools. (My emphasis).

One exemption is similar to the ‘Nelson System’ but with greater flexibility for religious observance during the school day “ if a State school’s board, after consultation with the principal, determines that school buildings may be used for the purposes of religious instruction or observances conducted in a manner approved by the board”. (Section 56)

The 2020 Act includes an additional exemption with Section 57(1)(b) a potential trojan horse for including belief-based education when the ‘normal curriculum’ is (mis)represented as ‘knowledge systems’ education.

Section 57 Additional religious instruction

(1) This section applies if the Minister is satisfied that—

(a) the majority of the parents of students attending a State school wish their children to receive religious instruction additional to that provided under section 56; and

(b) the additional religious instruction is not to the detriment of the normal curriculum of the school.

Section 58 imposes conditions on the two exemptions. Student attendance at religious instruction must be confirmed (1) A student enrolled at a State school may only attend or take part in any religious instruction at the school if a parent of the student has confirmed in writing to the principal that they wish for the student to take part or attend.

Section 57(1)(b) is relevant to the first part of my submission where I describe the damage done to NZ education by including the ‘knowledge systems’ approach into the curriculum.  These are belief systems but are falsely misrepresented as knowledge systems by postmodern relativists. Such belief systems, including religious instruction and observances, are not subject to the requirements and procedures of science – i.e. objective, provisional, falsifiable, and universal, therefore they are to the detriment of the normal curriculum of the school and contrary to Section 57(1)(b).

[xi] The principle of secularism in state institutions is maintained when students in state schools are taught about local tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori, and te ao Māori but not instructed into the beliefs – an indoctrination approach made respectable by refering to beliefs as ‘knowledge systems’. Appropriate curriculum subjects for the inclusion of such content are history, social studies, language (English and Māori), and geography. The content must be selected for its accuracy and taught in an objective manner.

Attention must be paid to ensure that matauranga Māori is not presented as science. Matauranga Māori is based on the belief in the existence and operation of a spiritual sphere as the explanation for natural and physical phenomena, similar to creationism. Science ascribes the explanation to the properties and processes of the phenomena. The knowledge systems approach, also known as mana orite or knowledge equivalence, that the Bill in its present form recognises would include both supernaturalism and naturalism. This will lead to widespread confusion amongst students about what science is. See an account of this in The History and Philosophy of Science and Science Teaching Newsletter, May 2025. May HPS&ST Newsletter, available HERE

More importantly the inclusion of matauranga Māori in the state school Science curriculum may be illegal in that it contradicts Section 57(1)(b). Although the beliefs in a causation spiritual force are not presented explicitly as “additional religious instruction”, when taught using the relativist knowledge system justification, the effect is to provide students with instruction into beliefs that are not science. This is “to the detriment of the normal curriculum of the school.

Content about the empirical methods of observation and trial and error used by all ancestral groups including Māori, can be included in social studies courses about the history of science.

Beliefs in a guiding spirit world (mauri) may be included in non-secular schools (i.e. Christian, te ao Māori-based) for the purpose of socialising students into those beliefs, but the curriculum itself must be secular if it is to lead to achievement. This is an accommodation of the two purposes of schooling – socialisation and knowledge transmission – one that mainstream Christian schools have come to terms with since the evolution and vitalism debates of the 19^th century were resolved concerning the naturalism of modern science.

This Submission contains:

1. Comments on the Draft English Curriculum. Pages 1- 3.
2. Argument for Prescription. Page 4 – 5.
3. Prescription in the English Curriculum. Page 5.
4. Suggestions for Prescribed and Recommended Titles. Pages 6-18
5. Language and Trust in the Curriculum. Comments about language used in curriculum documents regarding Māori borrowings into NZ English and sex-specific language. Page 19.

1. COMMENTS ON THE DRAFT ENGLISH CURRICULUM

I support the Draft English Curriculum (March 2025):

• It is knowledge-rich because it is subject-based and designed for epistemic coherence
• It provides a standardised curriculum for all students across the nation
• It recognises that student achievement requires teaching methods using direct teacher instruction and well-planned student activities
• It recognises cognitive science learning principles in the curriculum design and in  teacher planning for content delivery

Once finalised this curriculum will make a significant contribution to increasing educational achievement for all New Zealand students regardless of sex, race, location, and individual needs.

The following 8 points describe features in the Draft English Curriculum I support including my recommendations for further development.

1. ENGLISH – A SCHOOL SUBJECT

The Draft Curriculum defines English as a bounded subject with a distinct body of knowledge – English language and English literature. This is knowledge that is disciplinary derived and accountable. It recognises that the curriculum’s specific purpose is the study of English language and literature both for its own intrinsic value and to enable students to attain high standards of language use in their own work.

Proposition

School Subject English is the study of the written and spoken language and literature in the English language that functions as the instrument of thought and means of communication[i].

• ENGLISH LANGUAGE CONTENT

English language content is specified and prescribed – Grammar:  e.g. construction rules and punctuation;  Vocabulary – e.g. semantics, etymology, morphology, pronunciation, spelling.

Resources required will include:

• General and Specialised Vocabulary Lists (e.g. Green and Lambert, 2018)
• Spelling Lists
• Grammar textbooks containing practice exercises

Students should also keep their own vocabulary lists that are continued from year to year so that they can see the development of their vocabulary across time. In the senior years these lists will contain increasing numbers of specialised words.

• ENGLISH LITERATURE CONTENT

The genres of English literature are included – poetry, novel, short story, non-fiction, Shakespearean works, drama, literary analysis, and visual works.

Specific titles are in the Suggested Works List appended to the draft document. The Draft Curriculum notes that the list is incomplete.

I have made the case for prescribed titles below and included an extensive list below  – see pages 5-18 of this Submission.

Although I have not included collections of traditional stories in Section C below, I would like to see specified myths and legends in the final curriculum document. Students should be taught the source of many literary symbols and allusions that have influenced English (and NZ English). They include Biblical, Greek, Roman, Old and Middle English (e.g. Arthurian), Viking, Polynesian, and Māori and refer to creation beliefs, morality (heroes and villians), and human universality (birth, growth, death).

Proposition

Traditional Stories are aboutcreation mythologies, legends, and folklore containing humanity’s universal themes which provide the symbolic repertoire for literary allusions in English language and literature. 

• READING

Reading is both a secondary cognitive (mental or intellectual) ability and an accompanying set of specific skills that are developed in daily practice. Along with the teacher-directed study of prescribed literary works, teachers should encourage reading for pleasure by directing students to a range of books. The final English Curriculum should expand on the Draft by explicitly referring to the practices that should be taught for students to acquire a lifelong love of reading.

These practices include:

• A daily reading routine
• Vocabulary knowledge for comprehension abilities and decoding skills
• Confidence in book selection
• Reading a range of genres
• Keeping a reading log from year to year
• Sharing favourite titles with others, including family members of different generations
• Knowledge about the history of public and school libraries and their use

• WRITING

Writing is a secondary cognitive ability. It requires abilities and skills that are even more demanding than those required for reading. Language structural components and features (grammar and vocabulary) should be specifically taught through the analysis of the prescribed quality literature (see list below) so that students appreciate what good writing actually is. Daily essay and creative writing develop the abilities and skills which enable students to apply that appreciation to their own work. Given the sheer difficulty of writing well, the process takes many years of teacher directed study and concentrated practice.

• CURRICULUM DESIGN

Coherence: The Draft English Curriculum content is designed according to the coherence of its epistemological structure (knowledge-that) using the scientifically justified Curriculum Design Coherence Model (CDC Model)[ii]. This can be seen in the reference to content as ‘know-that’, content which precedes and drives its use in connected skills of ‘know-how-to’. I recommend that the internal workings of the CDC Model be shown so that it is clear exactly how coherence is achieved through the logical relationships established between concepts and content.

Progression: The content’s coherent structure enables intentional progression from least abstract to most abstract. This guides selection content from junior to senior years.

Propositions are used in the CDC Model to assert, propose or claim the meaning of a topic and to frame its design. I discuss the primary of meaning as the driver of word choice in Section E but wish to alert the reader to it here.

• COGNITIVE SCIENCE

The CDC Model’s coherent curriculum design supports teaching sequencing as demonstrated in the Draft English Curriculum. Such deliberative sequencing recognises the cognitive science principles of prior learning, working and long-term memory, formative and summative assessment, historical time perception, and cognitive overload. Intentional curriculum design and teaching sequencing connects teaching to learning by recognising these cognitive processes.

• TEACHING METHODS

The most effective teaching methods are direct teacher instruction of content that has already been designed. The teacher’s professional work is to plan and teach that content and the accompanying student practice activities. The Draft Curriculum recognises this.

Thankfully the Draft excludes the failed ‘learnification’ methods of the 2007 Curriculum. These were responsible for teachers’ loss of authority as experts. Instead they became ‘faciliators of learning’[iii]. Students no longer studied subjects but became ‘learners’ pursuing their own unformed interests.

• THE ARGUMENT FOR PRESCRIPTION IN THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

1. The purpose of a national curriculum is to transmit the modern nation’s collective representations to each generation. These representations are the cultural connection between the past and the future. Their unifying function creates and maintains society’s cohesion and enables democratic governance for a pluralist society. They enable a modern pluralist society in which people do not share the same heritage but are committed to a shared future.

Therefore what is in a nation’s curriculum concerns the nation generally and is not of interest only to those in the education sector or to localised interest groups.  The curriculum is a public matter. This is my main reason for encouraging members of the public to make a submission on the Draft English Curriculum.

• The authority for knowledge is located in the subject itself, an authority drawn from the foundational discipline’s provisional body of knowledge, to which the school subject is accountable. Subject content selection is not authorised by teacher or student preferences, nor is it justified by interests which arise from outside the subject, including for example, teachers’ political ideology or a community’s religious beliefs.

• Teachers’ professionalism includes autonomy over how they teach what is already in the curriculum. But there are limits even to a teacher’s autonomy over the methods used in the classroom. The most effective teaching method is when subject material is taught explicitly using direct teacher instruction. Then a range of carefully planned activities provide students with practice in using the content. This approach also has the advantage of restoring teacher authority. The teacher is the pedagogical expert, justifying claims for professional status.

The argument against curriculum prescription rests on four main claims which were used to justify the 2007 New Zealand localised curriculum. They led to the decline in New Zealand education standards.

The claims are:

1. That teachers are professionals therefore should have autonomy over what they teach (the curriculum) as well as how they teach (pedagogy).
2. That the curriculum should teach localised content drawn from students’ experience. This claim gives the authority for curriculum selection and justification to the local community. It is a ‘place-based’ and local experience approach to the curriculum that has seen the emptying out of subject knowledge in some schools. However, place-based experiential knowledge cannot be designed using epistemic structuration principles – that requires subject concepts which are recognised epistemic structures by the CDC Model.
3. That teaching should consist of the student-centred, social constructivist methods of the past 20 years. These ‘learnification’ methods include inquiry learning, project learning, therapeutic education, outcomes-based and skills-based approaches. They are discredited.[iv]
4. That culturally responsive pedagogies lead to educational achievement. Numerous claims that evidence exists for the success of this teaching method are not substantiated[v]. Educational achievement is the result of being taught subject knowledge, regardless of heritage.

• PRESCRIPTION IN THE ENGLISH CURRICULUM

I support the Draft English Curriculum’s prescription of grammar, vocabulary, and the literary genres of poetry, the novel, short story, drama, oratory, non-fiction, and visual works.

I would go further to require –  

PRESCRIBED LITERARY TITLES

1. Prescribed titles are essential for the integrity of English as a subject. They are justified because they are the subject’s language and literary repertoire – its body of knowledge. The literary repertoire or canon consists of poetry, prose, oratory, and drama which are universally recognised for their quality.

• Prescribed historical titles are essential for four reasons:

1. They have ‘stood the test of time’ and the scrutiny of literary criticism.

• They deal with universal, age-old themes about humanity, and at the same time, contain the language, beliefs, practices, and specific cultural mores of the place and time in which they were written. By studying historical works, students understand that they cannot impose contemporary morality and language upon the past. They gain understanding about why discrimination and prejudice may no longer be tolerated, realising that such tolerance remains limited to those parts of the world which recognise universal human rights.

By understanding the universality of life’s experiences, despite those experiences being located in time and place, students accept the universal human being as the primary mode of existence and as the political category for democracies which adhere to universal human rights. Citizenship cannot be understood or exercised without this acceptance.

• The understanding of change over time develops students’ historical time perception. This is an essential secondary cognitive ability. It replaces the spontaneous primary cognition which locks students into a ‘presentist’ mode of thought unable to understand human agency as the cause of change over time. (The study of etymology also contributes to the development of historical time perception.)

RECOMMENDED TITLES are justified because:

They may be:

• Of high quality but the work is too new to have passed the test of literary critique to ensure a place in the canon
• Of high quality but there are limits to the number of prescribed works that can be taught in any given school year
• Popular works that will contribute to students’ enjoyment of reading

• MY SUGGESTIONS FOR PRESCRIBED AND RECOMMENDED TITLES

I have included specified titles for the main literary genres in the prescribed lists below. This is to ensure that major works of the English literary canon are read by all New Zealand students. I recognise that the list should be subject to critique and change on a regular basis.

There are also recommended titles that teachers may wish to include along with the prescribed one.

I have included a proposition for each genre so that the concepts which define the genre are made explicit. The propositions provide the reasons for the selection and justification of content and are required if the curriculum is designed using the CDC Model’s design method. I know that others may challenge my propositions and propose a superior definition. After all, saying what poetry is, or why Shakespeare matters has exercised scholars for centuries. The challenge is to be welcomed – all part of the relentless criticism of the truth-seeking scientific method.

POETRY

Proposition

Poems are works of literary quality written in English, in New Zealand English,  in translation into English from Māori and other languages. They contain layers of meaning, pleasing sounds, vivid imagery, and a connection of sound and images to meaning that stimulate and intrigue generations of readers across time and place. 

Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10	Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
Prescribed	Prescribed	Prescribed	Prescribed	Prescribed	Prescribed	Prescribed
Rain, Hone Tuwhare (1992)    The Tyger, William Blake (1794)     Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll (1906)   The Magpies, Denis Glover (1941)      Nana, Glenn Colquhoun (1999)    Beowulf Modern excerpts from the Old English epic	Funeral Blues, W. H. Auden (1936)   For a five-year-old, Fleur Adcock (1964)    O Captain! My Captain! Walt Whitman (1865)    Sea Fever, John Masefield (1902)   Sonnet 130 William Shakespeare (1609)   Journey of the Magi T.S. Eliot (1923)   I’m Nobody, Who are You? Emily Dickinson (1891)	Milking Before Dawn, Ruth Dallas (1953)    Daffodils, William Wordsworth (1804)     Sea Call, Hone Tuwhare (1975)     An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, William Butler Yeats (1919)     The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost (1915)     Sonnet 27 William Shakespeare   A Poison Tree, William Blake	The Old Place, Hone Tuwhare (1983)    High Country Weather, James K. Baxter (1945)    Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818) [sonnet]     Ode to Autumn John Keats (1820)    Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare   Drunken Gunners, M.K. Joseph   No Man is an Island, John Donne (1624)   The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe (1845)	How Do I love Thee ? Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1845)    Because I could not stop for death, Emily Dickinson (1863)    Elegy for an Unknown Soldier, James K. Baxter   Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen (1921)    The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William Butler Yeats (1888)    Sonnet 75, William Shakespeare   Fire and Ice, Robert Frost (1920)	Darkness,  Alfred, Lord Byron (1816)    The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue (opening verses), Geoffrey Chaucer (1476)     Sonnet 138, William Shakespeare   She Walks in Beauty, Lord Byron, (1832)   I have a Rendezvous with Death, Alan Seegar (1817)   Ode to a Nightingale John Keats (1819)	The Sun Rising,  John Donne (1633)    Sonnet 116 William Shakespeare (1609)   This be the Verse, Phillip Larkin (1971)   Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1751)   On Passing the New Menin Gate Siegfried Sasson (1919)   Ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats (1819)
Recommended
Caterpillar, Christina Rossetti     Early, Rachel Bush (2011)     The Naming of Cats, T.S Eliot (1939)     Boy’s Song, Sam Hunt (1991)     Five Poems About Auckland, Renee Liang (2008)    In Flanders Field, John McCrae (1915)     Rosary, Courtney Sina Meredith (2018)     Caterpillar, Christina Rossetti   Little Girl, Be Careful What You Say, Carl Sandburg (1978)   Tāmati, Zane Scarborough (2013)	Afakasi Chameleon, Selina Tusitala Marsh (2015)     Night Mail, W.H Auden (1936)    Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line, Peter Cape attributed (1957) (folk)    You Are Old, Father William, Lewis Carroll (1865) (nonsense verse)    “Hope” is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson (1861)     Waiheke, James Brown (2018)     Gus The Theatre Cat, T.S Eliot (1939)    God’s Plan, Oliver Wendell Holmes [limerick]     If, Rudyard Kipling (1943)    Aunties Are Boss, Maeraea Rakuraku (2013)	Unity, Selina Tusitala Marsh (2016)     The Highwayman, Alfred Noyes (1906) [ballad]    A Consumer’s Report, Peter Porter (1970)     The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson (1854) [ballad]    The Lady of Shalott, Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842) [ballad]     Requiem, Robert Louis Stevenson	On Joining Pasifika (For Jo), Karlo Mila (2005)   Song at Summer’s End, A. R. D. Fairburn (1947)    Strange Fruit, Abel Meeropol (1937)    The Identification, Roger McGough (1972)    Ulysses Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1842)   A noble sacrifice — Hoea ra te waka nei, Apirana Ngata, P. H. Tomoana, P. H. In Māori and English	Refugee Mother and Child, Chinua Achebe (1971)    Late Song,   Lauris Edmond (2000)    The Thought Fox, Ted Hughes (1957)    My Father Scything, Sam Hunt (2008)    Mother to Son,  Langston Hughes (1922)    Stormy Weather, Kevin Ireland   Resistance, Cilla McQueen (2002)    An African Thunderstorm, David Rubadiri (1963)    To Any Reader, Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)	Metaphors, Sylvia Plath (1959)     Poems from Nga Moteatea The Songs, Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Collected by A.T. Ngata, Translated by Pei Te Huinui Jones. Facsimile published in the 1970s.   On his Blindness, John Milton   Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas (1952)	The Little Miracles, Malika Booker (2019)   To a Friend, Allen Curnow (1997)    Papatūānuku,  Karlo Mila (2020)   Child in the Gardens: Winter, Vincent O’Sullivan (2004)    Brueghel’s Two Monkeys, Wislawa Szymborska (1957)    The Sea is History  Derek Walcott   Holy Sonnet 10 John Donne (1633)

Poetry Anthologies

Poems from Nga Moteatea The Songs, Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Collected by A.T. Ngata, Translated by Pei Te Huinui Jones. Facsimile publishedin the 1970s.

Maori Poetry: An Introductory Anthology [translation and commentary], Margaret Orbell (1978) 

As recommended in the Draft English Curriculum, Suggested Text List.

NOVEL

Proposition

The novel is a literary genre of the modern era which uses imaginative elements of fiction such as setting, plot, character, and stylistic features to develop an extended and coherent story about the human experience.

Prescribed

Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10
The Snow Goose, Paul Gallico (1940)	The Haunting, Margaret Mahy (1982)	The Whale Rider, Witi Ihimaera (1987)	Animal Farm, George Orwell (1945)

Recommended

Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum (1900)  Running on the Roof of the World, Jess Butterworth (2017)  Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl (1975)  Truth About Everything, Bridget Farr (2022)  The Night Diary, Veera Hiranandani (2018)  The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson (1911)  The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis (1950)  The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis (1950)  Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Montgomery (1908)  Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Robert C O’Brien (1971)  Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson (1977)  Black Beauty, Anna Sewell (1877)  Dawn Raid, Pauline, Vaeluaga Smith (2018)  Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)  Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred D. Taylor (1977)   Teacher selection	Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling (1997) Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972)  Little Women, Louisa Alcott (1868)  Before We Were Free, Julia Alvarez (2002)  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (1865)  Lizard’s Tale, Weng Wai Chan (2020)  The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (2008)  Under the Mountain, Maurice Gee (1979)  Once, Morris Gleitzman (2005)  Coming Back, David Hill (2004)  Finding, David Hill (2018)  Life on the Refrigerator Door, Alice Kuipers (2007)  How to Bee, Bren MacDibble (2017)  Goodnight Mr Tom, Michelle Magorian (1981)  Warhorse, Michael Morpurgo (2002)  Private Peaceful, Michael Morpurgo (2003)  Hatchet, Gary Paulsen (1987)  Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)  The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier (1956)  The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien (1937)  Refugee Boy, Benjamin Zephaniah (2001)    Teacher selection	The Call of the Wild, Jack London (1903)  The Crossover, Kwame Alexander (2015)  The Bridge over the River Kwai, Pierre Boulle (1952)  The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne (2006)  The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier (1974)  One, Sarah Crossan (2015)  The Bone Sparrow, Zana Fraillon (2017)  The Fat Man, Maurice Gee (1994)  Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse (1997)  See Ya, Simon, David Hill (1992)  Moby Dick Herman Melville (1851) Welcome to Nowhere, Elizabeth Laird (2017)  Falling into Rarohenga, Steph Matuku (2021)  Trash, Andy Mulligan (2010)  Z for Zachariah, Robert C. O’Brien (1974)  Dear Martin, Nic Stone (2017)  Ghost Boys, Jewell Parker Rhodes (2019)  The Wooden Horse, Eric Williams (1949)   Teacher selection	The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo (2019)  Hollow Fires, Samira Ahmed (2022)  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie (2007)  Future Girl, Asphyxia (2020)  I Am Not Esther, Fleur Beale (1998)  The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan (1915)  Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985)  The 10pm Question, Kate De Goldi (2008)  Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens (1838)  Bugs, Whiti Hereaka (2013)  Legacy, Whiti Hereaka (2018)  The Pōrangi Boy, Shilo Kino (2020)  To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)  The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton (1967)  The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)  Tomorrow When The War Began, John Marsden (1993)  Flight of the Fantail, Steph Matuku (2018)  Long Way Down, Jason Reynolds (2017)  Unwind, Neal Shusterman (2007)  The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker (2012)    Teacher selection

Prescribed

Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954)  Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)	Life of Pi, Yann Martel (2001)  Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (1868)	A Soldier’s Tale, M.K. Joseph (1976)  Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy (1891)

Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (2008)  The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love, Davina Bell (2020)  Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953)  The God Boy, Ian Cross (1957)  The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai (2006)   Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (1868)  Nimblefoot, Robert Drewe (2022)  Oracles and Miracles, Stevan Eldred-Grieg (2007)  The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1952)   Sleeps Standing: Moetū, Witi Ihimaera and Hēmi Kelly(2017)  Tangi, Witi Ihimaera (1975)  The Map of Salt and Stars, Zeyn Joukhadar (2018)  Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes (1959)  Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay (1967)  Man Alone, John Mulgan (1939)  The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien (1990)  The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)  The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas (2017)  A Mistake, Carl Shuker (2019)  Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (1937)  The Redemption of Elsdon Bird, Noel Virtue (1988)  Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto (1988)  The Book Thief, Markus Zusak (2005)    Teacher selection	Once were Warriors, Alan Duff (1990) Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1958)  Purple Hibiscus, Chiamamanda Ngozi Adichie (2003)  Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (1811)  A Thousand Moons, Sebastian Barry (2020)  The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (1865)  Where We Once Belonged, Sia Figiel (1996)  Potiki, Patricia Grace (1986)  The Secret River, Kate Grenville (2005)  The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)  Paradise of the Blind, Dương Thu Hương (2002)  Passport to Hell, Robin Hyde (1936)  The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke, Tina Makeriti (2018)  The Bone Tree, Airana Ngarewa (2023)  1984, George Orwell (1949)  Greta and Valdin, Rebecca K. Reilly (2021)  Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1966)  The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951)  The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)  Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie (2017)  How to Loiter in a Turf War, Coco Solid (2022)  Kāwai, Monty Soutar (2022)  Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (2014)  The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinberg, (1939)   Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)  Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726)  Petals of Blood, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1977)    Teacher selection	Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami (1987) The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)  Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2007)  Sydney Bridge, Upside Down, David Ballantyne (1968)  The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan (1678)  Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (1847)  Glory, NoViolet Bulawayo (2022)  The Plague, Albert Camus (1947)  The Rehearsal, Eleanor Catton (2008)  The Promise, Damon Galgut (2021)  Plumb, Maurice Gee (1978)  The Odd Women, George Gissing (1893)  Sprigs, Brannavan Gnanalingam (2020)  Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy (1891)  Kurangaituku, Whiti Hereaka (2022)  The Bone People, Keri Hulme (1983)  The Matriarch, Witi Ihimaera (1986)  Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)  Checkerboard Hill, Jake Kake (2023)  Auē, Becky Manawatu (2021)  No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy (2005)  Atonement, Ian McEwan (2001)  Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851)  Attraction, Ruby Porter (2019)  Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin (2014)  Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)  Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)  The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (2016)   Teacher selection

SHAKESPEARE

Proposition

Shakespeare’s works have made aunique and lasting contribution to English vocabulary, grammar and metaphorical language with the plays’ plot complexity and character psychological depth developing the literary genres of comedy, history, and tragedy.   

Shakespeare is to English what the periodic table is to chemistry. For that reason, I propose the teaching of at least one Shakespeare play a year from year 9.

Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10
Extracts For example:   Romeo & Juliet monologue: Act 2 Scene 2, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo…”  As You Like It monologue: Act 2, Scene 7, “All the world’s a stage…”	Extracts For example:   Hamlet soliloquy: Act 3 Scene 1, “To be, or not to be…”    Macbeth soliloquy: Act 5, Scene 5, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…	A Midsummer Night’s Dream    Julius Caesar	Macbeth   Romeo and Juliet

Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
Hamlet   Much Ado About Nothing   Henry IV Part 1	Othello   Twelfth Night	King Lear   The Tempest   As You Like It

SHORT STORY

Proposition

The Short Story is a literary genre which condenses elements of fiction such as character and setting to illuminate the human experience in a particular moment of time and place and is a genre of significance in the development of New Zealand literature. 

Recommended(at least four short stories a year from the recommended list)

Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10
New Zealand Short Stories    The Seahorse and the Reef, Witi Ihimaera (1977)  Beans, Patricia Grace (1981)  Cow-Pats, Frank Sargeson (1978)  The Long-Shanked Teddy, Margaret Mahy (1990)  Angel Beads, Jane Westaway (1948)  The Jacket, Graeme Lay (1989)  Benny, Bernard Beckett (2015)    International Short Stories  Teachers’ Selection  Half a Creature from the Sea, David Almond  The Secret of the Purple Lake, Yaba Badoe   Quest: Stories of journeys from around Europe, Daniel Hahn (Ed) (2017)  Tales from India, Bali Rai, Puffin  Dragons at Crumbling Castle and Other Stories, Terry Pratchett  Into the Jungle: Stories from Mowgli, Katherine Rundell     Teacher selection	New Zealand Short Stories    Dear Mr Cairney, Graeme Lay (1985)  Yellow Brick Road, Witi Ihimaera (1977)  Whaea Fire, Ria Masae (2021)  Freddie Bone, Tessa Duder (2006)  The White Dress, Amberlea Gordon (2019)  Match Report, Kate De Goldi (2014)  It Used to Be Green Once, Patricia Grace (1975)    International Short Stories  Teachers’ Selection  The Umbrella Man, Roald Dahl (1980)  Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl (1953)  Unbelievable, Paul Jennings (1987)  Mystery & Mayhem, Katherine Woodfine (Ed), Farshore (2016)      Teacher selection	New Zealand Short Stories    Butterflies, Patricia Grace (1996  The Voyage, Katherine Mansfield (1921)  Rainbow Club, Lani Wendt Young (2021)  A Great Day, Frank Sargeson (mid 1930s)  In Search of the Emerald City, Witi Ihimaera (1977)  Fish Heads, Apirana Taylor (1988)  Tales of Tails, Lauren Keenan (2021)  The Silk, Joy Cowley (1984)    International Short Stories  Teachers’ Selection  All Summer in a Day, Ray Bradbury (1954)  Breaking the Pig, Etgar Keret (2001)  Examination Day, Henry Slesar (1958)  On the Sidewalk Bleeding, Evan Hunter (1956)  The Fun They Had, Isaac Asimov (1951)  The Test, Angelica Gibbs (1940)    Teacher selection	New Zealand Short Stories    The Doll’s House, Katherine Mansfield (1922)  Going for the Bread, Patricia Grace (1987)  No Speak English, Lani Wendt Young (2021)  The Whale, Witi Ihimaera (1987)  Aunty Lucky, Serie Barford (2015)  Father and Son, Owen Marshall (1981)  The Kumara Plant, Apirana Taylor (1989)    International Short Stories  Teachers’ Selection  Singing My Sister Down, Margo Lanagan (2004)  The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)  The Sniper, Liam O’Flaherty (1923)  The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)  The Toymaker and His Wife, Joanne Harris (2007)    Teacher selection

Prescribed

Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
International The Happy Prince, Oscar Wilde (1888) The Lottery, Shirley Jackson (1948)	International The Necklace, Guy de Maupassant (1884)  Story of your Life, Ted Chiang (1998)	International The Tell-tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe (1843)  This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski (1946)
New Zealand	New Zealand	New Zealand
The Woman at the Store Katherine Mansfield (1912) Selection from His Best Stories Witi Ihimaera (2009)	The Fly Katherine Mansfield (1922) Selection from His Best Stories Witi Ihimaera (2009)	Prelude Katherine Mansfield (1918) Selection from His Best Stories Witi Ihimaera (2009)

Recommended

Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
New Zealand Short Stories    The Doll’s House Katherine Mansfield (1922) The Last Summer, Beverley Dunlop (1988)  The Totara Tree, Roderick Finlayson (1984)  The Terrible Screaming, Janet Frame (1969)  A Way of Talking, Patricia Grace (1975)  Collection: Pounamu, Pounamu, Witi Ihimaera (1972)  His First Ball, Witi Ihimaera (1987)  Rush, Nick Low (2017)  Her First Ball, Katherine Mansfield (1921)  Rush, Nick Low (2017)  Pātea Pools, Airana Ngarewa (2021) For All The Saints, J.C. Sturm (1955)  Māori Art, Alice Tawhai (2007)  Crocodile, Albert Wendt (1986)    International Short Stories  In a Bamboo Grove, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1921)  Sonny’s Blues, James Baldwin (1957)  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce (1890)  The Signal-man, Charles Dickens (1866)  The Gift of the Magi, O. Henry (1905)  The Lottery, Shirley Jackson (1948)  The Monkey’s Paw, WW Jacob (1902)  Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving (1819)  A Horse and Two Goats, RK Narayan (1970)  Let it Snow, David Sedaris (2003)   Teacher selection	New Zealand Short Stories    The Future is Koe, Shelley Burne-Field (2021)  A Small Story, Maurice Duggan   You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, Janet Frame (1969)  The Bath, Janet Frame (1965)  All Part of the Game, A.P. Gaskell (1984)  Collection: The New Net Goes Fishing, Witi Ihimaera (1977)  Better Graces, Sam Keenan (2019)  Collection: The Best of Shonagh Koea’s Short Stories, Shonagh Koea (2013)  The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield (1921)  The Fat Boy, Owen Marshall (1984)  The Master of Big Jingles, Owen Marshall (1982)  Afkasi Pours Herself Afa Cuppa Coffee Selina Tusitala Marsh (2009)  Famished Eels, Mary Rokonadravus (2017)  Conversation with My Uncle, Frank Sargeson (1936)  Jerusalem, Jerusalem J.C. Sturm (1982)    International Short Stories  Civil Peace, Chinua Achebe (1971)  Hands, Sherwood Anderson (1916)  The Kiss, Anton Chekhov (1887)  Stories of Your Life Ted Chiang  The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)  The Overcoat, Nikolai Gogol (1842)  The Ransom of Red Chief, O Henry (1907)  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving   Emergency, Denis Johnson (1991)  Music at Annahullion, Eugene McCabe (2004)  We Didn’t Like Him, Ahkil Sharma (2013)  The Body Snatcher, Robert Louis Stephenson (1884) Minutes of Glory, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2019) The Magic Shop, H.G. Wells (1903)    Teacher selection	New Zealand Short Stories    Pawn Broken Eleanor Catton (2010)  Cicada Cingulata: The Birth of Rehua, Anahera Gildea (2017)  The Kaumatua and the Broken Man, Keri Hulme  The Thrill of Falling, Witi Ihimaera (2011)  The Affectionate Kidnappers, Witi Ihimaera (1989)  Man’s Inhumanity To Man, John A. Lee (1984)  How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped, Katherine Mansfield (1912)  Life of Ma Parker, Katherine Mansfield (1921)  Mr Van Gogh, Owen Marshall (2008)  Good Form, Vincent O’Sullivan  An Attempt at an Explanation, Frank Sargeson   International Short Stories  The Country Husband, John Cheever (1954)  My Life, Anton Chekhov(1896)  B24, Arthur Conan Doyle (1899)  A Simple Heart, Gustave Flaubert (1877)  Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway  A Village After Dark, Kazuo Ishiguro (2001)  The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (1915)  Extra, Yiyun Li (2003)  The Love of a Good Woman, Alice Munro (1998)  A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor (1953)    Teacher selection

DRAMA

Proposition

Historical and contemporary plays written in English or in translation use language and staging techniques, dialogue, conflict, and action to evoke tension, excitement, and empathy in portraying the universal human experience. 

Recommended (at least one play from the recommended list)

Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10
The Trial: School Journal Level 4 May (2017)    The Game: School Journal Level 4 (November 2019)    The Name Game: School Journal Level 4 (May 2019)    Like, Share, Subscribe: School Journal Level 4 (November 2020)    Teacher Selection	Much Ado: School Journal Level 4 (November 2018)    Waiting for Toni: School Journal Level 4 (May 2016)    Last Match: School Journal Level 4 (May 2020)    Teacher Selection	Girls in the Boat, Alice Austen (2018)    A Song For Ella Grey, Zoe Cooper and David Almond (2024)   The Roses of Eyam, Don Taylor (1970)    Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross, Harry Dansey (1979)    Free!, David Grant (2009)    Mockingbird, adapted by Julie Jensen (2015)    Hating Alison Ashley, Robin Klein (1988)    Alice Dreaming, Ned Manning (2010)    Real Dramas: A Collection of 10 Plays, Sue Murray (2001)    Teacher Selection	John Lennon and Me, Cherie Bennett (1996)     Left To Our Own Devices, Dale Dunn and Lynn Goodwin (2014)    Maui and Sina, Helen Tau’au Filisi (2015)    The Diary of Anne Frank, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (1955)    A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry (1959)    Across the Barricades, Joan Lingard (1972)    An Inspector Calls, J. B. Priestley (1945)    The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, adapted by Simon Stephens (2013)    Teacher Selection

Prescribed

Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
End of the Golden Weather, Bruce Mason (1962)	Once on Chunuk Bair, Maurice Shadbolt (1982)	The Crucible, Arthur Miller (1953)

Recommended

Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
Adam and Eve, Mikhail Bulgakov (1931)  The IT, Vivienne Franzmann (2023)  And What Remains, Miria George  Death of the Land, Rowley Habib (1978)  Niu Sila, Oscar Kightley and Dave Armstrong (2007)  Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda (2016)  The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan (1946)  Twelve Angry Men, Reginald Rose (1955)  War Horse, Nick Stafford (2011)  Foreskin’s Lament, Greg McGee (1981)    Teacher Selection	Antigone, Sophocles (441 BC)  The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov (1904)  Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, Yaël Farber (2002)  Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel (1990)  Purapurawhetū, Briar Grace-Smith (1996)  Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, Errol John (1957)  Time Stands Still, Donald Marguiles (2010)  Wednesday to Come, Renée (1985)  Kongi’s Harvest, Wole Soyinka (1965)  The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde (1895)  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams (1955)  When Sun and Moon Collide, Briar Grace-Smith (2007)    Teacher Selection	Medea, Euripides (431 BC)  Ophelia Thinks Harder, Jean Betts (1993)  Top Girls, Caryl Churchill (1982)  W;t, Margaret Edson (1995)  Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot (1935)  Falemalama, Dianna Fuemana (2006)  A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen (1879)  Woman Far Walking, Witi Ihimaera (2000)  Waiora: Te Ūkaipō, Hone Kouka (1997)  The House of Bernarda Alba, Federico Garcia Lorca (1936)  Shuriken, Vincent O’Sullivan (1986)  The Homecoming, Harold Pinter (1965)  An Experiment with an Air Pump, Shelagh Stephenson (1998)  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard (1991)  The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster (1613)  A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee William   Teacher Selection

VISUAL WORKS

Proposition

Visual Works is the production and reception of visual imagery (moving or static) in film, advertising, illustration, social media, and other media where the purpose is to inform, describe, entertain and persuade. 

Recommendations

Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10
Still Visual Works    El Deafo, Cece Bell (2014)  Pashmina, Nidhi Chanami (2017)  Comic Man, Kate de Goldi (School Journal Level 4 October 2015)  Real Friends, Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham (2017)  Allergic, Megan Wagner Lloyd and Michelle Mee Nutter (2021)  Muse, Paul Mason and Mat Tait (School Journal Level 4 May 2020)  Hushed, Paul Mason and Mat Tait (School Journal Level 4 May 2017)  Wind Chimes, Paul Mason and Mat Tait (School Journal Level 4 November 2017)  Mophead, Selina Tusitala Marsh (2019)  The Fight, Sarah Penwarden and Scott Pearson (School Journal Level 4 November 2017)  Battle, Maria Samuela and Ant Sang (School Journal Level 4 November 2014)  Sky High, Robert Sullivan and Tim Gibson (School Journal Level 4 June 2014)  Cicada, Shaun Tan (2018)  Guts, Raina Telgemeier (2019)    Teacher Selection	Still Visual Works    Window, Jeannie Baker (1991)  Jane, the Fox & Me, Fanny Britt (2012)  Be Prepared, Vera Brosgol (2018)  New Kid, Jerry Craft (2019)  Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, Anne Frank, Ari Folman and David Polonsky (2017)  Origin Story, David Larsen and Ross Murray (School Journal Level 4 May 2017)  Dodinga, 1858, Paul Mason and Gavin Mouldey (School Journal Level 4 November 2020)Press B, Paul Mason and Mat Tait (School Journal Level 4 May 2021)  Four Eyes, Rex Ogle and Dave Valeza (2023)  Maui: Legends of the Outcast, Robert Sullivan and Chris Slane (1996)  Something Alive, Jem Yoshioka (School Journal Level 4 June 2018)  Press B, Paul Mason and Mat Tait (School Journal Level 4 May 2021)  The Secret Garden on 81st Street, Ivy Weir (2021)    Teacher Selection	Still Visual Works    Piece by Piece: The Story of Nisrin’s Hijab, Priya Huq (2021)  Mexikid, Pedro Martin (2021)  White Bird, R. J. Palacio (2019)  Parachute Kids, Betty C. Tang (2023)  The Arrival, Shaun Tan (2006)    Moving Visual Works    Fantastic Mr. Fox, dir. Wes Anderson (2009)  Koro’s Medal, dir. James Barr (2011)  Big Fish, dir. Tim Burton (2003)  Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009)  Whale Rider, dir. Niki Caro (2002)  Bend It Like Beckham, dir. Gurinder Chadha (2002)  Billy Elliott, dir. Stephen Daldry (2000)  New Boy, dir. Steph Green (2007)  Rabbit-Proof Fence, dir. Phillip Noyce (2002)  Stand By Me, dir. Rob Reiner (1986)  The Breadwinner, dir. Nora Twomey (2017)  Hunt for the Wilderpeople, dir. Taika Waititi (2016)  Remember the Titans, dir. Boaz Yakin (2000)    Teacher Selection	Still Visual Works    Illegal, Andrew Donkin, Eoin Colfer and Giovanni Rigano (2017)  The Graveyard Book: Graphic Novel, Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell (2015)  Almost American Girl, Robin Ha (2020)  The Odyssey, Gareth Hinds (2010)  A First Time for Everything, Dan Santat (2023)    Moving Visual Works    Life is Beautiful, dir. Roberto Benigni (1997)  Edward Scissorhands, dir. Tim Burton (1990)  Minari, dir. Lee Isaac Chung (2020)  Lion, dir. Garth Davis (2016)  The World’s Fastest Indian, dir. Roger Donaldson (2005)  Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig (2023)  The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, dir. Mark Herman (2008)  10 Things I Hate About You, dir. Gil Junger (1999)  Milk & Honey, dir. Marina Alofagia McCartney (2012)  Spirited Away, dir. Hayao Miyazaki (2001)  The Hunger Games, dir. Gary Ross (2012)  Two Cars, One Night, dir. Taika Waititi (2003)   Teacher Selection

NON-FICTION

Proposition

Non-fiction includes a range of prose types in speech and writing which contain content and language features designed to inform, persuade, and create other effects that require critical judgement by readers. 

I have only provided recommendations for orations, biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, and essays.

Other examples of prose types which also exemplify the proposition for each year level include: Journalism news reports, profile pieces, reviews, column/opinions, instructional guides, debates, textbooks, letters, social media posts. 

Memoir, biography, autobiography, letters

Recommended

Year 9	Year 10	Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947) Jonah: My Story (Revised Edition, 2004), Jonah Lomu I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzaiwith Christina Lamb (2013) Valerie, the Autobiography (with Phil Gifford) (2012)  Willie Apiata VC: A Reluctant Hero, Paul Little (2008)   Teacher Selection	Ernest Rutherford: Just an Ordinary Boy, Alistair Hughes and Maria Gill (2023)  Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks (2001) Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1994)   Teacher Selection	Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996) Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah (1999) Ngatokimatawhaorua, the Biography of a Waka, Jeff Evans (2024)  Maori Boy: A Memoir, Witi Ihimaera (2014)  Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1996)  Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, Lauren Redniss (2010)     Teacher Selection	Whitiki! Whiti! Whiti! E! Māori in the First World War, Monty Soutar (2019)  Blue Latitudes, Tony Horwitz (2020)  Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969) An Angel at my Table: The complete Autobiography, Janet Frame, (1998)   Teacher Selection	Goodbye to all that, Robert Graves (1929) The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Samuel Pepys (1825) Bread and Roses: Sonja Davies Her Story, Sonja Davies (1984)  Na to Hoa Aroha, from Your Dear Friend. The Correspondence of Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck (1998)     Teacher Selection

Oration

Recommended

Year 9	Year 10	Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
I have a Dream, Martin Luther King (1963) Nobel Speech, Malala Yousafzai (2014)   Teacher Selection	Their Finest Hour, Winston Churchill (1940) Address to the United Nations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt (1948)   Teacher Selection	Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln (1863) Freedom or Death Emmeline Pankhurst (1913) Ain’t I A Woman, Sojourner Truth (1851)   Teacher Selection	Pericles Funeral Oration, Thucydides (c. 429 BC) Speech at the Rivonia Trial, Nelson Mandela (1964) I Have A Dream, Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) Spanish Amada Speech, Elizabeth I (1588)   Teacher Selection	On the Crown, Demosthenes, (330BC) Quit India, Mahatma Gandhi (1942) Questioning the Universe, Stephen Hawking (2008)   Teacher Selection

Essay

Recommended

Year 11	Year 12	Year 13
Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) The Secret History of Black England, Zadie Smith (1922) The Death of a Moth  Virginia Woolf (1942)   Teacher Selection	Why I Write, George Orwell (1946) A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift (1729) Florence Nightingale, Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey (1918) On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau (1849)   Teacher Selection	Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell (1936) Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin (1955) Concerning Whare-Kura: Its Philosophies and Teachings, Hongi Hare, Journal of the Polynesian Society. (1898, Vol. 7 No. 1, March, pp. 35-41)   Teacher Selection

LANGUAGE FEATURES

Proposition

Language used in poetry, prose, drama, and other media provides the tools for the analysis of literary works and contributes to students’ essay and creative writing.  

(Each year level includes and builds on the concepts already taught.)

Years 7 and 8	Years 9 and 10	Year 11	Years 12 and 13
Figurative   alliteration, metaphor, onomatopoeia, repetition, simile, personification, cliche, pun      Structural   contrast, rhetorical question,	Figurative   anthropomorphism, emotive language (connotation and denotation), euphemism, hyperbole,  extended metaphor   Sonic: assonance, consonance, sibilance    Structural contrast, imperative, listing, repetition, rhetorical question    Referential allusion, genre, symbol	Figurative   anachronism, analogy, imagery (auditory, gustatory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, tactile), irony, neologism, semantic field, understatement, zoomorphism    Sonic Types of sound (fricative, glide, liquid, plosive, sibilant),   Structural antithesis,  inversions of grammatical order, listing, parallelism, syntactical functions (declarative, exclamative, imperative, interrogative, prognostication)   Referential Sources of allusions	Figurative   litotes, imagery (auditory, gustatory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, tactile, synaesthesia), metonymy,  synecdoche   Sonic Effects of sound (cacophony, euphony)    Structural interruptions and unfinished sentences   Referential Types of reference (burlesque, derivative work, homage, pastiche, parody and meta parody, satire)

• LANGUAGE AND TRUST IN THE CURRICULUM

Political interests control the curriculum’s language when disciplinary authority is usurped by ideologies. This happened to the New Zealand curriculum from the 1990s. Within a tightening straitjacket of permitted language, words were disconnected from meaning.  George Orwell described this ideological tactic as thought corrupting language and language corrupting thought. The solution was to let meaning choose the word.

The Te Matawai Maihi Maori Strategy and Implementation Approach launched by Cabinet Directive in December 2018[vi]  illustrate what happens when words choose meanings to serve ideologies. Te Maihi Karanua’s three Audacious Goals were to drive the meaning of public policy. The goals were truly audacious with ‘Aotearoatanga’ intended as the outcome for Audacious Goal One – a transformation of what New Zealand is as a nation.

From 2018 to 2023 Te Maihi Karanua was an imposed experiment in ideological control. The public service, publicly funded media, and the health and education sectors obeyed without hesitation and, in most cases, without question. The intention, to change the nation by changing New Zealand English, would occur, not through the usual organic process of word borrowing, but by top-down degree. The strategy kicked off at a remarkable pace with national radio and television presenters eager to demonstrate how we were to speak in the new nation.

Given that it is a direct way to reach entire generations the Refreshed English Curriculum of January 2023 would be a powerful vehicle for the strategy’s Three Audacious Goals. However, its potential ended abruptly with the March 2025 Draft English Curriculum. The new curriculum, if the final version is true to the Draft, will return language to the real world, one where real-life meaning drives word choice. Because it is subject-based – its content is clearly disciplinary-derived and accountable – ideologies are more easily detected and removed. A few traces of Te Maihi Karanua do remain in the Draft, more likely by oversight than intent. There is a relapse to the ideology on page 6 and in some headings, for example the Draft is authorised by Te Poutahu of Te Tahuhu of te Matauranga of Te Kawanatanga of Aotearoa and the nation is Aotearoa New Zealand. These minor details can be remedied.

On the whole the Draft does remove ideology. Māori word borrowings are again recognised as the organic process of language change and a key defining feature of New Zealand English.

A subject-based English curriculum includes Māori words in these ways:

1. Commonly accepted borrowings in vocabulary lists and in etymological study.
2. Titles: e.g. Pounamu Pounamu; Poems from Nga Moteatea, Na to Hoa Aroha, from Your Dear Friend. The Correspondence of Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck; Whitiki! Whiti! Whiti! E! Māori in the First World War; Ngatokimatawhaorua, the Biography of a Waka.
3. Biographical information about authors.
4. Characters in literature, including conversations (e.g. in Pounamu, Pounamu) and context features such as placenames and events.

Sex-specific words and meaning

While Te Maihi Karanua is one ideology that made astonishing headroads in just five years, it is not the only ideology to permeate the curriculum.

The subsumption of female-specific words into male words or the removal of the female term demonstrates the unintended, ‘be careful what you ask for’ consequences of 1960s’ feminism. We believed, wrongly as it turned out, that changing the words would change meaning. Supported by the postmodern ideas that language creates reality (all you need to do it to make people think and speak in the new required way), a new vocabulary emerged to re-create the relationship of female to male.

Heroine was subsumed by hero, actress by actor, waiter by waitress.  The sex neutral ‘principal’ replaced headmaster and head mistress. In extreme cases, words were removed completely – widow and widower disappeared in the desire to equate divorce to death.

Feminism scored the ultimate own goal when words for the female sex itself were removed completely. The nadir was the removal of the word which holds the most meaning for women  – woman itself. Once a word goes, then so does the very referent – the adult female and what it means.

My advice is to watch the language is all curriculum documents so that no word escapes your scrutiny. Consider the greatly improved 2025 Draft Relationships and Sexualities Framework. For all the improvements on its predecessor, the document reveals that ideological influences still attempt to compete with biological reality. Thankfully male and female did make an appearance – it would have been impossible to refer to genital parts without these words – but it was a reluctant mention. What is astonishing is the omission of girl and boy, she and he. If reality is to be acknowledged, those four words should be there.

In the real world, the last word must surely go to Mad Hatter and the March Hare. When Alice told the Mad Hatter that she didn’t think, his reply was – then you shouldn’t talk. The March Hare advised – say what you mean. The purpose of the English curriculum is to ensure that young New Zealanders can think meaningfully and can communicate those considered thoughts. Meanings in the English language are built on centuries of use and change. Knowing how others use them helps us to trust language.

 The scientific method is to test everything.  Orwell’s question – what comes first, the meaning or the words – provides us with a truth-telling language test. It should be applied not only to the English Curriculum but to all other curriculum subjects so that we can indeed trust the meaning of a word.

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[i] The line ‘the instrument of thought and means of communication’ is paraphrased from Emile Durkheim and refered to in Pierre Bourdieu’s paper ‘Symbolic Power’. Originally published in Annales, 1977, No 32, pp. 405-11. Translated by Richard Nice, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Birmingham. (In the original the phrase ‘instrument of thought’ is ‘Instruments for knowledge and construction of the objective world. ‘Means of communication’ refers to language/culture vs speech/behaviour.)

[ii] Rata, E. (2021). The Curriculum Design Coherence Model in the Knowledge-Rich Schoool Project. Review of Education. Vol. 9, No. 2, June pp. 448–495.

Rata, E. (2025). Logic in the Curriculum Design Coherence Model: How the Model creates coherence. In McPhail, G, Pountney, R, Wheelahan, L (2025).Emerging Perspectives from Social Realism on Knowledge and Education Curricula, Pedagogy, Identity, and Equity.Routledge. Chapter 8.

[iii] Rata, E. (2017). Knowledge and Teaching, British Educational Research Journal. 43(5), 1003-1017.

[iv] Tim Surma, Claudio Vanhees, Michiel Wils, Jasper Nijlunsing, Daniel Willingham, John Hattie, Nuno Crato, Daniel Muijs, Elizabeth Rata, Dylan Wiliam, & Paul A. Kirschner. (2025). Developing Curriculum for Deep Thing: The Knowledge Turn. Springer.   

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74661-1.

[v] Lynch, C. & Rata, E. (2018) Culturally responsive pedagogy: A New Zealand case study, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 27:4, 391-408.

[vi] The Te Matawai Maihi Maori Strategy  and Implementation Approach was approved as a Cabinet Directive, 13 December 2018.

Audacious Goal 1: Eighty-five percent of New Zealanders (or more) will value te reo Māori as a key part of national identity.

Audacious Goal 2: One million New Zealanders (or more) will have the ability and confidence to talk about at least basic things in te reo Māori.

Audacious Goal 3: One hundred and fifty thusand Maori aged 15 and over will use te reo Māori as much as English by 2024.

Outcome – Aotearoatanga (Nationhood); Matauranga (Knowledge and skills): Hononga (Engagement)

Te Maihi Karanua was officially launched in Waitangi Week 2019. It directed cultural change within the public sector. This produced the escalation of language and cultural commissars in the public service from 2019 including the Ministry of Education.

Te Maihi Karanua Implementation Plan targets 3 priority groups. They are: Young People, Proficient Speakers, Public Service. The Māori Language Commission, Taura Whiri i te Reo was required to support the initiative throughout the public service.

This article was first published on Open Inquiry 

http://openinquiry.nz 

February 2025 

  

  

The 2007 New Zealand Curriculum allows teachers and schools to decide what to teach. In this localised curriculum there is no prescribed content, no nationwide standardisation nor effective quality control. The result is increased inequality. Students in schools committed to high quality academic subjects continue to achieve. Students in schools that offer little more than socio-cultural beliefs and practices are denied the education needed for full inclusion in modern society.   

  

The Minister of Education, Erica Stanford is determined to introduce a knowledge rich curriculum for all New Zealand students. What does this mean? First, it is a standardised curriculum which ensures that students across the country receive the same high-quality knowledge. That knowledge consists of academic subjects with content selected for its value and justified for its veracity. Furthermore, the content must be designed so that it is coherently organised and built progressively from the most basic to the more complex.  

Second, it is about planning for teaching. It is here that teachers take the designed national curriculum and turn it into effective teaching plans suitable for their school and their students. The latest ideas from cognitive science about secondary mental abilities, time perception, memory load, and feedback are needed at this stage. They help connect the content to students’ thinking processes.  

Third, both good curriculum design and planning for teaching set the foundation for the actual teaching. Many teachers know their subjects well and use teaching methods that best connect students to rich content. They will welcome a knowledge-rich curriculum because it is what they have taught for years. We know and respect those teachers. The real benefits will be for those teachers and students who have been disadvantaged by eighteen years of a localised curriculum.  

This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generationⁱ. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s. However, its success is not yet assurred. The professional class which benefitted most from that post-war subject-based curriculum, has worked tirelessly to dismantle the source of its privilege in a strange alliance of decolonisation and socialism. 

  

We can thank the recent secondary school incident for revealing what this alliance looks like in practice – a junior English class, a video playing, a teacher instructing how to analyse the video’s tone and mood. In the video, How colonisers went from learning to reo Māori to trying to exterminate it, students hear the authoritative voice of sociolinguist, Dr Vini Olsen-Reeder declaiming, Once the pakeha government was established here, from there the desire grew to exterminate the Māori peopleⁱⁱ.  

  

The video’s content is either wrong or seriously distorted. Such propaganda will be difficult to teach in a knowledge-rich subject that requires the selection of content to be justified. That’s the sticking point – who justifies the content? What criteria are used? 

In the coming months, the public will be consulted on the draft English curriculum. This is right and proper – it is not a curriculum for teachers alone, but for the nation.  It is here, in the national discussion about the subject of English that I predict a simmering conflict will surface. Some, like me, regard school English as the study of language and literature in the English language. For others, English is the tool of the capitalist coloniser, intent on locking the colonised into a permanent state of subjugation. Their demands are for the decolonisation, then indigenisation, of the entire education system. 

It is unsurprising that English is at the centre of the gathering storm, although History and Science are not far behind. English has a very particular role – that of creating society’s cultural repertoire. When we study English at school we are taught, or should be taught, the content and conventions of our nation’s most widely spoken language. New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English. It is the language of the 19th century colonial era and of 20th century nation building. According to one secondary school principalⁱⁱⁱ, the most effective way to decolonise the nation is by removing English, that dangerous language of the Eurocentric coloniser from the school curriculum.  

If we agree that the subject is the study of English language and literature, then the content selected must be justified. A straightforward process, one might think. But no, at the very source of the creation and justification of academic knowledge, is the wellspring of the conflict. It is in the nation’s universities that decolonisation and indigenisation are being promoted^iv. School subjects which are drawn from university disciplines and accountable to their rules and methods, will be hostages to the unaccountable ideologies of our decolonising universities.  

English as a school subject draws in the main from the disciplines of literary criticism (including Shakespearean studies), linguistics, sociolinguistics, and history. Decolonising those disciplines removes all means of accountability – those methods of empirical evidence, logical argument and ongoing criticism which ensure that disciplinary knowledge is always on trial and always subject to rejection, revision, or provisional confirmation. These methods are what gives the disciplines, and by extension those who practise them, authority and status.  

Although Dr Olsen-Reeder does not identify himself in the video as a university lecturer, his title and sociolinguist label convey authority. Teachers and high school students are likely to take him at his word. If anything, the English lesson incident is to be thanked for providing us with a glimpse of a decolonised education system. It should alert us to the difficulties faced by those tasked with introducing a knowledge rich curriculum.  

If you contribute to the consultation of the draft English curriculum, I ask that you justify what you want taught. The content must have value not only for its literary beauty, its grammatical precision, its vocabulary richness, but it must challenge students. When teachers introduce young people to abstract content beyond their immediate experience, the students develop the secondary cognitive abilities necessary for the complexities of modern life.  

A decolonised curriculum does not provide quality content. Instead it locks young people into emotional responses. But emoting is not thinking. Abstract thinking develops only when students are confronted by complex content. A knowledge-rich English curriculum offers both that content and the development of the mental skills needed for the modern world. 

See Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Turn. Springer.   

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74661-1.

The book is free to download 

  

Democracy’s Pillars 

The pillars are:  

1. The citizen^ix – the individual who bears political and legal rights – not the racialised group member.  

2. The state  –– the governing infrastructure of parliament,  systems of law, education, health and so on, regulator of public resources such as water, foreshore and seabed, flora and fauna, radio waves . . ..   

3. The nation – at once a geographic entity and a symbol of a unified though historically diverse people who muddle along together in liberal civil society. 

Each of these pillars is riven by a necessary tension – a tension arising from their inherent contradictions  – contradictions which make democracy future-oriented, progressive  –  and vulnerable. 

The contradictions are: 

• As citizens, we have a duty to society but, at the same time, we have personal interests arising from kin, cultural, and other social loyalties.   

• The state is simultaneously the capitalist state – generating economic wealth and inequality – and the secular democratic state – guaranteeing political equality and regulating wealth distribution. 

• The nation is unified in facing the future, yet diverse in its past.  

Democracy is peaceful battle within and between each of these three pillars. This bloodless conflict is only possible when individuals are partially loyal.  

So what is ‘partial loyalty’? 

Partial loyalty 

I first came across the term in anthropologist, Alan Macfarlane’s The Making of the Modern World. It intrigued me and I have developed the idea further in the following way.  

‘Partial loyalty’ can explain what it is about the modern individual who has contradictory loyalties simultaneously – identifying as a family member, a member of an ancestral group, a cultural group, a tribe, a religion, an identity group defined by leisure interests, sexuality, and so on.  

This is civil society. From different, even conflicting interests how do we decide where our loyalty lies – is it to New Zealand? To an identity group? An ancestral group? To those ‘who look like us’? 

The idea of ‘partial loyalty’ is a way into thinking about this question.  

It is a question that someone in a tribal society, an autocratic society, a religious society would not have to ask, or be permitted to ask, because the answer is already provided.  

Most societies demand total loyalty. 

• Traditional tribal societies allowed one identity – fixed by birth status and and kinship ties – not open to individual choice.  Loyalty was non-negotiable because total loyalty ensured the group’s survival.  

• Autocratic regimes, both past and present, impose total loyalty – not for the survival of all, but for the elite – imposed by might and by ideological indoctrination. 

Democracies are different in a fundamental way. They not only allow partial loyalty but require it. 

In a democracy we hold many loyalties simultaneously – family and social groups where the loyalty is personal – creating a deeply held sense of identity and belonging  – perhaps to a tribe, culture, religion, sport or other type of association.  

And at the same time we are loyal to a diverse society and to its governing system that is not personal. Indeed loyalty to the democratic nation is loyalty to a vision – the idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.  

These two different loyalties – one a deeply personal identity – the other a rational commitment to an idea – is why democracy is so difficult. It is much easier to fall back into loyalties of emotion, not reason.  

The ease and attraction of total loyalty favours ethno-nationalism – it is profoundly anti-modern and anti-democratic – yet profoundly seductive.  

(This is an extract from the speech I gave to the New Zealand ACT Party Annual Conference, in Wellington and Auckland, July 2022.)

This extract about partial loyalty from Chapter 6 ‘Social Relations of Trust‘ in my 2012 book ‘The Politics of Knowledge in Education’.

The objective knowledge developed in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences is important to liberal democracies for political as well as for educational reasons. This chapter is about the link between the objectivity of epistemic knowledge and the rational thinking required for democracy. It draws on Alan Macfarlane’s (2002) ideas about ‘partial loyalty’ (p. 271), a concept developed in the literature about the role of contractual associations in making the modern world (the title of Macfarlane’s book). According to this approach, the partial loyalty of social relations of trust enables the simultaneous attachment and separation towards knowledge that is required for objectivity and criticism. Macfarlane (2002) refers to the development of a world of trust and openness as ‘the basis not only for capitalism but also for modern science’ (p. 106), a view of science’s role in modern society shared by Sharplin and discussed in chapter 3. Along with their importance in establishing and maintaining relations of trust between people in societies based on contract not status, objectivity, criticism, and judgement are also features of democratic citizenship.

The student who ‘knows only what has been told him, (whose) judgements are only those which he has received from his teachers (and) has formed his mind on another’s. His knowledge has not been drawn from reason. He is merely the plaster-cast of a man’ (Kant, 1781/1993, p. 535). Such imbibed understanding is the doxic or embodied knowledge of subjective experience, where ‘we accept many things without knowing them’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992, p. 113). It is the commonsense reality of experience that is the source of ideology and the reason for ideology’s power. But it is a reality in which our “senses may fail us”. Only the provisional truth claims of objective knowledge can reveal the ideological or cultural nature of experience.

This means that the reasoning required for disciplinary knowledge is that which is critical both of itself and of the society which that knowledge serves. It employs the sociological imagination which makes the familiar unfamiliar and enables us to conceptualise that which is unknown to us. Forms of social organisation that have been developed in the academic disciplines over time, forms that arise from the ‘cognitive interests’ (Young, 2008, p. 31) of intellectualised individuals and that are produced in disciplinary institutions, are intimately connected to the partial loyalty of contractual social organisation. That partial loyalty enables agency—whether the agency of the intellectual individual in knowledge creation or the rational citizen in democratic politics.

Social knowledge and academic knowledge have much in common. Both types of knowledge are produced by people within a social context and in the service of the society. Both have their origin in the sacred of the traditional world where ‘in general no distinction is drawn between the natural, the supernatural, and the human; the gods do not transcend the universe but are rooted in it and subject to its principles’ (Lindberg, 1992, p. 8). But as David Lindberg (1992) observes, the early ‘conceptions of space and time are not (like those of modern physics) abstract and mathematical, but are invested with meaning and value drawn from the experience of the community’ (p. 8). With reference to the origin myths of several early societies, Lindberg points to the ‘strong tendency in oral traditions to identify causes with beginnings, so that to explain something is to identify its historical origins’ (p. 8).

This is a significant observation and helps with the task of delineating one of the major differences between social realism and social constructivism—that of abstract conceptual knowledge. Whereas scientific knowledge is characterised by advanced theoretical and conceptual understanding, social knowledge too conceptualises the world in the beliefs found in religious and cultural explanations for the unknown. However with social knowledge, the meaning and value of knowledge remain tied to the experience of the social group. The beliefs do not become abstract concepts capable of being applied to other times and other situations. They remain experience-based beliefs even if the experience referred to occurred in mythological times. In this way, commonsense knowledge, although located in the reality of experience, is ideological. It is not a “false consciousness”, because it is deeply embedded in the reality of everyday life and is a “way of knowing” that arises from that experience. For this reason the cultural beliefs that make up ideology are extremely difficult to change (Shalem and Bensusan, 1999). But although such social knowledge  is the “truth” of our lives it is one limited in what and how it can explain the world given that it is always tied to the the world of the “knower”.

Like Durkheim, Lindberg (1992) traces the emergence of science from the early understandings of the sacred, describing how the contemplation of natural phenomena led to new sets of questions and new sets of answers with ‘personification of nature gradually becoming a less-prominent feature of their (the early philosophers) discourse, and the gods disappearing from their explanations of natural phenomena’ (p. 26) as a ‘distinction between the natural and the supernatural was emerging’ (p. 27). The distinction between the natural and the supernatural, which has enabled the growth of science as objective knowledge, was developed within the canons of the various disciplines. These were communities of scholars across time and space that produced the ‘coalitions of minds’ described by Collins (2000, p. 7)—a claim accepted by social realists to support the argument that knowledge is produced within social and historical circumstances but not limited to those circumstances. It is in the sociality of the canon that the collective representations of the discipline are generated. According to Durkheim (1995):

Collective representations are the product of immense cooperation that extends not only in space but also through time; to make them, a multitude of different minds have associated, intermixed, and combined their ideas and feelings; long generations have accumulated their experience and knowledge. A very special intellectuality that is infinitely richer and more complex than that of the individual is distilled in them. (p. 15)

Despite the sociality of the production of knowledge, the “product” is able to be separated from those conditions of production—for reasons that I described in the previous chapter. That is one of the crucial differences between social realist and constructivist arguments. Another distinction concerns the role of the individual in generating knowledge and contributing to the disciplinary canon. Not only must the knowledge be separated from the knower, but that “knower” must have a degree of agency within the social relations of symbolic production. In order to be a critic within disciplinary systems and procedures researchers must be capable of objectifying their own conditions of existence, including the symbolic relations of production within which they are located. In doing so researchers are intellectual agents contributing to producing the collective canon, not to merely reproducing it.

Social knowledge is characterised by its role as the means to reproduce a socio-cultural group. It preserves the “culture” in order to maintain continuity and cohesion. In contrast, modern societies are characterised by internal mechanisms of change, what Alan Macfarlane (2002) describes as ‘the unusual properties of the new kind of grouping’ to emerge in societies based on contract not status (p. 259). This is the partial loyalty made possible by the fact that individuals can enter and leave social groups according to the person’s volition—something not possible with groups organised according to kin and ethnicity. The idea of partial loyalty can also be usefully applied to academic communities. They, like members of socio-political organisations, have an “entry and escape clause”. Neither the researchers nor their ideas are required to be totally loyal to the wider group, as is the case with religio-cultural groups. The latter require such total loyalty to maintain social and political cohesion. But it is a condition of the academic system that its members are not “loyal”, that they remain critical and judgmental.

For this reason, although ideas are created within the social relations of symbolic production of any particular discipline, those relations are not necessarily determining of the intellectual thinker who produced them. They do determine the systems, methods, and codes that are used, that is true, but the scientist is not restricted to reproducing the theories and concepts of the discipline. He or she is able to change them. While the disciplinary systems and procedures allow for the development of innovative theories, it is the individual scientist either alone or with colleagues whose creativity is “distilled” in the complex intellectuality of the canon.

Michael Young (2008) refers to one of the two goals he identifies for social realism as ‘to explore how the forms of social organization that arise from “cognitive” interests may themselves shape the organization of society itself’ (p. 31). That exploration is my purpose here to link the type of institutions made possible in contractual societies to those institutions and procedures of science. The link is to be found in the partial loyalty that characterise the social relations of trust required for criticism and judgement. The rise of objective knowledge that contains criticism as a key part of its logic is intimately associated with the shift from status-based to contractual societies and the resulting individualisation of personal identity that followed from the breakdown of the kinship structuring principle. Trust emerged as the unifying device for this new social order.

My interest in this chapter is in examining the relationship between contractual society and objective knowledge to explore the nature of the link. I find it in a politics of knowledge that contains two features; one is the processes of objectivity, criticism, and judgement that allows for the partial loyalty of attachment and distance exercised in the disciplinary canons and in democratic politics. The second feature is the social relations of trust that provide the context for that partial loyalty to operate. The organising principle of liberal democratic societies in the modern world is that of contract, and it is in the making of the contractual relationships and the public sphere as the site for those relationships that objective knowledge plays a major role. It is for this reason that I devote the first section of the chapter to explaining the shift from status to contract—what Henry Maine describe as the ‘the greatest of all changes’ (Maine, cited in Macfarlane, 2002, p. 16)—before turning to examining how objectivity creates the partial loyalty that is a necessary condition for the exercise of critical reasoning in contractual societies.

How do societies with populations that do not share a common past cohere and hold themselves together? The status to contract issue is an old question for modernity—one asked by thinkers from Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Tocqueville to Marx, J. S. Mill, and Durkheim. According to Alan Macfarlane a question at the heart of sociology is: What is the ‘way in which the individual is embedded in wider groupings’? (p. 5). In The Making of the Modern World (2002), Macfarlane traces what it was about the change in the individual-group relationship that enabled the shift to modern liberal democratic societies. Convinced by the nineteenth-century historian, F. W. Maitland’s argument that the answer is found in the non-kinship corporations and trusts that characterise English common law and equity from the Anglo-Saxon period, Macfarlane asks the rhetorical question: ‘How could civilisations avoid the Scylla of status and also the Charybdis of contract?’ His answer is that ‘the way lay through some combination of the best of both; the affective, emotional ties of status, the flexibility and efficiency of contract’ (p. 259).

In tracing the development of contractual associations as ‘a new kind of grouping’, Macfarlane brings back into the literature Maitland’s ideas about how a new form of cooperation emerging from the early English ‘proto-trusts’ ‘could balance the allegiances of group and individual’ and replace societies based on status bonds’ (p. 259). According to Macfarlane (2002), Maitland ‘finally solved the problem of combining individualism and associations in a new way’ (p. 3) in explaining the ‘origins and nature of the modern world’ (p. 4). This is indeed a powerful statement. If it is the case, then Maitland’s insights will also assist those like myself who wrestle with how to explain the relationship between a determinism in the relations of symbolic production and the agency of individuals in creating Durkheim’s ‘collective representations’ (1995, p. 15).

While the canon ‘enables a particular type of activity and its principles are generative’ given that it is the ‘knowledge not the knower that counts’ (Moore, 2007b, p. 68), the individual is consciously involved in the creation of knowledge. In this way, I would argue, the knower does count (although not tied forever to the knowledge as the constructivists would argue). Along with creating ideas that become distilled in the canon’s complex intellectuality, the scientist issimultaneously a member of the disciplinary community and its critic. It is this “knower” who enacts the systems and procedures of objectification and criticism authorised by the discipline as well as doing the actual thinking. As Durkheim (cited in Culliver, 1983) maintained, ‘truth is only ever achieved by individuals’ (p. xx). However, Durkheim traced the condition for individualism in the social division of labour.

My argument that the form individuality takes with its “partial loyalty” under certain political conditions—conditions enabled by the objectivity of knowledge—does not deny the location of individualism in economic relations. However I do argue that the contractual nature of liberal democratic political relations acts as a counterbalance to the determinism of capitalist relations of production. This is the case because the partial loyalty of contractual social relations encourages objectification, and with it, criticism and judgement. It is for this reason that the uneasy but workable settlement between liberalism and capitalism of the expansive industrial period was the condition for the extension of epistemic knowledge to the wider population. The stronger the forces of liberal democracy, the greater the spread of epistemic knowledge with its objectivity and criticism.

However, since the 1970s, the democracy-capitalism settlement of the industrial era has weakened. Reactionary and conservative political forces with their accompanying strategies of localisation have found that accumulation in the era of financial capitalism appears to operate effectively alongside non-democratic polities. The success of capitalist accumulation in countries governed by oligarchies and autocracies as well as the emergence of localised forms of capitalism, such as neotribal capitalism in New Zealand (Rata, 2000; 2011b) would support this view. It would appear that democracy is no longer the price that capitalist elites need to pay by placating the working class in return for expanding profits. This realisation that democracy may not be the only polity suited to capitalist accumulation supports the rise of conservative elites, increasing inequalities, and liberal-democratic nations that govern increasingly on behalf of global capitalism rather than on behalf of the people.

It is a pyrrhic victory for capitalism however. As democracy declines, so too does epistemic knowledge, given one is a condition for the other. Capitalism, by weakening the conditions for objective knowledge through various localisation strategies, weakens its own foundations. The source of creativity required for capitalist expansion is located in epistemic knowledge. The “long twentieth century” settlement between capitalism and democracy was not only a settlement with the working class, it was a settlement with science. While financial capitalism may believe it can dismiss the claims of working people for greater equality, it cannot do without objective knowledge. However, such knowledge also serves democratic aspirations. This means that contemporary capitalism is mistaken to think that its rejection of the settlement with democracy is in its best interests. Creative capitalism still needs the “turbulent individual” who can think objectively. Democracy is the price to be paid for science.

But before continuing with the idea that the objectivity and critical reasoning developed in the disciplines is made possible by the social relations of trust in liberal democracies—I indulge in an intriguing tangent—one that also fascinated Macfarlane. Given the importance of Maitland’s contribution to explaining the modern world, what accounts for the amnesia surrounding his work? Macfarlane attributes that amnesia to ‘the way in which earlier knowledge of a high quality is quietly forgotten’ (p. 7). I include these comments here as a further reason for the importance of the structuration of disciplinary knowledge with its procedures of building on the work of earlier thinkers through processes of scrutiny and criticism. The collective representations developed over time that become the disciplinary canon are undermined by the constructivist conflation of knowledge and the knower. It means if one does not approve of the politics of the philosopher or the politics of the age in which the philosopher worked, then one also rejects his or her ideas. This has enabled the dismissal of earlier thinkers as “dead, white men” and of their ideas as well. It means the generation of students raised within postmodernism miss out on the philosophical heritage that underpins today’s social sciences.

I recall one of my postgraduate students justifying her refusal to read anything from the “dead white male camp” by saying that not only did those writers contribute to Western patriarchy but so did their writings. For her, the knower and the knowledge were inseparable. Because she refused to read the work of Enlightenment thinkers, she missed out not only on understanding the historical context of today’s sociological theories but also on those works with which she would have a degree of sympathy. These would, I have no doubt, include Kant’s essay On Enlightenment (1784/1990) and Mills’s The Subjugation of Women (1869/1999). She also missed out on acquiring the historical way of thinking required for the sociological imagination. Most unfortunate of all is that she will never know what she has missed. Although that student was at the extreme end of the postmodern generation of graduates, her dismissal of the knowledge of the last three hundred years on the grounds of the sex of its producers captures the intransigence and irrationality of the postmodern fundamentalist that I referred to in chapter 4. It is also a real problem for emerging researchers in indigenous studies, where a hostility to “Western” ideas can mean that the young researcher is confined to an ahistorical intellectual context.

To return to the amnesia surrounding Maitland—a silence that cannot be blamed on postmodernism since Macfarlane identified it in the 1960s. The silence suggests a larger problem; how to maintain disciplinary knowledge down through the generations without important ideas becoming lost, or alternately, other ideas taking over as an authoritative “creed” in the manner of moribund degenerative science. When the latter happens, disciplinary knowledge is reduced to stultified and stultifying “truths”. Indeed that is a charge levelled at the traditional school curriculum by social constructivists—one not without some foundation—although the answer lies in re-vitalising the knowledge that is taught and in teaching it well, not in rejecting it. In the case of the former, when ideas are simply lost, as exemplified by the amnesia concerning F. W. Maitland, it was not that Maitland’s ideas were abandoned because they had been tried and found wanting. That would suggest a vibrant discipline doing what it should do—testing and discarding as warranted. In this case it appears that the ideas had simply been overlooked and then forgotten. Yet, like Macfarlane, I also consider Maitland’s ideas insightful, finding in his explanation of a new form of social organisation based on trust and its institutional expression in legal trusts a powerful explanation for the emergence and resilience of contractual societies. This includes the “contractual” society of the scientific community. Their “discovery” by Macfarlane and my own use of the ideas may well exemplify the cooperation over time that may be seen not only as a continual process, but as one that has its stops, starts, and disjunctures.

Maitland drew on earlier ideas about the role of trusts in the modern world and contributed to taking the ideas further. Voltaire (1647/1994) had, as early in the modern period as the seventeenth century, identified the emerging new forms of association based on trust (in his case a trust engendered by common business interests) that overrode race and religion. Accordingly, ‘the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all profess the same religion and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts’ (p. 30). Over three centuries later the two great unanswered questions that Macfarlane returned to remain central to sociological inquiry.

The first concerns the exceptional case of modernity, where civilisation favours the individual rather than the group as the political subject. The second is ‘what could possibly hold such a system together? If kinship is restrained, God was kept out of the market, the state inhibited, how and why should people work effectively together?’ (2002, p. 257). Given social realism’s preoccupation with the sociality of knowledge, these are questions as relevant for that discipline as for political science. For society generally, the institutions of the political sphere—the state—and the institutions of the broader public sphere—civil society—provide the sites and systems for the individual to exercise partial loyalty to the group and, in doing so, enable individualisation and, at the same time, group commitment. For academia more specifically, the institutions of each discipline offer the site and systems for that partially loyal engagement.

The intellectual conversations across time by those in the same or inter-related disciplines are part of the procedures of academic knowledge that guarantee its truthfulness. It is a point made by the social realists in their use of Collins’s metaphor “coalitions of the mind” as the sub-title in the edited volume by Karl Maton and Rob Moore (2010) that brings together some of the major articles in the emerging social realist canon. The idea emphasises the importance of scholarship that builds disciplinary knowledge over the centuries. As a relative newcomer to this coalition, my interest in applying the ideas of Maitland and Macfarlane to social realism is because both writers provide insights into the socialising character of contractual associations and it is the very sociality of knowledge that is the central issue for social realists. Such associations, which include academic communities, must remain connected to their social contexts if they are to survive, and yet they must also be able to exercise critical judgement within that very context; a criticism that has the potential to destabilise the discipline’s existence. What accounts for the stability of that vulnerable state? It is a contradiction that exists in contractual societies as in disciplinary institutions. According to Maitland and Macfarlane, it is the social relations of trust that stabilise the society while at the same time allowing the contradiction to serve as the vehicle for innovation and change. Contractual forms of social cohesion have something very human at the core—trust—a trust that becomes institutionalised as legal trusts, associations, incorporations, institutions, and in the case of knowledge, in disciplinary institutions, systems, and procedures.

Disciplinary knowledge remains connected to its social context yet able to transcend that context in a number of ways: by the sociality of the academic community—that is its “coalition of minds” I previously referred to, and by the partial loyalty of those working in that coalition. The third way in which knowledge both maintains and transcends its social character is in the materiality of the knowledge “product”. Moore (2007a, p. 38) draws a distinction between ‘constructivism’ and ‘emergence’ to explain the materiality of scientific knowledge. He describes constructivism as reductionist in that ‘knowledge relations are reduced to power relations between social groups and their specific standpoints and interests and any autonomy of knowledge is denied’. In contrast, the disciplines are ‘concerned with the emergent properties of knowledge producing practices and their capacities to transcend their immediate contexts of production (allowing for autonomy)’. Accordingly, ‘whereas one is concerned with the social construction of knowledge (and is a form of idealism) the other is concerned with the social production of knowledge (and is a form of materialism)’ (p. 38). I understand that ‘autonomy’ to be  the partial loyalty of social relations of trust found in institutions that have mechanisms enabling change (in contrast to the stasis that characterises the institutions of traditional societies). In the knowledge disciplines, the mechanisms of change are the thinker’s objective reasoning and critical judgement. These are faculties enabled, rather than determined, by the procedures of the disciplines.

It is the structuring relations of trust that enable the otherwise de-stabilising forces of change to operate in disciplinary institutions and in the wider contractual society itself without destroying institutions from within. Scientific knowledge serves that society through processes of objectification that enable change to occur within institutions that guarantee continuity. Social knowledge also serves society. It is important primarily for its role in providing the cement that holds the society together and maintaining stability and continuity. This role of disciplinary knowledge, on the other hand, is as the agent of change. But to understand the changes made possible by science in Heideggerian terms as ‘a machine-like “total mobilization” of technological enframing’ (Irwin, 2008, p. 73) is to confuse knowledge with how it is used. That application is to be found in the motives and interests of real people.

Knowledge is, as Moore (2007a) suggests, a symbolic production that is ‘organized through distinctive modes of production parallel to those of material production in the economic sphere’ (p. 30). If its use is corrupted, then it is to those who control knowledge to whom we look, not to the knowledge itself. In chapter 10, I take up Moore’s identification of the issue for the sociology of education—‘to investigate the historical and sociological conditions under which the possibilities (of modes of symbolic production) are realised and distributed’ in an account of the production of indigenous knowledge. It is in the specificity of those conditions that one finds the ideological strategies of knowledge production and application.

Where the science “product” is controlled by a political group acting in its own interests, knowledge production and reproduction, like any economic resource, serves that elite. In such cases, erudite knowledge loses its partial loyalty character and becomes social knowledge—a total loyalty. This is the case because the authority over the knowledge has passed from the disinterested systems and procedures of the discipline reliant on trust to maintain their stability to the interested strategies of an economic elite or an ideological driven group. We see this with religious and cultural “knowledges”, where the criteria for who can produce the knowledge is based on the knower’s status as a group member rather than developed through procedures integral to the discipline. These are the procedures that scrutinise and test the knowledge.

Objective knowledge contains moral and aesthetic as well as economic dimensions. The arts and humanities are as important in their potential application to society as are the sciences from which technologies are developed. Objective knowledge with its inherent reasoning and critical features has the potential to ensure that science is directed towards sustaining the natural world and improving the lives of human beings. This is in marked contrast to societies that value knowledge for its economic worth only. With only an instrumental rationality as the guiding principle for existence, a society becomes lost in the reactionary modernism that Jeffrey Herf (1984) identified as Germany’s fate in the 1930s. It is the other side of modernity; soulless, sterile, and ultimately self-destructing. It is the price to be paid for rejecting the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge as capable of containing the moral and aesthetic means by which we become fully human, means that are intrinsic to the judgement function of criticism.

Contract societies need all three dimensions of knowledge to provide the material for “trust” that integrates individuals into the social contract. The individual is the social and political subject of the modern world, and it is for the individual that the concept of human rights was developed. It is the individual who holds those rights in liberal democratic nations. This fact makes nonsense of the belief that the modern individual is ‘a fiction’ (Irwin, 2008, p. 73). The social contract between individuals that arises from the individual’s political subjectivity is the condition for social and political agency. Whether the explanation for individualisation is a Marxist or liberal one, the process of becoming individualised means separating from the status-based social group in order to re-connect through contract (the liberal explanation) or class social relations (the Marxist understanding). Ulrich Beck (1994, p. 13) uses the terms ‘disembedding and re-embedding’ to describe that process of individualisation. It contains the same idea of attaching, separating, and re-attaching—the process by which partial loyalty is created.

The struggle to be free from cultural tyranny, to cast off the prescriptive template laid out for people in status-based societies is not only about what is to be rejected. It also involves ways of re-connecting. For Marxists the individual is re-connected through capitalist social relations of production that are considered to be alienating in their exploitative character. For liberals, the re-connection is the partial loyalty enabled by the contractual social relations of trust. It is when the re-connections fail and the individual is left isolated and atomised that we see the rise of traditionalist ideologies, of re-racialisation movements, and of romantic dreams of Arcadia. Although these are all part of modernity—in the logic of its negation—they are understood as a return to the more humanised world of an idealised tradition. Yet it is a world that lacks the means of progressive change. That is found in the partial loyalty of individuals within institutions, including disciplinary institutions, and operating according to social relations of trust.

Individualisation enables people who are not from the same racial and religio-cultural heritage to unite within the modern imaginary of the liberal democratic nation. How this happens is, as Macfarlane (2002) points out, the task of sociology—to understand ‘what it is that unites people in the modern, industrial, world’ (p. 109). While Marx argued that the new form of social relations are to be found in the exploitative relations of production, Macfarlane, drawing on Maitland’s insights, looks to trust-based forms of association for the explanation of reconnection. The key feature of the associations that sustain individualisation while simultaneously relating the individual to others within a social entity is the partial loyalty of the individual. That person, while belonging to the group through relations based upon trust—a relationship institutionalised in various ways and all with their codes, systems, and practices as with the institutions of academic practice—is also free to join and leave.

The processes involved in developing objective knowledge provide the mechanisms that connect people into the non-status associations of the disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences. The same procedures also provide the wider society with the mechanism for the unifying trust that enables the simultaneous stabilising continuity and the destabilising but transformative change of contractual social organisations. That mechanism is objective critical reasoning. It is a process developed within the scientific disciplines but of huge importance to modern societies based on the delicately balanced social contract. The trust between individuals that creates the society, a trust institutionalised within the systems, procedures, and practices of social organisations, ensures the existence of the society as well as the existence of the individual. It is a trust that is only as sound as the institutions that provide its structures and systems. The processes of objectification, scrutiny, and criticism, processes developed as mechanisms in disciplinary knowledge production, are as important for all forms of contractual social organisations as they are for the disciplinary communities. They play a crucial part in maintaining trust because they are procedures that enable the connection to—yet, at the same time, the separation from—the social context.

It is in these ways that scientific knowledge contributes to uniting people so that non kin-based associations are possible. Epistemic knowledge, while located in the social context, is directed to its criticism and transformation. The type of knowledge that can unite the non-kin, non-ethnic associations of the modern world must be knowledge that enables ‘communities not based on blood and place, but communities of sentiment as well as purely instrumental and practical goals’ (Macfarlane, 2002, p. 269) to cohere. Any society with groups placed on the margins and not fully integrated into the national imaginary struggles with that unity. And yet what is the ‘trick’ of unity? Macfarlane speaks of the concept of ‘trusts’ as ‘islands of fellowship in a sea of atomistic, contractual, market society’ providing the possibility and the resolution of the logical contradiction of self-love and social’—a ‘trick’ he calls the ‘mysterious essence of modernity’ (p. 272). These ‘new flexible institutions’, whose ‘prototype is the trust’, enable a ‘civilisation to emerge which “has separated off different parts of life”—power, economics, religion, and kinship’ (p. 272). I would add that the ‘trick’ he identifies is one made up of objectification, doubt, and criticism—strategies first developed within and protected by the institutions of science.

The new ways of uniting people that don’t come from one’s status in the kin group, in the religious order, or in other traditional hierarchies of power and wealth brings people together in the sports clubs, the music and arts fraternities, the political groups, the endless number and type of community organisations based on anything from gardening to sexuality to child care, and central to all—the school. The public school in the national education system—one with a common curriculum that teaches academic knowledge—is at the heart of the “trick” of unity. Public schools have the potential to create the social links that are vital to unifying each new generation in the act (and art) of association—one that ultimately depends on trust. Trust only develops where there are shared values, behaviours, and aspirations, but it is a sharing that is not mandated by kinship and the need for total loyalty to ensure the group’s survival.

To have a “heart”, these associations must have internal links but be able to link to the wider contractual society in ways that command both loyalty and criticism—in other words “partial loyalty”. Public schooling and public universities are not only institutions where the contract is developed and strengthened, their importance lies in their role as contractual institutions based on the “raw material” of association—the methods of producing and reproducing abstract objective knowledge. That knowledge is, or should be, produced and reproduced in public education, thereby providing the instrumental means for social coherence but also providing the affective and moral ties that make the civilisation worth having. In a world where people without a shared heritage form new bonds, those bonds must have ongoing value from a source other than tradition. It is not enough that epistemic knowledge be instrumental. It must also provide the raw material for social integration, but for an integration that is constantly fluid as new individuals and groups join the society. To do this, knowledge must draw on disciplines from the three dimensions of human life—the instrumental or economic, the moral or spiritual, and the aesthetic. These are found in the symbolic codes of the arts, humanities, and sciences. They form the basis of education in modern democratic nations—all directed towards the universal humanity captured in Kant’s (1781/1993) dictum referred to in chapter 1 of this volume.

What can I know?

What ought I to do?

What may I hope? (p. 518)

‘What can I know’ is the promise offered by objective knowledge. It frees us from the way of thinking that is tied to experience; to a world where “I know because I was there”, “I know because I feel”, “I know because I am a member of a gender, a race, a religion”, a membership that provides certain experiences to be understood only by those in the group. ‘What can I know’ is the implicit acknowledgement of the key idea of the Enlightenment, the idea of the universal human being who is the author of his or her own destiny, whose self-authority comes from the ability to reason and to criticise—but who exercises the authority within the collective representations of “coalitions of minds”. ‘What can I know’ also evokes an instrumental use of knowledge. It suggests what can I know for what purpose. It is the utility of knowledge; the way knowledge can make our lives better. We don’t need to live the brutish and short lives lived by all our ancestors. The science that brings economic benefits is to be welcomed. As David Landes (1998) points out in describing the great technical advances of the nineteenth century, the bringing together of ‘instruction in abstract and theoretical matters’ with technical application ‘opened the way to new branches of knowledge of great economic potential’ (p. 283).

But that instrumental use of knowledge is only one dimension. It needs the humanising control of the moral and aesthetic dimensions if we are to be more than alienated, mindless machines. It is these dimensions that are expressed in the everyday lives of people as they associate with those to whom they are not bound by ties other than their universal humanity. The contractual society cannot do away with the human need for emotional warmth and for a life with meaning and value. Indeed it needs these values more than status-based societies do because they cannot be assumed but must be constantly created.

‘What ought I to do’ is the promise of that meaningful future. Disciplinary knowledge is by its nature future oriented. It is about what is not yet known. The very idea of a future is the source of hope. We can think about what is to be valued and why and what we should do to maintain that value and carry it forward into the future. It is for this reason that a national curriculum should be the ‘knowledge that each country agrees is important for all students to have access to’ (Young, 2011). The universality and future orientation of epistemic knowledge means that all individuals are seen as contributors to this future. It has a moral message: That we have an obligation to contribute to making a better world, and that what we do, however small, does matter. Indeed, it is the idea behind the growing contemporary commitment to a sustainable world, a commitment to redress the excesses of industrial capitalism and the narcissistic greed of financial capitalism. The final line of Kant’s dictum, coming after the first two suggesting that knowledge is behind action, is a political message. Hope implies a purpose; hope for a better society. Politics is about making that society. In this way, Kant’s dictum links knowledge and politics.

The mechanisms for the link between knowledge and politics are the partial loyalty based on trust and produced by objectivity and critical reasoning. The objectivity and critical reasoning needed for scientific inquiry is also needed for democracy. Young people are prepared for citizenship, not merely by learning about being a citizen and what democracy is, but by being trained in the practices of objectivity and critical reasoning. Their understanding of the world cannot be tested against experience because “experience fails us”. It requires “testing” using the abstract concepts of political and civic engagement. In this way, the objectification required for scientific knowledge is a source for the institutions and systems of political citizenship. It is also a source for the systems and institutions of social citizenship. It provides the material for the partial loyalty that links people across the enormous range of interests and activities in modern societies.

Although loyalty to the contractual group is only partial, this does not mean that societies are simply collections of individuals. The structures of the institutions and systems of association exist independent of the individuals who belong to them. Liberal societies are constituted by social relations of trust. This is not an idealised mechanism but has its own materiality in those social relations of trust. Like knowledge, “trust” is a “product”. There is a difference, though, in terms of the type of “product”. Unlike academic knowledge, which has a specific product in terms of ideas, the component of the trust product is affective and social—it is the emotional ties and the belief in the efficacy of those ties. It is also the practices of social interaction that occur in contractual organisations. Where abstract knowledge and trust have a similar materiality is that both are produced in systems that operate according to the mechanisms of objectification, doubt, and criticism.

By producing the intellectual means for the individual to be at once separated from yet partially loyal to the group, disciplinary knowledge is intimately tied to democratic politics. This means that the attack on objective knowledge by relativists and constructivists has implications for society far wider than the “dumbing down” of the curriculum. The dominance of constructivism in educational circles contributes to what Durkheim described as ‘one of the great obstacles which constrict the development of sociology’ (1983, p. 91). Durkheim’s insight that ‘for a long time to come, there will be two tendencies in any society: a tendency towards objective scientific truth and a tendency towards subjectively perceived truth, towards mythological truth’, captures the impasse that the sociology of education found itself in at the end of the century. By denying the objectivity of knowledge, the discipline lost its own object of study.

This article was published in The Democracy Project, 3rd October 2023 

Elizabeth Rata: Two Treaties of Waitangi: The Articles Treaty and the Principles Treaty

October 2023 

Commentary 

There are two versions of the Treaty of Waitangi.  The first is the 1840 Treaty – the ‘Articles Treaty’. The second is what I call the ‘Principles Treaty’. It dates from 1986 when the principles were first included in legislation. Astonishingly the parliamentary representatives who inserted the word ‘principles’ did not know what they meant. To include a word estranged from its meaning into legislation is an egregious political failure. At the very least, a democracy requires words to have an agreed meaning otherwise rational communication is impossible.  Autocracies that use ideologies to control how people think can dispense with accurate meaning. Democracies cannot. 

The result of parliament’s failure is two versions, one of Articles – the ‘Articles Treaty’, the other of Principles – the ‘Principles Treaty’ – and the consequences – a racially divided country and a group asserting co-governance rights.  How did it happen?  

The 1840 Articles Treaty has a Preamble and 3 Articles that reflect the ideas, motives, and actions of the time. Similarly the Principles Treaty is of its time and place – the 1980s. The cause of enormous confusion and conflict is because the treaty today has the words of 1840 (whether in Māori or in English) but the meaning is late 20th century ideology.  

The meaning of the 1840 Treaty exists in the Articles. Article I recognised British sovereignty. Article II recognised the rights of Māori to hold or dispose of property. Article III recognised Māori as British subjects. In start contrast, the inventors of the Principles Treaty have, after decades of uncertainty, finally settled on the so-called core principles of partnership, active protection, and redress, despite these words not appearing in the Articles. 

The word ‘principles’ first appeared in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act. In that legislation, ‘principles’ referred directly to the meaning, value, and purpose of the Articles. The word ‘principles’ was tied to the Articles. It had no referent outside those Articles. It did not state the word ‘partnership’, nor was active protection and redress mentioned or implied.  

Three events detached the word ‘principles’ from the Treaty Articles, leading to decades of meaning creation. They are the 1985 Treaty of Amendment Act, the 1987 Court of Appeal’s ‘akin to partnership’ statement, and the insertion of undefined ‘principles’ into legislation from 1986.  

The Articles-Principles detachment occurring in these three events was crucial to today’s invented treaty. It enabled the principles to acquire a different meaning, value and purpose – a new referent. To reflect the word’s new power, it was given a capital ‘P’. From that time treaty revisionists of all ethnicities talked excitedly about the ‘Principles’ as though they had always existed. Like sacred text, the meaning was lying in wait in the Treaty runes. It would be revealed by those who now interpret the Word to the World – the lawyers who are the modern secular priesthood.  

As the practice of legislative insertion and legal interpretation gained momentum so too did an acceptance of the erroneous belief that the Principles had authority. An authority conundrum was created. It is reasonable to believe that insertion into legislation is the act of authorisation.  

After all, members of parliament authorised the insertion. However they failed to define the Principles despite numerous and ongoing insertion. It was left to activist judges, officials and retribalists to take on the monumental task of deciding what the Principles were to mean.  

In a democracy, parliamentarians represent us, the people. Yet does this authority have legitimacy when our representatives did not know what the Principles meant when they were inserted into law?  

A vacancy of meaning, especially when concealed by righteous language, opens up opportunities for those with vested interests to insert their own meaning.  In inventing and consolidating the Principles, advocates for a kinship-based political structure have used traditional ideology to provide a timeless, spiritually authorised quality to their very time-bound interests. The erroneous partnership Principle is given the greatest weight, opening up a wide backdoor to power. Tribal corporations can now move beyond their economic interests to demand political power – to be entrenched first as co-governance, then as tribal sovereignty.  

How do you get people to believe in an invention and then to agree to its consolidation in legislation? Retribalists simply used age-old strategies.  

The first strategy laid the groundwork by creating alliances with those in government and the professions, particularly in the judiciary. It didn’t matter if the alignment proved to be incompatible – such as that between a racialised retribalising movement and emancipatory feminism. As a temporary alliance it served its purpose with many feminists proving to be ardent retribalists. Some later retreating in silence, unable to resolve a dilemma created by mistakenly defining equal rights and justice in identity terms. In this way, feminism was ousted by gender identity politics and women’s rights were side-lined. 

The second strategy is to ride on the back of current intellectual movements. Using postmodernism’ mystifying and irrational idea that reality only exists in language means that if one say something is the case then it is – especially if it is said in the loud and certain tone of the righteous with prayers adding the gravitas of sacred authority. If it is stated that the Treaty has Principles, then it is for the secular priests to reveal that truth.  

This emperor’s new clothes strategy was supported by the righteousness of Cultural Marxism, a thriving ideology in university social science and education faculties and in government departments staffed by those with postmodern degrees. Although the nonsensical conflation of culture and materialism would have Marx turning in his grave, it gives social justice intellectuals a site on the moral highground from where they can do well by doing good.  

The third strategy, the language game, rests on this irrational intellectual bedrock.  Controlling the language that can be used when talking about the Treaty ensures that thought itself is restricted in both its expression and, more seriously its very development.  How can alternative ideas be developed if they cannot be spoken?  Even more seriously, once language is couched in moral terms then criticism is excluded.  

The rapid inclusion of the word indigenous into New Zealanders’ everyday language from the 1980s shows how effective this method is.  Belief in a treaty partnership requires partners who are to live in a permanent relationship.  Differences are emphasised, sometimes even created, and commonality rejected. 

Embedding one of those partners in the status of indigeneity with the other partner an intruder into Arcadia expands the moral distinction into a timeless mythical realm.  Romantic evocations of the evil coloniser and the indigenous colonised provide a more seductive narrative for the nation’s collective memory than the more prosaic fact that, from the thirteen century to the present, all New Zealanders are settlers.  

Our history is one of waves of settlers. It is a shared experience that trumps an arbitrary division into the indigenous on the one hand and all other settlers on the other. But language control is most successful when it evokes the sacred. The word indigenous does this with its suggestion of a mythological connection to the land and its creators. Those who resist the language game are accused of refusing not only the word, but the Word as revealed truth. Those who insist that truth lies in reality – that the 1840 Treaty didn’t have Principles and that we are all settlers, no matter the time of arrival, are silenced by accusations of racism. Far better to be silent than to bear the racist taint suggestive of a profoundly immoral character.  

It is in the revelation of sacred meaning that the fourth strategy has proved to be most effective. Today’s secular priests – the activist judges, tribalist law professors, and lawyer-politicians – have claimed the authority to interpret the truth from the Treaty runes. They have won the age-old battle between the World and the Word in securing doctrinal supremacy. Made vulnerable by their commitment to the Word and their role as its interpreters to the World, lawyers tend to believe that if it is said, and especially if it is said in legislation, then it must be true. That revealed Word is now the authority. 

But tribalist intellectuals, activists and lawyers aside, the group most to blame for the invention of the Principles Treaty are our Members of Parliament. The inclusion into legislation of a statute without legislators knowing what it meant is an unprecedented failure of political representation. Compounding the failure by continuing to insert the Principles does not make up for that failure. Repeating an error does not diminish or remove it, rather the error is consolidated. 

The initial authority for inclusion was not given by the people. Until this occurs, or if the people refuse to authorise the inclusion, the Principles do not have the authority claimed for them. They should be removed. In the end, legitimacy is decided by the people if democracy is to work. 

Those who have done well out of the invention of Treaty Principles will object to their removal. They will use the loud voices and threatening tactics that have proved so effective and led to widespread entitlement. They will be shameless in calling on the democratic ideals of universal human rights to justify a racialised future.  

But an unsettled and messy time is democracy in action. Indeed a degree of conflict is to be expected given the current mess.  But the message for legislators is clear. They act on behalf of the people. They must know what their legislation means before laws are passed. Officials and lawyers then interpret the law. They do not create its meaning in undertaking that interpretation.  

It is in discussion with the people that our parliamentary representatives assure themselves and us that they know what they are talking about. The discussion about whether we want Treaty Principles may be four decades late, but it must happen for the sake of New Zealand democracy.  

I identify three possible choices. The first is continue with the 1980s’ invented Principles Treaty knowing it justifies co-governance and will lead to the irresolvable conflict between a kinship-based polity and a universal democratic one, one justified in a racial division of people into indigenous and non-indigenous.  

The second choice is to value the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi as one of the country’s most significant historical documents, but one with no practical relevance to a modern democracy.  

The third choice is similar to the second but treasures the symbolic value of the historical document within the nation’s collective memory. It is to regard the principles (lower case ‘p’) mentioned in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act as referring directly to the Articles but with no meaning or application beyond those Articles.  

Democracy is not just arriving at a decision. It is the act of rational communication that enables the decision to be made. For this to happen, language must be pulled apart so that meaning is exposed, and with it, the intentions of the user. There can be no language priesthood, no sacred words, no moral highground.  Those who have controlled treaty language have controlled meaning for too long. It is now time to talk critically about the Treaty.  

When Alice told the Mad Hatter that she didn’t think, his reply was – then you shouldn’t talk. But we must talk, the alternative is silence – and anger. So let us follow the March Hare’s advice – say what we mean. Language has three components – words, meaning, and the explicit connection of the word to its meaning.  Ideology intrudes in the vacant space when words are detached from their meaning. That has been the case with Treaty talk since the 1980s.  

Let us insist on democracy’s rational communication in all its complexity and disturbing power so that we know what we mean when we speak and we can justify the meaning in explicit argumentative logic. Let us insist that our parliamentary representatives do the same. 

(Note: The ideas in this commentary are based on my article: Rata, E. (2004) ‘Marching through the Institutions’: The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi. Published in Sites, New Series, Winter, Volume 1, No. 2 https://sites.otago.ac.nz/Sites) 

PUBLISHED: UNIVERSITY WORLD NEWS, 3 June 2023

When a university no longer commits to the principle of universalism it can neither claim, nor does it deserve, the title of university.

New Zealand universities are rapidly indigenising and in so doing may undermine the very universal foundations that give the name university its purpose and meaning. We need to ask why New Zealand’s universities, among the best in the world throughout the 20th century, have embraced anti-universal decolonisation and indigenisation.

The answer has deep historical roots. Decolonisation and indigenisation are today’s expression of the Counter-Enlightenment communitarianism ethos that has resisted the Enlightenment’s liberal democratic ideals since the 18th century.

At its heart is whether the group or the individual is the primary social and political category. Although an old battle in 21st century clothes, the type of re-emergent communitarianism depends on a country’s particular history. New Zealand’s version is retribalisation, with demands that ancestral kinship serves as the political category.

Decolonising and indigenising all government institutions, including the education system and the universities, are retribalism’s strategies.

Reactionary modernity

The reactionary modernity that rejects universalism and its accompanying individual rights for communitarianism is justified by a virulent mixture of revisionist history, performative culture, corrupted leftism and postmodern relativism.

Universal human rights are claimed to be identity group rights, whether of kinship, race, sexuality or culture. The rights that first served Enlightenment universalism now serve the Counter-Enlightenment division. Modern science, developed to serve universal humanity, is wrongly labelled just one of the many cultural ways of knowing by identity groups.

In this anti-democratic modernity, the authority that individuals seized from the aristocracy and the priesthood, that right to think for themselves and make public those ideas, now stands accused as the enemy. Better, say the reactionaries, to embrace the authority of race, kin or cultural identity, than allow the rational individual to be the author of his or her own destiny.

Science

It is the universities that are the target of this prolonged attack on individual thought. We should not be surprised. Modern science admits no authority but that of justifiable reason. However, a direct attack on individual reason is not easily achieved, despite postmodernism’s best attempts.

The problem is science itself. Its truth-seeking mission cannot operate without reason, and reason cannot exist without the individual. It is the individual who thinks and it is science’s abstractions that train thought into rational logic.

Science allows individuals to develop and justify naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. Its concepts refer to the theorised structures and properties of the physical world, its methods are those of hypothesis, testing and refutation, its procedures those of criticism and judgement.

It is humans daring to provide naturalistic explanations without reference to the priestly interpreters of supernatural beliefs that give science its authority. It is the authority of the scientific method, long exercised in the university. Traditional knowledge can be included, but only by submitting to scientific criticism.

Who holds authority over knowledge?

And this is the nub of the matter – who holds authority over knowledge – today’s communitarian priesthood or the scientific method? Because New Zealand universities are proceeding apace to indigenise, what is happening in my country is instructive.

Justified by retribalisation politics with the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi used as the mandate, the aim is to insert traditional ways of being, thinking and doing into all areas of the university. The commitment to a revisionist historical treaty can be found in universities’ strategic plans.

Curriculum initiatives along with research ethics and funding are also required to demonstrate a treaty commitment. There is some dissent, but accusations of racism and the response to those who have spoken publicly have silenced opposition.

Social justice

Ironically, decolonisation and indigenisation are justified using the universal human rights argument for equity. But this will not be the outcome. The anti-universalism of this dawning reactionary age will indeed divide society into two groups – but not those of coloniser and colonised locked into the permanent oppressor-victim binary used to justify communitarianism.

Instead one group will comprise those who receive a sound understanding of science, mathematics and the humanities. Their intelligence will be developed in the demanding engagement with this complex knowledge. It is to be hoped that they will serve as the guardians of the Enlightenment’s democratic modernity.

The second group will comprise those who remain restricted to the type of knowledge acquired from experience and justified in identity ideologies. Discrediting science as ‘Western’, identity-based cultural beliefs and practices will exclude these young people from the benefits of a scientific education.

It will be a tragedy for New Zealand if indigenising the nation’s universities continues to advance unchallenged. However, given our universities’ history of excellence, one dating back to the University of Otago’s foundation in 1869, a recommitment to the principle of universalism is not impossible. But that will depend upon university leaders with the courage to speak in defence of science.

Elizabeth Rata is a professor in the School of Critical Studies in Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Free Kiwis Podcast Series: Conversation with Michael Johnston and James Kierstead

I gave this address ‘In Defence of Democracy’ to the New Zealand ACT Party Annual Conference, in Wellington and Auckland, July 2022. I want to thank David Seymour, Leader of the ACT Party, and like myself committed to liberal democracy, for inviting me to speak.  Although the address was given at a political party event, I was a guest speaker so the ideas I present are my own.

IN DEFENCE OF DEMOCRACY[1]

Professor Elizabeth Rata

University of Auckland

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. My talk ‘In Defence of Democracy’ is for those of all political persuasions who are deeply worried about New Zealand’s descent from democracy into a tribal form of ethno-nationalism[2].

I want to talk about democracy[3] – about what it is we are in danger of losing and what we need to do to retain our nation’s remarkable 170 year legacy of democratic governance.

Nearly forty years ago the 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act set in motion a radical constitutional agenda. The aim –  to shift the country from democracy to tribalism. In that time a corporate tribal elite has privatised public resources, acquired political power, and attained governance entitlements. Activist judges have created treatyism – a new interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi as a ‘governance partnership’[4]. Intellectuals have supplied the supporting racialised ‘two world views’ ideology.

The question we must ask is this: How has a small group of individuals, both Maori and non-Maori, managed to install a racialised ideology into our democracy?[5]

In his book The Open Society[6], philosopher Karl Popper identifies those who would take us back to the past, to that closed tribal society from which we are all descended. He describes how throughout history those who ‘could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom’, those ‘incapable of leading a new way’ will return us to what he called ‘cultivated tribalism’.

It is this colossal failure of vision for a democratic future that has taken New Zealand to the crossroads.  Democracy is one path ahead; ethno-nationalism is the other.

Treatyism’ success can be seen in how comprehensively ‘partnership’, ‘decolonisation’, ‘co-governance’  – whatever term is used – is inserted into all our government institutions, into the universities, and into the law. It is an ideology that tells how we are to understand our country’s history and how we are to envisage its future.

The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was, like all human products, of its time and place. One aim – shared by British and Maori signatories alike – was to establish the rule of law by imposing British sovereignty through British governance. Sovereignty and governance go together as two sides of the same coin – with intertwined meaning. In the decades which followed, the treaty lost relevance in the new colonial society. This is the case with all historical treaties.

Revived in the 1970s as the symbol of a cultural renaissance, the treaty was captured by retribalists in the 1980s to serve as the ideological manifesto for the envisaged order – a reconstituted New Zealand. It was given a ‘spirit’ to take it above and beyond its historical location so that it could mean whatever retribalists say it means.

This treatyist ideology successfully promotes the false claim of partnership between the government and the tribes. However there is a deeper more insidious strategy propelling us to tribal ethno-nationalism. It is the collapse of the separation between the economic and political spheres.

The separation of the economic from the political is absolutely essential for democracy. When economic interests and political ambitions are merged there is no accountability to the people – consider all those totalitarian leaders whose power gives wealth and whose wealth gives power – a merger broken only when (and if) the people revolt.

When the combination of reactionary politics and wealth accumulation is justified by ‘myths of past perfection’[7], we have what I call the neotribal capitalist version of the wealth-power merger[8].

The corporate tribes have already acquired considerable governance entitlements – the next and final step is tribal sovereignty.  It’s a coup d’etat in all but name, accomplished not by force but by ideology – enabled by a compliant media.

Given the enormous success of retribalism is it too late to reclaim New Zealand from the relentless march to blood and soil ethno-nationalism?

That depends upon our willingness to understand, value, and restore democracy.

To do this we need to be clear what democracy is.

First, it is the remarkable and still uncommon form of government described in Abraham Lincoln’s famous words as ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

Second, democracy has three pillars. Remove or even tweak these pillars and it collapses.

Third, democracy requires the ‘partially loyal’ universal individual. 

I want to talk about these three pillars and that partially loyal individual. If we are to understand democracy this is where we start.

Democracy’s Pillars

The pillars are:

1. The citizen[9] – the individual who bears political and legal rights – not the racialised group member.
2. The state  –– the governing infrastructure of parliament,  systems of law, education, health and so on, regulator of public resources such as water, foreshore and seabed, flora and fauna, radio waves . . .. 
3. The nation – at once a geographic entity and a symbol of a unified though historically diverse people who muddle along together in liberal civil society.

Each of these pillars is riven by a necessary tension – a tension arising from their inherent contradictions  – contradictions which make democracy future-oriented, progressive  –  and vulnerable.

The contradictions are:

• As citizens, we have a duty to society but, at the same time, we have personal interests arising from kin, cultural, and other social loyalties. 

• The state is simultaneously the capitalist state – generating economic wealth and inequality – and the secular democratic state – guaranteeing political equality and regulating wealth distribution.

• The nation is unified in facing the future, yet diverse in its past.

Democracy is peaceful battle within and between each of these three pillars. This bloodless conflict is only possible when individuals are partially loyal.

So what is ‘partial loyalty’?

Partial loyalty

I first came across the term in anthropologist, Alan Macfarlane’s The Making of the Modern World. It intrigued me and I have developed the idea further in the following way.

‘Partial loyalty’ can explain what it is about the modern individual who has contradictory loyalties simultaneously – identifying as a family member, a member of an ancestral group, a cultural group, a tribe, a religion, an identity group defined by leisure interests, sexuality, and so on.

This is civil society. From different, even conflicting interests how do we decide where our loyalty lies – is it to New Zealand? To an identity group? An ancestral group? To those ‘who look like us’?

The idea of ‘partial loyalty’ is a way into thinking about this question.

It is a question that someone in a tribal society, an autocratic society, a religious society would not have to ask, or be permitted to ask, because the answer is already provided.

Most societies demand total loyalty.

• Traditional tribal societies allowed one identity – fixed by birth status and and kinship ties – not open to individual choice.  Loyalty was non-negotiable because total loyalty ensured the group’s survival.

• Autocratic regimes, both past and present, impose total loyalty – not for the survival of all, but for the elite – imposed by might and by ideological indoctrination.

Democracies are different in a fundamental way. They not only allow partial loyalty but require it.

In a democracy we hold many loyalties simultaneously – family and social groups where the loyalty is personal – creating a deeply held sense of identity and belonging  – perhaps to a tribe, culture, religion, sport or other type of association.

And at the same time we are loyal to a diverse society and to its governing system that is not personal. Indeed loyalty to the democratic nation is loyalty to a vision – the idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

These two different loyalties – one a deeply personal identity – the other a rational commitment to an idea – is why democracy is so difficult. It is much easier to fall back into loyalties of emotion, not reason.

The ease and attraction of total loyalty favours ethno-nationalism – it is profoundly anti-modern and anti-democratic – yet profoundly seductive.

I want to turn now to how we have been seduced. This means talking about ideology.

Ideology

Retribalism has attackedthe three pillars of democracy through the covert use of ideology. I want to talk specifically about how this is occurring in language, education, and the media.

Retribalist ideology and language

Ideologies control not just speech but thought itself. The most successful have a manifesto, a ‘sacred text’ or covenant[10]. Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, the sacred texts of religions, the US Constitution’s Second Amendment – these are used to symbolise a spiritual, ‘beyond this world’ authority,  disguising the real-life ambitions of those controlling the ideology. 

Since the 1980s the Treaty of Waitangi has been developed as such a manifesto – using two highly effective tactics.

I call the first the transubstantiation tactic.

Here the treaty is transformed from an historical document to a sacred text. This mystical transubstantiation takes the treaty into the realm of the spiritual from where it acquires a doctrinal authority – one to be interpreted for we common folk by a new priesthood – treatyist intellectuals.

Once the treaty’s unchallengable spiritual authority is established the second tactic comes into play. It is the diversion tactic. This ‘how many angels on a pinhead’ tactic operates by diverting us into echo-chamber squabbles – about the 1840 meaning of this word, that word, this intention, that intention. This is all interesting and important material for historians but our concern should be, not what the treaty said in 1840 – those days are gone – it served the purpose of the time – but what it is being used to say today – and for what purpose.

What about retribalist ideology and education?

Our  education system is indoctrinating children into retribalism. The so-called ‘decolonisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ of the curriculum is the method. This is a disaster. Decolonisation will destroy the very means by which each generation acquires reasoned knowledge, and in so doing, the ability to reason. 

I have described how this ability creates the disposition of partial loyalty that is required to be a citizen. Reasoning provides the rationalism to counter the irrationalism of total loyalty.  By undermining the secular academic curriculum – that which creates the reasoning mind – we are destroying the partially loyal individual. Our fate – to be left with those capable only of mindless total loyalty.

And retribalist ideology and the media?

An ideology becomes omnipotent when it is not challenged. In a democracy the media should inform us of all competing interests and in all their complexity. We, the people, need to know everything, because it is us who will decide what should happen. Mainstream media has failed to do this – indeed is culpable in embedding treatyism.

The Future

Is it too late to save New Zealand’s democracy? Have we already passed the crossroads? A pessimist, realist perhaps, might say ‘yes’. As a reluctant optimist I would say there is still time if we do the following:

1. Remove the treaty and its principles from all legislation. People (not a sacred deity)  put these into legislation. People can remove them.
2. Remove retribalism’s ideology from all public institutions, including the universities.
3. Encourage those in civil society who value and desire Maori culture to participate in – for example – Maori media, Maori language, kaupapa Maori schools[11], Maori literature, arts, music, fashion, film, festivities . . . all the activities of a vibrant culture.
4. Teach a complete and unvarnished NZ history developed according to sound scientific methods.
5. Allow New Zealand English to evolve organically through incorporating Maori words, not by government decree[12].
6. Re-build the education system to teach academic subjects – the source of the partially loyal individual – not ideological dogma [13]. 

And finally, hold a national discussion – possibly over several decades – about a symbol for New Zealand’s foundation.  I have four suggestions:

1. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi – for its historical value only – not as a legal and constitutional document. Recent attempts to trace democracy to the treaty are nonsensical and will further embed treatyism.

• The 1852 Constitution Act. This Act, with all its limitations, did establish New Zealand democracy. It set up Parliament and the beginnings of the workable state that continues today. It recognised the citizen to whom Parliament is accountable – even though only certain Maori and settler men were able to vote – it is that crucial principle of accountability to the people that was put in place.

• The 1893 Electoral Act – women’s suffrage.

• Don’t have a founding document. Do we need one?

On a personal note  –  I confess an emotional pull to the 1893 Electoral Act – for kinship reasons – one of my great-grandmothers was a signatory to the Suffrage Petition. However as a ‘partially loyal’ citizen I must give full and rational consideration to the other contenders – even to argue against my own various loyalties in coming to a decision. There is no doubt that the 1852 Constitution Act is the strongest contender because we can trace our liberal democracy to this legislation. Surely it worth celebrating?

But we may never decide on an official founding document – and that’s fine. It is the continuous peaceful battle of democracy in action that matters. But that ongoing battle is democracy’s inherent source of instability – an unsettleness that is both its strength and its vulnerability.

When citizens abdicate their democratic duty, when the media abandons its responsibilities, when judges become political activists, when academics are intolerant of open inquiry, and when governments are subverted by an ideology – that is when a corporate tribal elite emerges to encircle the commons, that is to privatise what belongs to the public, to us the people, and to govern not in our interests but for themselves. In this way wealth and power are merged.

Before moving to my conclusion I want to make one thing absolutely clear – especially to those who will seek to distort my words – I support the activities of those in civil society who value and engage in Maori language and culture. A liberal civil society is where we meet in all our differences – indeed society is at its most creative when diversity is practised and enjoyed by all. 

To conclude

Politics arises from civil society – from the various conflicting interests of people. That political-civil interaction is what democracy looks like.  But, and this is the crux of my argument,  no interest group  has the right of governance unless the people agree. Elections are that act of agreement – always temporary with the winner always on trial. 

New Zealanders, both Maori and non-Maori, have not been asked to agree to tribalist governance.  If we had been asked would we have agreed?

Tribalism and democracy are incompatible. We can’t have both.  If we wish to keep New Zealand as a liberal democratic nation then, as we derive our citizen rights from the nation-state, so we have a duty to ensure that the nation-state which awards those rights, remains democratic and able to do so.

For our country to remain a liberal democracy, we need to know what democracy is, its true value, and what we must do to restore it.

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[1] The ideas in my speech are been developed in academic articles and books since the early 1990s. Some are available on these websites – www.elizabethrata.com

https://profiles.auckland.ac.nz/search?by=text&type=user&v=Elizabeth%20Rata

and https://openinquiry.nz. My choice of the title ‘In Defence of Democracy’ is a nod to the Listener letter ‘In Defence of Science (NZ Listener, 31 July 2021). I was one of the seven signatories to that letter.

[2] Rata, E. (2021) Ethno-nationalism or Democratic Nationalism: which way ahead for New Zealand?

Elizabeth Rata: Ethno-Nationalism or Democratic-Nationalism: Which way ahead for New Zealand?

[3] Amartya Sen (1999).  Democracy as a Universal Value. Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17.

[4] Rata, E. (2021) The road to He Puapua – Is there really a treaty partnership? The Democracy Project, 5 July.

Elizabeth Rata: The Road to He Puapua – Is there really a Treaty partnership?

[5] My first article, published in 1996 was entitled ‘Goodness and Power’: The Sociology of Liberal Guilt, New Zealand Sociology, 11(2), 231-274.

[6] Karl Popper. The Open Society, Vol. 1.

[7] Acknowledgement to Professor Brian Boyd for this beautifully apt phrase ‘the myth of past perfection’.

[8] ‘Neotribal capitalism’. Available at www.elizabethrata.com

[9] The term ‘global citizen’ is nonsensical. A citizen is someone who bears rights. Those rights must be from an entity that has the power both to award the rights and to enforce them.  Currently it is the nation-state that does this as there is no global institution that has the authority to award and enforces rights and responsibilities.

In the absence of such an authority the term ‘global citizen’ is hollow in substance, and only useful as a metaphor for the aspiration of equality for all people.

[10] Margaret Wilson,  cited in Rata, E. (2005). Marching through the Institutions, The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi, Sites New Series, 1 (2) 56 – 81. Article available https://openinquiry.com and www.elizabethrata.com

[11] My recent book, written with Tauwehe Tamati, is about a teaching method to use in kura kaupapa Māori in order to develop students’ academic achievement in both Maori and English.

Rata, E. and Tamati, T. S. (2022) Academic Achievement in Bilingual and Immersion Education: TransAcquisition Pedagogy and Curriculum Design. Routledge.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003156444/academic-achievement-bilingual-immersion-education-elizabeth-rata-tauwehe-sophie-tamati

[12] Public Service Act 2020 Te Whakapakari I te hononga I waenga I te Maori me te Karauna Strengthening the Maori Crown relationship. Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission. Fact Sheet 3.

[13] The cultural knowledge of traditional societies is not science. However the science-culture distinction doesn’t exclude traditional knowledge from the secular curriculum. It does however put limits on how it is included. Students can be taught in social studies, history, and Māori Studies about the traditional knowledge. But this must not be induction into belief and ideological systems. The home and community (e.g. marae and churches) are for induction into cultural beliefs and practices.

The following extract is taken from Rata, E. (2022) The Decolonisation of New Zealand Education. The Democracy Project.

Elizabeth Rata: The Decolonisation of Education in New Zealand

“Proto-science (pre-science) is found in all traditional knowledge and includes traditional navigation, medicinal remedies, and food preservation This knowledge, acquired through observation and trial and error, as well as through supernatural explanation, along with the ways it may have helped to advance scientific or technological knowledge, is better placed in history of science lessons rather than in the science curriculum.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. Its concepts refer to the theorised structures and properties of the physical world, its methods are those of hypothesis, testing and refutation, its procedures those of criticism and judgement.  The inclusion of cultural knowledge into the science curriculum will subvert the fundamental distinction, one acknowledged by mātauranga Māori scholars, between naturalistic science and supernaturalistic culture”.