Gordon Campbell of Scoop calls the cuts: Anne Tolley’s 19th century approach to education
Remember National’s election promise to return New Zealand to the top half of the OECD tables? In government, its moves in education seem motivated more by a desire to return New Zealand to the golden age of Victorianism – when the three “R”s and a stern testing regime were seen to be all that a young lad or girl really needed.
From a New Zealand perspective, one aspect of the reaction to the Cambridge University report in Britain has been particularly interesting. There has been a striking level of support from the Conservative Party for the retention of an expert advisory service across the entire curriculum.The Tories are doing so not instead of a concentration on the teaching of reading and writing – but because they believe the broad-based approach actually makes the task of teaching reading and writing skills much more effective. Here for instance is the shadow Tory education Minister Michael Gove, writing in the British press earlier this week :
“A broad and demanding curriculum – far from undermining reading, writing and arithmetic – reinforces attainment in these core skills. “Perhaps Education Minister Anne Tolley should be talking more to her British counterpart. Or at least explaining why she and her Tory colleague are treating the evidence on teaching outcomes so differently.
Clearly, the decision to narrow the scope of the advisory service available to our teachers makes no educational sense. It is being done in the service of a national testing regime at primary level that also makes little educational sense. This is penny pinching and political rhetoric, at the expense of our children and their future. The money at stake – $10 million – is a fraction of the amount that the government is planning to spend on the Rugby World Cup. Well, the battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton. But an emphasis on winning at rugby – and a Victorian Age type of education system – will be of little use against the challenges we face from globalization.
And Catherine Delahunty at Frog Blog: The Three Rs”: Reduce, Regiment, and Ruin our public education system
It wasn’t much fun waking up this morning to the news that the Ministry of Education will no longer be providing advice to primary schools on arts, science, technology, or physical education – nothing in fact, except the “three Rs”: reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. This latest assault on the public education system by the National Government is just plain stupid.
It also heralds the undoing of a robust curriculum. There is no educational justification for such a narrow focus, when all the evidence points to the importance of a holistic educational experience at primary school level.
The limitation of Ministry of Education support to literacy and numeracy is clearly to assist with the implementation of the new National Standards (which are due to be announced tomorrow, according to Education Minister Anne Tolley.
Presumably, the Minister thinks literacy and numeracy are not developed in parallel with the core subjects by subjects like art, science, and technology. Perhaps she hasn’t been visiting schools and seeing the interconnections between subjects in action like I have. She certainly hasn’t been listening to her counterpart in the British Tories, Conservative Education Spokesperson Michael Gove, who says
“a broad and demanding curriculum – far from undermining reading, writing and arithmetic – reinforces attainment in these core skills.”
You can drive a truck through her logic but I get the feeling that the Minister’s ideological advisers don’t care. They have a plan which involves selling the idea that the “three Rs” are somehow learned in little boxes taught separately from other topics, and that all children learn in exactly the same way.
Through this same cut, we have now lost all the Sustainability Advisors who survived, just, the cuts to the Enviroschools Budget earlier this year.
Under this Government, it seems that “three Rs” are now Reducing the curriculum, Regimenting the assessment processes, and Ruining opportunities for our children.
