New Zealand teachers shocked at leaked curriculumn – 'Where's the science?'
nzherald.co.nz
nzherald.co.nz
It seems to me that the disagreement here is about whether to structure a curriculum around bottom-up or top-down pedagogy. Do we fundamentally structure things:
- like the tech-tree from a strategy game: I think this is how a lot of us conceive of traditional learning. "Congratulations! You've done enough calculus problems to unlock Newtonian physics!" is the extreme position.
- or like a Kanban "just-in-time" system: We start with a large theme and learn things as we need them. "Well, we've been learning about `conflict and civilization` for six months, and you've been trying to build a better trebuchet for a while but in order to for you to improve it any more I'm going to have to teach you this thing called calculus".
Obviously both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. Also obviously, any real learning is some combination of both of those. A purely "tech tree" approach would require hellish discipline, and human knowledge is way more messy than a clean DAG anyway. Also no-one would stare at a group of kindergarteners who can't count past 10 and say "lets build a large language model!"
I happen to think that the ideal system is closer to the to top-down approach, but there are big challenges to implementing it. I think it's probably much easier to do bottom-up learning if you're treating large classrooms of children like widgets on a conveyor belt. I.e it may be that bottom-up wins on efficiency and so given the current resources of our education system, a much more top-down system would just fail at the implementation stage. Whereas if our education system had way more resources, then top-down would win.
And then we can see who are truly left behind
Schools have to make choices about pedagogy. I think this is a debate about which choices give the best outcomes.
You’re pointing out that access to educational resources is allocated by wealth to some degree, which is obviously true but I don’t understand your point beyond that?
Else the parents will take the matters to their own hands, because they know the moment their children r in the real world internships or entrepreneurship, they r in the world of stack ranking and result based fierce competitions.
Have we seen these kind of reforms would make the children more competitive by those parents standard? Tbh no so far. I don't think those parents will take the chances
Even on my bigger-city tech salary, putting both of my kids through private high school would be about 1/3 to 1/2 my after tax income.
Yes it's an option, but it's a big sacrifice.
Real learning requires real inquiry, which unrelated to your comment, is what the NZ Education Dept is trying to do - make subjects about the world around us to focus on problem solving - rather than the rote learning of say Newtonian laws.
As a general rule there is exactly zero of any of this for the overwhelming vast majority of primary school children in their first 7 years of formal education in either Australia or New Zealand.
If you teach maths in a JIT fashion, when do you learn "basic facts" like 3+4=7?
If you don't teach that stuff systematically, how do students get to the point where they feel they can apply maths reliably - e.g. adding prices together in their head?
So you need both - a solid foundation, plus applications using that foundation plus a bit more.
Basic facts of math are for example ZFC axioms of Set theory.
I only learned some set theory in high school. My point being, that teaching math is unexpectedly surprisingly top-down, at least at first.
Source: I have two children in NZ primary schools.
However, both assume a well intented and agreed upon implicit goal of looking for the best way to teach science.
I do not think the politics pushing for the changes described in the article share that goal.
We have a pretty decent history of being relatively early adopters of evidence-based changes to our education system in New Zealand. That's reflected in, for example, the high desirableness of New Zealand-trained educators in the prestigious international-school circuit.
What do you think the politics is pushing for?
The postmodern curriculum theorists influencing these ideas are fundamentally anti-science.
They criticize presence and origin, they deny that there is a inherent truth behind phenomena, criticize the idea that anything is really there, really exists, or can be directly apprehended if it does exist. Furthermore they see the natural sciences itself as product of the social relations that they serve to judge, that is,the idea was created at a certain time and place, to serve certain interests, and is dependent on a certain intellectual and social context, specifically one that that serves the "status-quo" of patriarchal oppression maintained through an active process of "exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization" that is inevitably embedded in the scientific method itself.
The "situating" and "holistic" approach, while in theory neutral, is in practice presented to facilitate the introduction of relationalism, placing "power and suppression" as the fundamental paradigm in which to contextualize every element of the curriculum and the teaching interactions.
The choice of current contexts with far from more settled science and and highly divisive narratives is no accident, meant to deconstruct and displace science rather than convey it.
Also, this looks like a very early draft designed to incorporate feedback.
I don’t understand how people go about criticizing a deliberately iterative process based on the first draft.
As for 'evidence', the presented framework, objectives and tactics come straight out of postmodern curriculum theorist literature. They would see nothing controversial in the above.
You could argue that the proposed drafts do not intentionally align with the presented ideological framework, but are merely accidentally aligned or enabeling. Not sure that would make it better.
The problem is that it often doesn't happen like this. Instead, it goes "You need calculus for this next part. Don't know calculus? Well, you are supposed to, so figure it out yourself."
Where do you find enough teachers to staff a nation full of secondary schools who can effortlessly move from competently teaching history to competently teaching calculus? I don't think that's realistic.
In high school we did a solar hot dog cooker project. In my Algebra 2 class, we determined the right conic to use for the cross-sectional shape of the reflector. In my physics class we calculated the energy coming in from the sun at various times of the day for our latitude. In my drafting class we produced blueprints for the cooker. And over in wood shop, they built the cooker using the designs we drew (which were dependent on the math from Algebra class), and using the materials selected by the physics class.
Then one day we all went outside and cooked our dogs.
This was a one-off thing of course. My school wasn’t structured to completely integrate all the subjects all the time. But it was valuable in teaching mushy things like project coordination and management. It was kind of like a group project, except each member of the “group” was more like a cog in the supply chain :)
New Zealand's High School curriculum is very perspective. There is an exact list of skills that students are expected to show, and all assessments are managed centrally. Teachers are more or less expected to teach to the test first and then fit actual learning around that. It does work well when the curriculum is well designed.
This article is talking about the the primary school (elementary) curriculum, which has always been much less prescriptive. There are no centrally managed assessments, just a set of learning guidelines that teachers have freedom to design a learning program around.
This new science curriculum draft is taking this anti-prescriptivism approach to the extreme. It's a pretty short document that lists a few overarching mega topics. It's expecting that teachers will read between the lines and manage to teach all the important science skills within context of those topics and get them ready for high school. On the positive side, this gives teachers even more freedom to customise their teaching programs.
But it also places a massive workload on those teachers to actually work out what they need to teach students. Good teachers with strong science skills might be able to achieve this, but the rest will struggle. Opponents of this draft are arguing the majority of students will receive sub-standard science teaching, find it boring and then stay away from science courses at high school. Science is one area were you really do want a more prescriptive curriculum, simply so these generalist primary school teachers know what they should be teaching.
It’s interesting to me that the ideal curriculum changes as a function of the resources available.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/19/what-are-maori-way...
I get the feeling the people dreaming this stuff up don't know what science is or why anyone might care about it. If it's going to be severely watered down, why bother teaching it at all?
(throwaway account, this is a hot button topic in NZ)
There are different systems for generating information. Knowledge”, and therefore “Science”, are dangerous words.
Our modern Western Liberal colonial societies don’t have it all figured out but have a hegemony that often chafes indigenous peoples.
I think we would be better recasting what we teach, and what we try to teach as Empiricism or something similar.
Frame it around experimentation. Frame it around students own desire to learn and share their learnings. Go after the “why?” that they love so much.
I think it’s at once compatible with non “Science” knowledge systems, cultivates curiosity, and engenders that which creates knowledge.
It also protects empiricism from the urge some have to deny what lends authority to good science.
It’s a draft for a reason. It was shared with 5 people who leaked it.
A high level draft is missing keywords like matter and particles...
"What we are pushing towards with the current fast draft is more of a holistic approach to how the different science concepts interact with each other rather than a purist, siloed approach."
Buntting said the draft was very high-level, as were curriculum documents for other subjects but it was clear it needed more clarity about where teachers should expect to teach various science concepts.
Education Minister Jan Tinetti said there was no question the final curriculum would include chemistry, physics and biology and other core science topics.
Broaching change ruffles feathers, and playing up outrage makes for good eyeball catching news fodder.
Now, the complaint is that instead of physics, chemistry, and biology, it's "the Earth system, biodiversity, food, energy and water, and infectious diseases." That's all it says, I don't really know what that's supposed to mean. The elementary school version of chemistry I learned was just making vinegar and baking soda volcanoes. Maybe that's "energy" now.
Basic science like physics and chemistry are a problem for woke authoritarians because you can do experiments in high school labs, and this introduces children to things like standards of evidence, the scientific method, statistical rigor, the idea that some things are universally true and false etc. More importantly it teaches them to think for themselves. Science is at its best when the teacher says "X is true" but then also "and here's why you don't have to take my word for it", which is a powerful introduction to adulthood.
All the replacement topics are united by an inability to do experiments. Instead these fields rely heavily on unvalidated simulations of assumptions. These specific topics are also clearly selected for left wing environmental radicalism e.g. "earth science" means climate change, "infectious diseases" means teaching kids how important and brilliant lockdowns and masks are, "biodiversity" means the importance of not building anything and so on.
Universities are a power base for the left because they strictly teach students to silo themselves and never question professors, especially not those from a different field. High school doesn't teach that mentality to the same degree. If this curriculum does goes through, science will immediately be redefined as "here is what academics say, memorize it, regurgitate in exams, if you do that accurately you're good at science". This is exactly what they want, because if there's one thing that COVID revealed very well it was the rampant fear of those in power of anyone who doesn't define science as blind acceptance of the word of government and academic authorities.
Sounds like the only ideologically bent character in this entire saga is you.
I have no idea what this little draft means in New Zealand. There's not much to extrapolate from.
That sort of thing sounds OK for primary/elementary school. You'd expect science at that level to be focused on soft stuff. Expecting kids of that age to do real experiments or care about the philosophy of science is too much, if you can get them out into the garden and looking at insects and flowers then that's a good start.
I think there's a subtle difference between viruses/bacteria and what government officials mean when they talk about infectious diseases. Obviously any good biology curriculum will cover viruses and bacteria at the microscopic level. But when governments talk about "infectious diseases" what they really mean is the macro scale of epidemiology and other social sciences, because they're constantly being told by rich NGOs that we now live in an age of pandemics, and they think about disease purely through the lens of social policy and enforcement. The response to COVID was widely condemned as un-scientific because link between what academics/civil servants recommended to governments and what was actually scientifically known about viruses was nearly non-existent.
In the late 19th century, New Zealand raised one of the greatest scientists of all time - Ernest Rutherford, a pioneer of atomic and nuclear physics, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. He is often referred to as "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday".
Now New Zealand is introducing a new science curriculum that has no mention of physics or chemistry! Only last year the NZ government made Maori mythology part of science education.
I see this as another indicator of New Zealand's continued evolution into an impoverished agrarian backwater where social justice ideology is worshipped as the state religion.
I'm Aussie and am fond of New Zealand. It's our next-door neighbour. I enjoyed my brief visits there and found it to be a beautiful country with many good people. Unfortunately, their isolation and naïve idealism has made them complacent as hell about their economic future and their civil liberties.
We face similar regressive forces here in Australia, but I feel they've taken a far stronger hold in New Zealand. My heart breaks.
Lower the bar would only harm the poor kids who would have a chance to thrive in merit based programs
It looks to me to be exploring a different way of presenting the subject matter that tries to answer the "how would I ever use this information" questions so commonly heard about hard sciences.
Teach the fundamentals, give students the tools to asses for themselves what the problems are, and how to best approach understanding them.
Otherwise, just teach Latin instead of everything else.
Maybe that's a bit unfair, I guess they mean to do things like "Due to global warming, the ocean level rises 5mm per year, how much will it have risen in..." Teaching arithmetic framed in the context of climate science or something. Still, it seems hamfisted and cringe.
When I learnt the greenhouse effect in school in the mid 90s, my curriculum absolutely linked it to sitting in a car and getting hot and also global warming as well as growing crops. All of which could continue in such a curriculum.
Where's the semicolon?