The president and executive have prepared a submission on the government’s proposed social science curriculum for years 0 -10.

The 2027 Social Science Curriculum for School Years 0-10. Submission on behalf of the New Zealand Historical Association.

Introduction:

We welcome this opportunity to improve the draft curriculum. The social education of our young people is clearly a crucial part of our cultural infrastructure. It helps them understand the cultures from which they come, the relationships between these, and the country in which they live. It ranks with numeracy or science but, in an AI world, becomes arguably more important as it helps students to assemble the skills to think for themselves. The Social Science Curriculum for school years 0-10 (5 to 15 years of age) is therefore, like physical infrastructure, too important to become a political football.  Yet the changes between Curriculum 23 and Curriculum 27 risk exactly that outcome. Furthermore, it is not clear to us that the proposed new curriculum will meet the government’s expectations in providing students with the skills and knowledge required for civic participation, critical thinking, or as a foundation for further study.

Expertise

The New Zealand Historical Association (NZHA) represents most of this country’s professional historians, including world-leaders in global, settler, and indigenous histories. Much of what is being drawn on in C27 is the product of our members’ work. However, the Association was not involved in drafting the 2027 curriculum (C27), a missed opportunity given many of these leading researchers would have contributed their expertise freely. Our experience as researchers and as teachers in tertiary settings make us especially well qualified to comment on the quality of C27. As it stands C27 is not fit for purpose. Our broad concerns are outlined in what follows:

The Proposed Curriculum:

• Design: C27 is intended to replace the curriculum implemented in 2023 (hereafter C23), on the grounds that C23’s content over-emphasised local and indigenous history. Yet not only the content, but also the structure, some of which has clear and apolitical merit, is being ditched. C23 separated History from the other three social sciences (Geography, Economics, and “Civics”), which made it more coherent and easier to use. It was less overloaded with easily acquired information. Above all, it was better aligned to teaching and learning resources. Modifying any weaknesses should not mean ditching the strengths.

• Methodology:  C27 focuses on content at the expense of approach. Our members support a curriculum with rich content. However, it does not emphasise historical skills required for interpreting and analysing that content. These are transferable critical thinking skills, vital to any world-leading education system, but absent here.  History involves questioning. Big New Zealand questions include the changing nature of our relationships with Britain, Australia, China, and the USA; the roles of gender, class, and racism; the implications of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, past and present; and the evolving role of immigration. These questions should not be concealed from New Zealand students. On the contrary, they should be encouraged and enabled to consider them for themselves.

• Content:  as noted above C27’s design does not support its content-heavy approach. Further, the content itself is uneven. Notably there is a reduction in iwi and hapu histories, and other local histories, which can connect students with the subject. We do need global history, yet there is consensus that enabling students to connect themselves to the histories they study improves learning outcomes. Fortunately, much New Zealand history is global. It stems from the two most wide-ranging expansions in human history, that of Polynesians and Europeans. The former began in south China, matured on the maritime fringes of Southeast Asia, then stretched west across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and east across the vast Pacific to the Americas, from which gourd and kumara were acquired. These plants helped Polynesians to venture into colder climates, even to New Zealand. Remarkably, they rapidly adapted from the tropics to the Bluff, becoming Māori in the process. Here is an astonishing and dramatic story that is both global and local. Yet it is largely absent in C27.

• Quality: Our members have strong reservations about the quality of the content in C27. Critical topics like those described above have been omitted, while others are partially or inaccurately covered. For example:
• The New Zealand Wars coverage does not include the Waitara Purchase, Governor Grey and the invasion of the Waikato, the government’s Māori allies, Tītokowaru, Parihaka, and much else.
• Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the NZ Company are not included as impetus for colonisation, or catalyst for British intervention and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
• Economic history is inaccurate and thinly covered. For example, the importance of our economic integration with Britain between 1882 and 1966 is very far from clear.
• Cultural history is almost entirely ignored. Striking absences include sport, art, craft, literature, and film 
• Pacific history is truncated, dealt with almost entirely as a twentieth century topic.

Such omissions and inaccuracies distort the historical record and are key weaknesses in C27.

• Coherence:  Content emphases and omissions have created a lack of coherence in C27.  For example, like Polynesian expansion, European expansion produced new peoples, in its case typically at the expense of the pre-existing inhabitants. There is no evading this colonising aspect of our history. But it is not the only one.  European New Zealanders have become a distinct type, anchored only in these islands, where they remain the majority. They differ from ancestral British and cousins in Australia and North America for intriguing historical reasons, not least the influence of Māori. Understanding New Zealand’s past requires engaging with this history.  For example, a notable difference is the more rapid advancement of women here than elsewhere. An informal settler “folk feminism” preceded and accompanied formal feminism, preparing the ground for votes for women in 1893. Folk feminism was also instrumental in giving New Zealand just about the sharpest “Mother’s Mutiny” in the world, with birthrates halving between 1886 and 1901, so halving the burden of motherhood. But the story of European New Zealanders, the majority of our population since 1860, is not coherently told in either C27 or C23.

The role of teachers

Teachers rightly have considerable discretion in implementing the curriculum, tailoring it to each school and class. Teachers, not students, are the first audience of the curriculum document. Teachers are professionals who should not be patronised (e.g. by being told, twice, that there are 365 days in a year), or over-directed. Instead, they should be assisted to engage students with history’s dramatic stories and disputed issues, and to guide them towards finding and assessing information for themselves. Careful attention should be paid to teachers’ own submissions on C27.

Conclusion

The goal of C27 is to create a world-leading curriculum. This cannot be achieved without the considered participation of experts in New Zealand history as well as in global history. It also must have input from those already teaching New Zealand history in schools, who will have to implement it.  We strongly urge the government to reconsider aspects of the design, methodology and content in the curriculum and to draw upon the expertise available to make these changes.

James Belich, ONZM, Beit Professor Emeritus of Global and Imperial History, Oxford University, President of the New Zealand Historical Association.