In response to a recent study conducted by The New Zealand Initiative highlighting a possible knowledge deficit in New Zealand education, NZ Principals Federation president Whetu Cormick responded in the New Zealand Herald saying:

“For a child in Bluff who might be interested in muttonbirds, they are not going to be interested in the fact that there are seven continents in the world,”

“We need to continue to develop a curriculum that is relevant to the community and in partnership with the community.”

A press release from The New Zealand Initiative suggests these comments reveal a particular weakness in New Zealand education.

The New Zealand Initiative and Whetu Cormick represent two opposite ends of a spectrum in education on the role of knowledge. Is there a set body of knowledge children should be given? What should be the role of knowledge in education? To answer these questions is complex and much depends on personal worldview and one’s perspective of the purpose of education.

The New Zealand Curriculum

For those of you who are not clear on education talk, ‘curriculum’ is simply Latin for ‘course of study’. So what position does our New Zealand Curriculum take on the role of knowledge?

The current New Zealand Curriculum is very open-ended. To give you an idea of what this looks like, consider Mathematics, which in the New Zealand Curriculum is one of the more prescriptive subjects. For level 3, which equates to roughly two years of school (Year 5 & 6), there are 17 main achievement objectives. By way of contrast, the Stage 5 (just one year of school equivalent to NZ Year 5) Cambridge Primary Mathematics syllabus contains 98 learning objectives. It’s fair to say then that our New Zealand Curriculum rejects the older traditional knowledge-rich approach for what could be described as a ‘skills’ or ‘outcomes-based’ approach.

Potential Benefits

One of the main benefits of this approach is the ability of teachers and schools to have the freedom to decide how best to educate the children in response to the needs of their community. Not every community is the same, and a one-size-fits-all model of education is not going to suit every community, let alone every individual child. I think many parents desire that their children learn in a way that reflects their concerns and worldview. Having a government decide what every child should learn about every subject does sound rather Orwellian.

Potential Dangers

Nevertheless, there are a number of dangers inherent in such an open-ended curriculum.

Firstly, it ignores the truth that there is a body of knowledge that our children need to grasp to lead successful and useful lives. One classic example of this is in reading comprehension. More competent readers are better, not because they have acquired superior skills in reading per se, but because they have a better knowledge-base that allows them to understand what they are reading. Another reason we need to have a common body of knowledge is that it facilitates communication in civil society. In communication with others, we assume certain things. Communication becomes difficult and more likely to lead to friction in society when different groups do not have a large shared body of knowledge.

Secondly, this approach is likely to lead to the entrenchment of inequality in society. In a world where we teach children what we deem is relevant to them, we are in danger of depriving them of the knowledge they need to make socio-economic gains. Teachers know that some children come to school with a knowledge deficit. Others have had privileges that come with more educated and wealthy parents. Schools can have a role in reducing this knowledge gap, but only if they are willing to see education as taking children outside of their known world and providing them with the proven riches of the great past civilizations, cultures and thinkers.

Education should be about breaking down barriers and giving children wings, not making assumptions about what they deserve to know. We should bring the best of the past to our children so they can enjoy these treasures that may be outside their community’s immediate knowledge.

Thirdly, an open-ended curriculum such as the New Zealand Curriculum actually requires a very knowledgeable and educated teaching profession who can make sound decisions regarding what needs to be taught. It is doubtful that this is the case. While few would doubt the enthusiasm and diligence of most teachers, given that the entry requirements for a primary teaching degree are some of the lowest in degree courses it seems unlikely that teaching is attracting our most knowledgeable and educated talent.

A fourth concern is that an open curriculum is likely to be hijacked by the issue du jour. This is in fact already happening. The school climate strikes in 2019 are symptomatic of this. Well-meaning and passionate children missed school to protest against climate change. It does seem that very little balance is being provided by schools and teachers on this issue, and our children are being used as pawns in a larger political game.

Faulty Assumptions

Finally, the move toward an outcomes-based model and away from a knowledge-rich curriculum seems to be built on a number of faulty presuppositions. The first is that knowledge itself is unimportant. One does not need to read too widely to find educators arguing that knowledge is irrelevant in the age of Google, “because you can just look it up”. While this might seem a fair enough comment for an adult who has a relatively solid basic grid of knowledge from which to draw, for a child, it is often the case that they will not know the questions to ask. They don’t know what they don’t know! To become a skilled expert in any field, a comprehensive knowledge of your subject (and of course application of this) is always going to be a requirement.

A second faulty assumption is that education should follow the interests of the child. In the Herald article mentioned at the outset, Whetu Cormick is reported as indicating that the curriculum was right to let teachers choose topics that interest their students, because students could always find out other facts on the internet. But perhaps this thinking has things around the wrong way. Children will look up things in encyclopedias or get books out of the library or google them based on their interests at home. They will do this anyway. What they won’t naturally look up is what they may not yet be interested in or even know about. And some of this is the knowledge that a civil society requires adults to know for human flourishing.

A final faulty assumption is that there is no hierarchy in knowledge. Muttonbirds and continents. Are they are equally important? Does it just depend on what you are interested in? Perhaps we could think of knowledge as a jigsaw puzzle. When my children and I attempt a jigsaw puzzle, we always begin by putting the corner and edge pieces together. It would be very difficult to begin with picking a middle piece at random. Certain pieces of knowledge and indeed subjects are like the edge pieces of a jigsaw. They are essential if we are going to get our puzzle anywhere near completed. School, and particularly the primary years, should be about getting those edge pieces put together. This will help our children as they go through life and put in the pieces they are going to need in their particular calling.