A Recolonised Health Curriculum for our Rangatahi
In August last year the AEC broke the story about the deletion of kupu Māori from junior readers with our At The Marae Substack piece. We posed the question: is this a slide into culturicide?
Aotearoa responded with a resounding yes!
Interesting then that the whitewashing of our education system has continued ‘at pace’.
Recently we have seen the claimants in the Wai 3553 Waitangi Tribunal hearings litigate this same argument in relation to the removal of school board obligations to Te Tiriti and the design of a Eurocentric Curriculum.
One aspect of the recolonisation of the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) that hasn’t received much attention yet, is the eradication from the draft Health Curriculum of Māori concepts, representation and models of health - or anything that authentically speaks to our specific context here in Aotearoa: New Zealand.
Hanna McCallum from Newsroom makes mention here: New school curriculum cuts mention of ‘mental health’ - Newsroom
The concept of hauora, or holistic wellbeing is nowhere to be seen in the draft curriculum.
The Minister of Education thought that hauora “probably” was included in the draft document (Ibid). However, a simple Ctrl-F word search of each draft Health syllabus from Year 1 - Year 10 reveals zero mentions. Stanford argued that many critics of the draft “have not actually read the curriculum”. Sorry Minister: Who has not actually read the curriculum?
Perhaps a Minister does not need to read the curriculum when the writing of it is outsourced to Learning First, an Australian business, who then in turn, pays someone in the UK to write it. Just like many of the details about who actually wrote other parts of the new NZC, this information is not in the public domain but the AEC has good reason to believe that the draft Health syllabus in the refreshed NZC was indeed written in the UK, tidied up in Australia, and paid for by NZ taxpayers.
It is particularly sad, but now not so surprising, to see that Te Whare Tapa Whā is not included anywhere. Anyone who has experience working in education, health or the social services in New Zealand knows how foundational and integrated Sir Mason Durie’s framework is throughout this country.
As our students move into the high school years they start to think about careers and opportunities outside of the education system. If they show an interest and inclination for work in the health, well-being and social sectors then it makes sense to prepare them with a curriculum that reflects the reality of working in the New Zealand health and social sectors, particularly if they are living, learning and working in communities that have high numbers of Māori and Pacific peoples.
A holistic Māori worldview of health and well-being has been a key part of our New Zealand Health curriculum and education system for many years now - because successive educators, academics and education policy makers have recognised it is the right thing to do.
In a country that has some of the worst statistics in the world for youth mental health, and particularly for rangatahi Māori, who in their right mind would think our tauira would be shut out of culturally relevant access to learning in Health? Perhaps a woman in the UK who may never have met any rangatahi Māori or a kaimahi in Australia who knows all about AI but not about Te Ao Māori.
It is concerning to see the ongoing recolonisation of our education system and the return to structural racism. It is even more of a worry to consider: what will be next?
It must be so demoralising for those who did the mahi for the Curriculum Refresh to see the Stanford Curriculum demolish it all. NZ tax payers need hear how Erica Stanford is wasting tax payers dollars and scrubbing NZ out of the curriculum with foreign writers.
I believe you are speaking of people who are entrenched in the notion that colonisation was good for Māori and, in fact, is good for everyone. Why would you get a curriculum directly from England zhooshed up in one of England's colonial countries? Because you think that what's good for colonial people is good for all, and you want everyone to be assimilated into the hierarchies of the British hive mind - which ultimately is a colonising tool for everyone to become the worker bees who make the money for the entitled rich?
Longitudinal research found clearly that what works for Māori works for everyone (because it's just darned good, human, relational, caring, reciprocal teaching). We already knew from our long tail of failure that colonial, imported educational norms, systems and philosophies weren't working for marginalised groups, heck, we've been trying to turn that enormous ship for years. It turns out the ship wasn't a ship, but an enormous rubber-band, still held in the hands of those who did well in the colonial system, who formed positive identities because they were "good" at it, who think the 50's were boom times (well, they were for them, sadly we know through research, they weren't for Māori and never were designed to be!) They've snapped back the rubber band and Māori are taking the brunt ... again and again.
They've stripped everything Māori because they are cognitive imperialists, epistemic racists, and colonialist loyalists who have no clue at all, have no empathy at all for what it's like to have someone stomp all over your culture, beat it out of you, take away your language, and basically force theirs into you. It's not just culturicide, it's rape, symbolic violence of the worst kind, and they just ... won't ... listen! I don't want them telling me how and who my mokopuna Māori should be, and here they are forcing it on me and my mokopuna, not asking me, or my whānau, hapū iwi whether I want my mokopuna to be some form of their "desired culture".
I'm sick of this violence; we've had nearly 200 years of them forcing themselves on us. It needs to stop.