What the HELL is happening with the new school curriculum?
Over and over again, I've had emails and messages from parents asking me about the new curriculum. I tried to get my head around it, but just had more questions than answers. So I teamed up with my friend and fellow writer, Josh Drummond, and we came up with questions we'd like to see answered.
Over and over again, I've had emails and messages from parents asking me about the new curriculum. I tried to get my head around it, but just had more questions than answers. So I teamed up with my friend and fellow writer, Josh Drummond, and we came up with questions we'd like to see answered.
And FAAAARRRR OUT it is bleak - Project 2025, the Atlas Network, AI Slop, hoplites for eight-year-olds, pseudoscience, religious crap, and the so-called "Trivium Method"? It's all there where it shouldn't be (and it's detailed below).
As a parent (as someone who cares about education full stop), I want transparency around this process. Unfortunately, I feel like we're not going to get it. Because ultimately, our children are being used by this government to push dog-whistle politics, and many of the changes being made to the curriculum are purely ideological. They have no evidence base, and that's incredibly worrying.
You used to be able to trust that experts were creating curricula. Now we have politicians and their mates all in a Google document dropping in revised history at best and pure racism at worst. This Government has to stop messing with our kids.
And we all need answers about exactly what they're doing and why. - Emily
In no particular order (plus one bonus question)
Will someone answer these questions? The Ministry? The Education Minister Erica Stanford? Or the actual Education Minister David Seymour? Or maybe the Atlas Network's comms person?
1) Does it seem like a problem that hundreds of principals have urged the minister to halt 'rushed' rollout of new curriculum?
2) Why has there been an open letter from maths education experts expressing deep concern about the curriculum?
3) Why have drama, music and arts teachers said they have been dealt ‘a significant blow’ by the curriculum?
4) Why is Home Economics (Food & Nutrition) being binned as a separate subject when it has been taught since 1917? At a time when grocery prices are at an all-time high, doesn't this take away a lifeline of food literacy and understanding?
5) Why has the rollout of the curriculum been so rushed? Like, why has the maths curriculum been rewritten three times in three years?
6) Maths teachers have said the curriculum seems "more political than educational". What role did politicians have in creating the curriculum and what teaching experience do they have?
7) Does the Education Minister’s qualification (a BA in political science) give her the skills to create a curriculum? What about her experience working "in a number of export sales roles for New Zealand manufacturers"?
8) How much of a role did Associate Education Minister David Seymour personally play in shaping the new curriculum?
Given how thrilled he seems by “taking politics out of history”? (Which is an oxymoron! History is politics!) it seems…quite a lot? Maybe that explains the rumours that he was personally involved in drawing up curriculum documents?
9) Not strictly the curriculum, but closely related: why is the Education Minister shrinking the Teaching Council, and replacing the majority of its members with ministerial appointees?
The teacher’s unions call it a “blatant power grab." They've said the most significant cause of stress for New Zealand teachers is government changes. I wonder if anyone in government is worried that only 14% of teachers believe the government values them.
10) Why have principals been hearing about changes to the curriculum only through the media? Why are they being “blindsided” by haphazard, frequent curriculum changes and the need to rapidly implement them?
11) Why did the ministry choose not to collaborate openly with schools?Why are teachers saying they had to sign NDAs to work on the curriculum?
12) What’s in those NDAs? What are teachers not being permitted to talk about? Let’s dig a little deeper, and perhaps we’ll find out. Warning: this gets very weird, very fast.
13) Do you know about the importance of hoplites? Of course you do. Everyone knows the importance of hoplites.
14) Do you (be honest this time) know what hoplites are? No, you probably didn’t. Don’t feel bad; unless you studied classics at a late high-school or University level (or played a lot of Age of Empires), this is information you simply do not need to know.
Hoplites were ancient Greek militias. If you are now asking: “what the fuck does this have to do with New Zealand?” that is a valid and correct response.
15) Does your eight-year-old need to know the importance of hoplites? No. But they’re going to. A curriculum focused on Aotearoa's history has been replaced with a shallow yet absurdly crowded curriculum that teaches eight-year-olds about things like the Peloponnesian War.
16) Are hoplites as important as the fact that, by one analysis shared with us, just 11% of the entire history and social sciences curriculum relates to Māori, and the curriculum for years four to ten has very few mentions of Aotearoa and Māori? Probably not! Especially given Māori comprise around one-fifth of New Zealand’s population and have been here for 100% of its human history!
17) What has the Atlas Network got to do with the new curriculum?What an oddly specific question — but it turns out the answer is quite a lot, actually! In fact, you might say the Atlas Network has everything to do with the new curriculum!
As well as being championed by David Seymour, who spent nearly his entire pre-Parliamentary career working for Atlas Network think tanks, the curriculum reset is profoundly influenced by recommendations in the Save our Schools paper by the New Zealand Initiative, a neoliberal think tank and Atlas Network member.
As detailed at E-Tangata, Erica Stanford appointed Elizabeth Rata (Pākehā), who wrote the foreword to Save our Schools, and Dr Michael Johnston, a senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative, to the ministerial advisory group that is spearheading curriculum development.
In turn, Stanford and the curriculum advisory group are following a blueprint set out by the Core Knowledge Foundation — founded by controversial figure E D Hirsch — which is also enthusiastically backed by Atlas Network members like the Heritage Institute (authors of Project 2025). Which is probably why Stanford went to the Core Knowledge Foundation’s conference in June to rub shoulders with Atlas Network think-tankers:
When Stanford addressed Hirsch on stage, she explained the profound impact his 1996 book The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them had on her. “It changed everything. I made my Secretary of Education read it. I made my staff read it. I am now implementing huge reform in New Zealand based on your book . . . We have a knowledge-rich curriculum.”.
18) What does “knowledge-rich” actually mean?
We don’t know. Neither do the people who are writing the “knowledge-rich” curriculum.
The Education Ministry told RNZ content of the English and maths curriculum was "consistent with knowledge-rich curriculum design principles" but it failed to provide a definition of knowledge-rich despite being asked for one.
19) What has Dr Michael Johnstone — who’s done so much lobbying about the public school curriculum and who’s now doing so much to write a new one — got to do with the Free Speech Union guy’s new charter school?
Jonathan Ayling, the former Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union, is setting up a Wellington charter school called the Altum Academy, which will teach students to “remember the virtue of civilisation that has come from the West.”
Perhaps the school will use Ayling’s unhinged AI-generated self-quotes, which he’s plastering the school’s Facebook page as resources.
The charter school is backed by Altum Academic Charitable Trust. Here’s their statement of purpose from the Charities Services website.
The Altum Academic Trust has been established to support the development of academic excellence for students via a knowledge rich, prescribed, explicitly taught curriculum. The Trust also seeks to elevate and grow good character within a supportive and nurturing environment based on traditional Christian values and principles.
And who is the Chair of the Trust that’s backing this new traditional Christian values and principles-based charter school?
Why, it’s new curriculum architect Dr Michael Johnston.
20) Interesting. And what “knowledge-rich” curriculum will the Altum Academy use?
It will be teaching the “Trivium Method.” What is that? We will let David Seymour’s press release do the talking:
Students will be taught how to learn and thinkbased [sic] on the Trivium method. The method identifies a three-stage natural development of a students’ education; grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In the early years (Grammar stage) students learn facts through recitation and repetition, and by asking ‘what’. In the middle years (Logic stage) students learn to ask ‘how’ and ‘why’. In the high school years (Rhetoric stage) students will learn to persuade others that facts are true.
21) …What?
Yeah. The Trivium Method is a pseudoscientific nonsense non-curriculum favoured by conservatives and Christian schools the world over. It originates in a speech — later compiled into a 1947 book — by one Dorothy L. Sayers, titled The Lost Tools of Learning. Sayer’s book begins:
That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, and whose life of recent years has been almost wholly out of touch with educational circles, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology.
It would have been great if she’d stopped there, but sadly, she did not. The Trivium Method suggests the “trivium” (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) maps onto the developmental stages of children. There is, it may not surprise you to learn, no evidence to support this, and given that Sayers' book came out 78 years ago and the real trivium’s most recent heyday was the actual Middle Ages it is entirely possible that it’s not the best way to be teaching children.
22) So… do you mean to say that the new curriculum’s bizarre boner for teaching 8-year-olds the “Western” canon might be because it’s being cribbed from the pseudoscientific, religious Trivium Method, stealthed in by a guy who also sits on the board of a Trivium Method charter school?
When you put it that way, it does seem a lot like that, doesn’t it!
23) Are there any good things about the new curriculum?
According to some teachers we’ve talked to, yes. The “dumping” of Reading Recovery made headlines, but what’s being taught instead is “structured literacy” based on phonics, which many experts say is a better way for most children to learn. And we’re told there are positives within the new maths curriculum, too.
But none of that offsets the allegations that teachers have been left out of curriculum development, their concerns have been ignored, that a prescribed approach can sideline neurodivergent children and children with complex learning needs, that the curriculum has been rushed, that its proposed implementation time-frame is impossible, that Te Ao Māori has been devalued, that the curriculum is stuffed with “Western” chauvinism, and doesn’t address all the other issues raised here and elsewhere...
And it’s important to note that phonics has been taught in classrooms for years. The architects of the new curriculum are trying to claim credit for positive changes that were already underway.
24) Is the biggest problem with the curriculum, and NCEA, and everything else, that teachers in New Zealand have been continually asked to do more work with fewer resources, and forced to take on ever-greater class sizes and given next to no support for terrible pay while the Ministry of Education funnels millions to failing charter schools?
You can answer this one.
25) I’ve been reading the draft curriculum and OH MY GOD. Did they use AI to write it?
They might have! The new curriculum documents have a bunch of what are often AI tells, like misplaced or too-frequent em-dashes — the long dash things either side of what you’re reading right now — and arbitrary, fragmentary bullet points.
Even more tellingly, officials have essentially said, “Yeah, we might be using AI, actually!” Here’s what they told RNZ:
A senior manager's briefing to ministry staff raised the possibility of using AI to write some of the material underpinning the curriculum. The manager said they could use AI to synthesise the curriculums of countries such as Singapore, NSW, British Columbia, with New Zealand information almost instantly…
Asked about the use of AI, the ministry told RNZ: "The Ministry is exploring how artificial intelligence tools can support curriculum development, particularly by analysing and synthesising information from international curricula and related knowledge frameworks. AI is not being used to directly write curriculum content but may assist with background research and insights."
BONUS QUESTION: If the people drafting the curriculum are using AI to do their homework, why shouldn’t students use AI to do their homework?
Good question!
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