I’m willing to give some leniency considering this is clearly an op-ed, but not giving any sort of citations to the curriculum itself but instead saying “I read this document (?) of which 1/3 is written in a language I don’t understand… here’s my interpretation of what’s happening in classrooms!” is a little… unscientific.
> To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori.
I would be totally on board with proclaiming how harmful this is, but let’s be precise about it!
I’m having some trouble tracking down actual materials for students that espouse this. Has anyone found anything? Closest I came to a government “thing” was this student encyclopedia [0] managed by a university with funding from the NZ government. It doesn’t seem too bad to me, learning about fungus and different names for stars.
This seems to be a theme with this kind of article.
A headline and lead proclaiming some school has done something outrageous, such as for example telling people to stop using terms like "white paper" or "submit" because they're supposedly offensive. It details some of the most outrageous parts of it, but you get the strong impression there's a lot they're leaving out. They never, ever have any kind of sources or hyperlinks to let you see the documents for yourself. If you do manage to find them on your own, you find some critical context (in this example, that the list of offensive words was not a school policy, but a fully optional document created by the IT department) that undermines the point the article was making -- a point they strongly imply, but never quite state, so it's not technically lying, you see.
NCEA is New Zealands main secondary school qualification.
First link talks about 'equal status' of Māori knowledge, but it talks about that in context of pathways to passing the NCEA, i.e. my reading of it is, its like a different curriculum for getting the qualification. That isn't the same as saying 'Māori knowledge has equal status with western science full stop'. It seems to be more like 'theres a path to this qualification that is based more on Māori knowledge'. Also a lot of it is about values rather than knowledge. But I've only skimmed it, thats just the impression I got.
Wow thank you! Good finds. This is exactly the content I was imagining was out there: clear details about what’s expected of teachers following this change.
That second link has quite a bit of information sorted under those “toolkit” tabs. I think your intuition is correct: that this is opening up a different way to be accredited, not optionally supplementing “western science”. Teaching under the correct cultural context for a student to get that most value from a lesson seems good. I’m also seeing a lot of values like you’re saying, which also seems like a good thing.
I can't help but admire Richard Dawkins' unwavering commitment to science, even if it means he can come off as a bit dogmatic. It's like he's a member of a cult that's dedicated to some holy pursuit of truth, but instead of chanting mantras and sacrificing goats, they cosplay as academics and debate each other on Reddit.
I wish the relationship between ancestral findings (trying to avoid the word knowledge) and science didn't have to be so adversarial. If you've got an idea that a plant can help with certain illnesses there's probably a natural product to extract from it. If you think a traditional way of managing land is better than whatever is currently being used, let's run a test.
We could probably collaborate effectively, but the mere suggestion that those ideas be subjected to the scientific method is denounced as prejudiced.
When my ancestors came to this country they ignored the voice and knowledge of people who had lived here for tens of thousands of years. Through the wonders of "Western Science" we managed to fuck up the ecology so bad that it is still stuffed to this day. Our country spends a huge amount of money paying for these mistakes because we thought that we were right.
It is this colonial attitude that our society is the best and everyone elses is wrong that needs to be changed. Dawkins isn't standing up for science he is standing up for an attitude that has plagued western civilisation for years.
> Māori originated with settlers from East Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of canoe voyages between roughly 1320 and 1350.
> No credible evidence exists of pre-Māori settlement of New Zealand; on the other hand, compelling evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology indicates that the first settlers migrated from Polynesia and became the Māori.
Why would you assume richardjam73 is referring to New Zealand?
Most of here in the Austral-Asian region are aware of the history of Polynesian expansion and Māori settlement .. so it's pretty clear they're not referring to New Zealand.
The OP was about NZ, and richardjam73 said "this country" so I though the comment was about NZ.
I made a quick search in the previous comments of richardjam73 and I see no location, so my second guess is that richardjam73 is from USA like 50% people here. Also, my guess is people not from NZ nor USA would say which country they were talking about.
I think it'd be a bit easier to care what is being talked about if it didn't involve spitting vitriol at every involved and uninvolved.
I don't know how people can acknowledge that there is problems around the act of performing science, like suppression of results, P hacking, poor sample sizes, poor sampling, not correctly blinding trials, not handling other conflicting factors correctly, the replication crisis, having to note conflict of interest, etc, bringing into question a far chunk of conclusions.
But as soon as one says that that might cause an issue with areas that modern forms of science rarely touch on, (e.g. race), suddenly science is pure, 100% factual, based completely on indisputable evidence, and only idiots ever question the science!
> To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori.
I would be totally on board with proclaiming how harmful this is, but let’s be precise about it!
I’m having some trouble tracking down actual materials for students that espouse this. Has anyone found anything? Closest I came to a government “thing” was this student encyclopedia [0] managed by a university with funding from the NZ government. It doesn’t seem too bad to me, learning about fungus and different names for stars.
[0] https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/topics/mātauranga-māori