Now let's get my own opinion out of the way first. Yes, I totally believe that every school in NZ should include the NZ Land Wars history in their curriculum and I sincerely hope that they do.
But, here's where misunderstanding of the NZ Curriculum structure gives Stuff the opportunity to rile the ire in many NZers. The NZ Curriculum is a framework. We are so lucky in NZ to have the ability to build our curricula around the framework, compared to most countries who tell their people exactly what they must learn and when. What it means is that using the 8 principles as a foundation, school communities can pretty much build their own content with a vision of having confident, connected, actively involved lifelong learners who are thinkers, able to relate to others, understand text and symbols, manage themselves, and participate and contribute!
So, with the hugest admiration of Waimarama and Leah, whom I think have done an invaluable job of raising awareness of the NZ Land Wars through their student-led petition, the MOE tried to clarify how forcing certain subject content is just not feasible in our NZC framework. And Stuff goes ahead and reports it in the headline "MOE refuses....".
The two young women, Waimarama and Leah, are a lot more educated than Stuff. Their petition asked for physical and online resources to be provided. Perfect! The Learning Outcomes and Achievement Standards that they also asked for already exist in the curriculum and NCEA. But teachers build their own content and context around these, depending on their school or kahui ako's local curriculum.
Inflammatory headlines are nothing but clickbait, and a disgraceful example of why digital citizenship needs to be part of every school's curriculum. But that's another story!
