Category: Education
The demands by the Maori elite are as relentless as a rising tide. Not content with securing the future ownership of the public’s foreshore and seabed - including invaluable mineral resources which should belong to all New Zealanders not privatised to corporate iwi – Maori leaders are now coming back for more. This time they want $600 million of taxpayers’ money for iwi to pay for something they should arguably be doing for themselves - teaching their children the Maori language.
The great Maori language rort is one of a series of frauds being perpetrated on New Zealanders by part-Maori looters of taxpayer funds and Crown assets (or in the case of the foreshore and seabed, ex-Crown assets).
With the budget fast approaching, National is finally being forced to do something about a government sector that has grown far too big. According to Treasury, since 2005 “government spending has ballooned by about 50 percent – twice the rate of Government revenue growth and twice the rate of economic growth”.[1] As a result, core Crown expenses that were an affordable 29 percent of the economy in 2005, have now blown out to an unaffordable 35 percent.
As 2011 begins, academic staff at New Zealand Universities will emerge from all the ‘formative exercises’, ‘mentoring’ and ‘coaching’ sessions of recent years, to get straight into the real thing: the 2012 round of Performance Based Research Funding. This will be the third (and, dare one hope, the last) in a sequence of formal evaluations of the value of academic research, which began in New Zealand in 2003 and was repeated in 2006.
Last month an estimated 280,000 students and their parents were badly disrupted by the strike action of members of the Post Primary Teachers' Union. Some 16,000 teachers went on strike, affecting 450 intermediate and secondary schools. The protest was part of a planned programme of industrial action being taken by the PPTA over stalled pay negotiations with the Ministry of Education. Eight rolling strikes are scheduled between now and Christmas as well as further action next year. In addition, teachers have been told to refuse to attend all meeting after 5pm, including staff meetings, parent interviews, and student tutorials.
History tells us that when a government takes on a trade union, there can be only one outcome. In 1912, William Massey’s government famously crushed a strike by Waihi gold miners. The following year, the same administration recruited special mounted constables from rural areas – dubbed “Massey’s Cossacks” because of their riding skills – to subdue striking waterfront workers.
Last Monday, a teacher at Te Puke High School was stabbed in the neck and back with a kitchen knife by one of his students. The boy’s whanau said that the 13-year-old had been brought up by his grandmother because his father was in prison. There is speculation that the attack was gang-related – part of an initiation process for earning gang stripes. Reports indicate that the school has a culture of bullying, and the offender had been suspended earlier in the year for fighting with other students. However, the principal advised there was no formal record of any bullying claims. Police placed the boy in the care of Child Youth and Family.
Family dysfunction ruins lives. We all know this; many of us will have personally seen its corrosive effects. Even if we’ve been fortunate enough to avoid this personal knowledge, we can’t escape the effects staring up at us from the pages of our newspapers. Two of the problems that have received the most attention in recent years are child abuse and neglect, and conduct disorder (severe anti-social behaviour) in children. Although these problems are frightening in their severity and scale, the good news is that although we can’t solve them completely, we can do something about them. Early intervention programmes offer a chance of breaking, even preventing, their cycle, if the programmes are truly effective. Unfortunately, not all of them are.
On Saturday some 20,000 people marched down Queen Street protesting against the government’s proposals to mine conservation land. The rally was organised by Greenpeace with some protesters bussed in from the Coromandel and others coming from Great Barrier Island. The well-orchestrated rally demonstrated how business-like environmentalism has become.
Across the English-speaking world, debates have flared periodically about the impact of political correctness and left-wing ideology on the school curriculum. Education has become a central part of the culture wars and debates have centred on history teaching as well as English, especially literature, and the extent to which such subjects, so the critics argue, reinforce conservative values and capitalist, euro-centric hegemony.
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