National MP Paul Goldsmith has doubled down on his views about including Māori knowledge in education, expressing concern about Kiwis kids keeping up with the world.
In a Facebook Live with National MP Christopher Luxon, Goldsmith said it was "quite right" to ensure there is reference to Māori knowledge in education, but he fears the Government is "taking about five steps too far".
He accused the Government of "trying to impose it on science and maths and a whole lot of other subjects, whereas I want our kids to keep up with the best and with the rest of the world; not what we call science, what the rest of the world call science".
"I think that's a real challenge and we've got to make sure that we maintain that global focus."
It's not the first time Goldsmith has canvassed these concerns. In July, he joined a heated debate involving several academics questioning a bid to put Māori knowledge on par with 'Western science' in schools.
It traces back to 2019 when the Government agreed to strengthen NCEA, with a commitment to explicitly reflect and promote mana ōrite mō tē mātauranga Māori, or parity for Māori knowledge, within the main secondary school qualification.
Goldsmith echoed similar concerns raised by a group of seven academics at the University of Auckland, who claimed Māori knowledge "is not science" in a letter published in the Listener magazine.
Dr Michael Corballis, one of the academics whose background is in neuroscience and language evolution, told The Hui last month that he stood by the letter's contents.
"Our main purpose was to complain about the fact that kids are being taught that science is colonising and evil," he said. "It may have been a mistake to add stuff on mātauranga Māori. We were there primarily to defend science and that's what our article is for."
He went on to say much indigenous knowledge isn't scientific, and criticised mātauranga Māori for promoting "creationism".
Rangi Matamua, a Māori astronomer who in 2019 won the Prime Minister's Science Prize, said Dr Corballis didn't appear to know what mātauranga Māori even was.
"It is science. There is empirical science embedded at the heart of our knowledge systems. It's right across the world for indigenous cultures," he said.
"It's a systematically compiled knowledge base around a particular subject matter, or it's understanding the behaviour of the natural and physical world through observation and experimentation, and it's understanding the world and our interactions with it. It's all of these elements of science."
In the Facebook Live, Goldsmith and Luxon also discussed their concerns with child-centred learning in schools.
With almost a third of children not turning up to school regularly, National fears a truancy crisis. And the latest National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement of Science showed just 20 percent of Year 8 students in New Zealand were achieving at or above expectations.
"I try to visit a school typically on a Friday afternoon in Auckland here, and it's interesting, you go into these big classrooms in primary school with 60 kids in team teaching, and parents tell me that they feel their kids are getting lost in that system," said Luxon.
Goldsmith said education follows "trends" over time, and acknowledged there is "room for a variety" of different approaches. But he questioned the Tomorrow's Schools reforms of the 1980s, when schools became autonomous entities, managed by boards of trustees.
"What we see in the New Zealand education system is... since Tomorrow's Schools in the 1980s, every school and its board of trustees responds to its community and has quite a lot of autonomy about how it goes about," Goldsmith said.
"That's fine, but there are two things that are required to go with it... You've actually got to measure progress so you know what's working, what's not working.
"Secondly, you need to have some choice as well, because you know if your local school is run by short back and side traditionalists, or raging hippies, and you don't like either of them, at the moment you really don't have much choice.
"That's a problem. There's all sorts of theories about how best to do these things. The problem with our system is that because we don't have any real robust external measurement of progress right up until NCEA, when you're 15, It's all a bit sort of anecdotal as to whether it works or not."
