Here is the key question: Given that Māngere College is under statutory management due to their students’ results – will the many schools that are doing worse, or only marginally better, also face that situation? Why or why not?
The same forces that hollowed out nations hollowed out families. The skills that built America skipped two generations. Now they’re coming back.
Education in NZ in 2026 needs a great deal of work – from attendance to achievement.
Adults siphon off taxpayer money earmarked for kids, and no one is held accountable. Teachers’ unions share the same dysfunctional incentives as headline-grabbing fraudsters in Minnesota.
New Zealand’s education system is teaching children a modern ideological story as ancient truth – a story that rewrites history, embeds race-based authority and quietly undermines democratic equality.
When authoritarian governments have access to American campuses.
A true commitment to academic freedom means defending expression even when it’s unpopular or offensive. That’s the price of intellectual integrity in a free society.
While institutions charge private foundations like Gates a mere 10 per cent and Rockefeller 15 per cent for indirect costs, they charge the NIH much higher rates – 69 per cent for Harvard, 67.5 per cent for Yale, and 63.7 per cent for Johns Hopkins.
When I read that some educationalists have decreed the novel is now considered ‘problematic’ with its ‘white saviour’ narrative and use of racial slurs, then I can’t but help but despair at how quickly something so culturally significant can be memory holed in the pursuit of progressive ideals.
Fostering the bile of anti-Semitism is the last straw.
New Zealanders aren’t going backwards. They’re rejecting the idea that national identity and public policy must be filtered through a single ideological lens. They want a government that governs for everyone – not just for the loudest or most organised voices.
Science embraces uncertainty. Scientists formulate theories to explain natural phenomena based on the available evidence. But they do not expect those theories to stand for all time.
Salmond calls for open minds. On this point she is right. But an open mind is not one that refuses to evaluate claims. It is one that is willing to have its own claims evaluated. It is not one that protects ideas from criticism, but one that welcomes criticism as the price of progress.
Reforming this system requires more than ideological shifts or incremental adjustments. The policies governing scientific institutions must be restructured so they are not beholden to an administrative class.
Dr Oliver Hartwich of the NZ Initiative previously asserted that the solution to the issues created by NZ’s Ministry of Education involved a truckload of TNT. They haven’t changed under the new government.
A new ‘disease’ is allegedly sweeping the nation – but you don’t catch it quite like Covid.
