Jane Stewart
RCR
Five years ago, I took my son out of primary school. Like many parents, during the Covid lockdowns I was dismayed to discover how little he knew.
However, even prior to Covid I’d had many interactions with the school raising concerns – about maths, in particular. The school had assured me that my son was doing fine. But he didn’t even know what subtraction meant, let alone how to do it. Another example was seeing him, after having been at school for several years, painstakingly adding multiple dots to work out the answer to 50 plus 10 – and getting the answer wrong. Adding lots of little dots isn’t efficient or effective. It was clear that he wasn’t being taught the straightforward concept of adding blocks of 10.
After a lot of unpleasant tussling with the school, my husband and I eventually spent $1,000 on an independent maths assessment. The assessment showed that our son was seriously behind, and that this was not consistent with his capability based on a standardised IQ test. To our shock, the school continued to deny that there was any issue. The principal said to me with great conviction and enthusiasm, “don’t you think he’ll get so excited by the fun of our new maths approach we’re bringing in that he’ll engage and learn well!”
Well – no. Not if he can’t do the basics such as count and subtract. We battled on, but by Covid it was apparent that to make any real progress we would need to remove him from school, and in 2021 we started our homeschooling journey. Throughout this time, I discovered exceptionally high-quality educational resources and programmes. Carefully prepared, sequenced, and explicitly taught. While there was an initial confidence barrier after having experienced failure at school due to lack of explicit teaching, once we got through this, our son’s maths capability soared. Along with his reading and writing and, noticeably, his ability to concentrate and complete tasks.
Fast-forward to 2024, it was clear that while our son had made enormous gains academically, he really needed to be at school with peers. At great sacrifice, we invested in an expensive private school with the expectation that there would be high academic standards. We were wrong. Our son started maths at an advanced level, and his first report stated that he was frequently seen helping his peers in class. However, at every assessment his grade would drop. There was little explicit teaching, and the children were on a computer programme most of the time.
English was even more disturbing. It became evident early on that virtually no teaching was taking place. “Reading” in class was done via audio. When I asked the teacher if she could have the children read actual books, her response was that this would disadvantage those who couldn’t read. This was Year 7, where one would really hope that children could read – and, if not, that the school would be doing something about it (they weren’t). After a term of audio, the teacher then introduced movies to be watched alongside the audios. That is, the class would first watch a section of the movie, after which they’d then listen to the parallel section of the book version by audio. This was not only a pointless waste of great chunks of time, but also erased the prospect of the children using their imagination to interpret the story.
After having effectively done no writing in English for most of the year, by term four the children were finally asked to write a story. They spent about four weeks on it with negligible guidance. Some produced less than a page of work. No child’s work was marked or corrected. Instead, the assignments – which included random streams of consciousness complete with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, incorrect uses of tense, lack of paragraphing, etc – were stapled together and given a collective A+.
In desperation, I wrote to a principal I had established a relationship with who leads a small private school. His response was as follows:
What you’re describing isn’t just a few poor teachers or bad decisions. It’s a full expression of a progressive philosophy of education that’s now deeply embedded – not just in that school, but across the whole system. It’s how teachers are trained. It shapes the curriculum, pedagogy, and ministry priorities across New Zealand.
That philosophy sees education as child-led, creativity-focused, and feelings-driven. Teachers become facilitators rather than instructors. Knowledge is de-emphasised. Truth is often treated as subjective. Education is seen as a way of producing activist citizens demanding social justice. Instead of grounding students in reading, writing, and reasoning, they’re encouraged to express, explore, and present – often without real correction or content. Students come out knowing little, making them handy pawns of the progressivist agenda.
By contrast, a more traditional or classical approach – like what we aim for [here] – starts from the belief that children need to be taught. Teachers teach. Students learn. Reading is foundational. Writing is regular and assessed. Knowledge builds over time.
This is the vision that the government’s new curriculum aspires to. Knowledge-rich, explicit teaching, within an evidence-based framework. Children going to school to learn, to make progress, and to leave school as capable young people with opportunities. The main reason the changes are causing friction is that we have sunk so low. The education system is in the process of being salvaged from the suffocating depths of progressivism. That there’ll be some teething problems and discomfort along the way is no reason to turn back.
One of the books my son and I read during our homeschooling time was a captivating story about a famous American bridge builder and his son, accomplished civil engineer Washington Roebling, who expertly and painstakingly led the design and construction of New York’s iconic Brooklyn Bridge. It occurs to me when I see those arguing that we drag ourselves back into the progressivist mire, such as the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU) who say education should be about “empathy, connection and inclusion” and that our children don’t need to learn how to count – who will build our bridges”? Who will be our engineers, our pilots, our electricians, our teachers?
Anya Zohrab, of the newly formed Parents’ Alliance summed it up perfectly in her closing launch comments: “In 30 years, New Zealand will look like the choices we make about education today.” Like Anya, I don’t want our children to be a lost generation. I want them to have a school system this country can be proud of again.
Source:
Sandra Grey, NZCTU President. Big Hairy Education Debate, 12 September 2026. At the debate, Sandra claimed that education should be about “aroha, empathy, connection, inclusion, and critical thinking”. Rote learning the basics, she said, harms our creative thinking and our creative communities. It also harms business, because “businesses don’t want kids that can count one, two, three, four, five – they want kids who can question whether five was the result”. As if that wasn’t disturbing enough, the NZCTU president went on to say that from eight years old, children are able to make their own rules for engagement in education. “They don’t need some basics that one person chooses them”, she said: “they need what works for them. For them.”
This article was originally published by RCR Media.
