No Arts, No Reo, No Roots

National says they ain't worth a counter's bean.

UPDATE: This is now public and the paywall has been removed. 🙂

No roots, no roots, no culture
We're running from the enemy…

Our roots, our roots, our culture
No one can take that feeling from me

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How do you define a nation and it’s people? What are the things that make our hearts ache for home, or swell with pride when we return to these shores?

Is it the lump in the throat as you walk beneath the Maori carving at Arrivals? The first words of te reo you hear spoken? Maybe it’s a tune you wouldn’t hear overseas, playing on the radio as you get into a taxi, bringing memories of times and places flooding back? Or do you think to yourself - it’s so good to be back in a country where 12 year olds do well at maths tests?

What are the things that root us to our land? That make us proud of Aotearoa?

Many things no doubt - sporting accomplishments, scientific research, business success. For me it is all of those things, but even more so it’s our music, artwork, films, and literature. Our culture and our language.

https://www.kuragallery.co.nz/

It’s hard to imagine a world without art or music, but our Prime Minister and government are willing to dream that dream - for our children, and for us.

Today I’ll be talking, as you might’ve guessed, about Christopher Luxon’s willingness to sacrifice aspects of our children’s education in order to hit a KPI he’s set for the purposes of his re-election.

We’ll also be looking at whether our kids are actually doing that badly, and whether it’s ok for our government to act as if one of our official languages, the one that’s unique to our country, is an embarrassment to be hidden away from guests.

A small amount of housekeeping first…

When I wrote on Monday to say that more newsletters would be paywalled a few folks suggested I do as Bernard Hickey has been doing at the Kaka, and open a newsletter publicly once it reaches 100 likes. I confess I don’t fully understand the rationale, but if it works as a mechanism to indicate which newsletters are good ones to share, rather than me guessing, that seems worth a go. So if this newsletter reaches 100 likes I’ll open it up for all.

Something else suggested, I think in regard to David Slack’s fine work, was providing a link so that people could gift a subscription. So here you go, if you click this button you can gift someone a sub, for a year or a month, if you’d like. 🙂

Right let’s get into it…

The Prime Minister might well be reducing the amount of time he’s available to the media, in the interests of less transparency, but he always has time for a good old chat with his old mate Mike. And when those two neoliberal tomcats get together there’s no telling what the screeching might result in. Like the emergence of this brain fart…

The Prime Minister told his chief cheerleader, “We are focused on outcomes: achievement in maths and reading and getting kids to school. That may well mean we’re going to defer our arts and music curriculum for now. But we’re going to do everything to get those jobs done.

How on earth do you get a four-lane highway from Auckland to Whangarei with future generations that can’t do maths. How do you become the world leading in agriscience if we don’t have our kids knowing how to do maths and read properly.”

Some interesting questions from the Prime Minister. My first thought is - if we used to be so good at maths, but we’re not any more, then where’s the four-lane highway to Whangarei? Maybe it’s not mathematics that’s been holding us back?

More than that though, this is cultural and educational vandalism he’s talking about. You don’t withhold lessons in the arts and in music because kids don’t do well in maths tests, we need to provide a broad education to our children. How else will they learn to question things?

Oh.

Kids absolutely need to learn maths, reading, and writing - they’re fundamental, but if what you’re doing isn’t working, and that’s a big IF, you don’t solve the problem by throwing the arts out with the bath water.

Aside from anything else there’s a lot of money and national pride that comes from the arts - so what’s the plan here? To outdo other countries at maths as our differentiator? Then what? Have you not noticed AI coming over the hill? The world is changing. We’re a long way from AI directing a movie or writing a poem, other than with mimicry based on works already done, yet mathematics - heck we’ve been doing that on calculators since I was at school.

Don’t get me wrong, kids absolutely need those core subjects, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of other aspects of their education. Luxon speaks of deferring them “for now”, so does that mean just one generation will miss out and we’ll reinstate the arts later on, when everything is working perfectly? That day will never come, and this is a slippery slope to mediocrity in the way we teach our children and in the cultural life of our nation.

As an aside, I mentioned a poem above, I wrote on Monday about my Dad’s book launch, some of you might’ve seen a review of that in the Herald. Needless to say my folks, and publisher Roger Steele, were pretty stoked about the article, which they had no idea was coming.

Back to Luxon and Hosking, if we must. This of course came about because National needed a policy announcement at the end of their conference last weekend. So what were they to do?

Can’t just announce the same old crack down on gangs again, people might start to question why we still see the same headlines as before the election. For obvious reasons they’d want to stay the hell away from anything to do with healthcare.

So announcing that you’re going to get maths back on track is a pretty safe bet, even if it’s a pretty unexciting announcement for the party faithful. Especially if you can paint the current situation as a crisis, but are things really as bad as National suggests? In a word - maybe. We don’t actually know.

Luxon has been running around proclaiming that the sky is falling and that “just 22% of students at Year 8 were meeting curriculum expectations.” Sounds awful doesn’t it?

Where the confusion lies is that the curriculum has changed, so we’re not comparing apples with apples. The very same study also “indicates that at Year 8, there has been no statistically significant change in mathematics achievement scores since at least 2013. On average, students scored about the same in 2013, 2018, 2022, and 2023.”

Study lead Dr Charles Darr said, “what we’re seeing in mathematics is a change in curriculum and a new benchmarking process rather than a change in achievement. We’ve been tracking student achievement in mathematics at Year 8 for more than 10 years, and in that time, there has been no evidence for improvement or decline. We do have a new draft curriculum however, and the provisional benchmarking exercise we carried out indicates it requires a higher level of proficiency than the 2007 curriculum.”

Chris Hipkins said the government was not using accurate data. “It's a bit like moving the goalposts after the kids have already kicked the ball. I think the government should use data and information that's accurate. I think assessing kids against a curriculum that they have not been taught isn't a fair reflection of what kids are capable of.”

Luxon denied this saying, “No, look, I mean, as you know the assessment moved at the end of last year to be in-year, looking at Year 8 versus a multi-year band. What we're focused on is making sure we fix the problem.” Presumably as opposed to working out if there actually is one. The way Luxon began his response set off alarm bells for me…

As Luxon-isms go “No, look, I mean…” is not exactly reassuring and people commenting agreed…

Suzy: “No, I learned doing psychology that people who use phrases like that 'No, look ...' or 'What I'd say to you' are usually lying. Lying requires time for the brain to think it thru (invent it), so preemptive words are used to fill the gap whilst the person is getting the lie sorted.”

Pam: “Luxon is like a talking doll. Pull the string and today's spin salad and slogan just spews forth ... over and over again.”

No Te Reo Thanks, We’re Kiwis.

Then yesterday I saw a post from Maria Sherwood, who some of you might know, that made me exclaim WTF? Just as she had. Even by the standards of this government this was some seriously hard to believe behaviour.

Our Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Paul Goldsmith, had ordered officials to remove te reo greetings and references to “Aotearoa New Zealand” from an official invitation to the formal Matariki celebration this year.

Sometimes, let’s be realistic - frequently, this government causes me to shake my head and ask - how can they be so petty and so small minded?

Asked on 1 News why he’d done it Goldsmith blathered about it being to do with National’s coalition agreement, and because the invitation was going to Australians. Which sounded like a bit of a dig at the mental capabilities of our mates across the ditch.

Goldsmith admitted that an Aussie probably would know what Aotearoa meant but said, “Look at our coalition agreement, it says unless there's been a referendum changing the name of our country, the name is New Zealand, and so I refer to it as New Zealand.”

What do you think? Keep in mind we’re talking about Matariki here. Does it feel right that an official invitation to that celebration is not allowed to contain “Kia ora” or “Aotearoa”? All because Peters, Luxon, and Seymour had a negotiation and decided it would be that way?

Māori language advocate and Rotorua Lakes councillor Rawiri Waru said, “I'm deeply disappointed, I'm kind of perplexed actually, as to what the point of this kind of attitude is. For Rotorua, we are a bilingual city. We have supported the Matariki kaupapa in terms of the national broadcast, which was on top of our maunga (mountain) Ngongotahā.

It was attended by many different people of different cultures and it was a positive thing. The karakia are all in Māori. The songs were all in Māori, the wairua (spirit) was wairua Māori and yet - can't have [some] Māori on the invitation letters. This makes no sense to me.”

Labour's Māori Development spokesperson Willie Jackson said, “It's an insult, not just to Māori people but to this country. Here we are trying to celebrate this language and you've got a minister acting contrary to that. It's just a shameful act.”

A couple of points on this meme. Yes, I understand that Kiwi is a māori word, Sally Bowring told me, and that the plural should be ‘Kiwi’. So pedants please save your comments for other errors. 🙂

Over on my Facebook page folks had a few thing to say about Goldsmith’s actions too.

Deane: “Stupid racist fool who has no business being culture minister in Aotearoa. Of all the places he chooses an invitation to Matariki Celebrations to show his true pathetic self. And to see him laugh his way through being caught out instead of some form of contrition shows just how the plan is real.”

Kathryn: “I find this very sad. Te reo Māori is taonga and in removing te reo Māori, he has refused taonga to the people he is inviting to attend the Hautapu ceremony. In my pākehā understanding of tikanga, I think this might be offensive to the invitee’s mana but even if not, he has refused another person a taonga which is easy to give and can mean a lot to the recipient.”

Our culture, and the first language of our land - these things matter. To treat them with such disdain is callous and short sighted. Our future is not in looking back and pretending to still be some far flung colony of the British empire - we are a proud independent nation with much to share with the world in music, art, and language.

Our government serves us poorly, but the news isn’t all bad. They misunderstand the situation, you can’t put te reo back in a box now and pretend it doesn’t exist, that horse has well and truly bolted. However failing to give our children a well rounded education will damage them far more than any perceived short comings in the way we teach mathematics.