With our English curriculum facing a rewrite, a deeper question emerges: is this about knowledge or control?
As a confident speaker of two languages – English and te reo Māori – I often find myself grappling with how history is conveyed. I believe being multilingual sharpens my ability to detect misinformation, as I see how narratives can shift between languages. I am increasingly concerned misinformation is becoming more acceptable, even though it’s never been easier to validate or challenge ideas.
In late 2023, Erica Stanford, education minister in the new National-led coalition, swiftly appointed a ministerial advisory group to review the primary school English and mathematics and statistics curriculums. The goal was “not to start again, but to build on the work that has already been done”. Aligned with National’s policy Teaching the basics brilliantly, the group was tasked with delivering an “evidence-based” and “knowledge-rich” curriculum. Its mission? To ensure primary school teachers had the clarity and tools needed to teach these core subjects brilliantly. Straightforward enough, right?
At least one member of the advisory group, Elizabeth Rata, appears to have other priorities. Last week, Rata published a blog post about a video clip shown in a high school (she’s also been involved in the high school English curriculum rewrite). There is no link to it on her post, but Rata appears to be referencing an earlier blog post on the same site by Rodney Hide, expressing concern about his daughter’s English class being shown a five-minute YouTube video from Re:News, which includes a translation referencing historical discussions on the extermination of Māori. Rata condemns this as “wrong or seriously distorted” and labels it “propaganda”. Sacre bleu! (That’s French.)
The painful history of dialogue proposing Māori extermination is well-documented. It’s not a surprise to academics. As Professor Peter Adds recently pointed out on RNZ’s Treaty Talks, the Polynesian Society was established to record Māori (and others’) knowledge before we all died out. The concept of extermination is present in historical records. The video Rata references is from 2022, and is a five-minute clip promoting a documentary on TVNZ+, but even in recent years, Treaty Talks episodes have referenced “extermination” verbatim and contemporary publications have also covered it. This is a grim but factual topic, not a contentious one.
I appreciate that many New Zealanders have not been exposed to much of our history. However, dismissing facts as “wrong or seriously distorted” without verification is disturbing – particularly for someone advising the minister on an “evidence-based” curriculum. I relayed a verifiable truth that anyone can fact-check, which aligns with the very approach the minister is championing.
I did not create the video nor did I write the translation. In fact, I had not even seen the translation until recently. It is misleading to hold me responsible for the translation’s wording. If I had created the video (I did not), said something incorrect (I did not), and if it were a scholarly teaching resource (it is an advert), then perhaps a parent might raise an issue with the school (they have not). But that is not what is happening here. Despite Rata’s post targeting the translation provided in the video, she offers up an incorrect one anyway: “from there the desire grew to exterminate the people who spoke Māori”. I can’t connect it to her transcription, or the original translation, or what I actually say – so it’s a new creation for the blog post.
Translation is an easy target for incubating seeds of doubt when people don’t know a language. Erring translation is common in our history – there’s the incorrect translation of te Tiriti, and misrepresentations of what the word Pākehā means, for example. All these errors have allowed misinformation to brood. It’s common for people who don’t have a capacity for the language to think they do have a capacity for it. We wouldn’t permit gibberish from English to pass as quality language in the classroom, but for some reason, te reo Māori is treated differently.
I suppose this haphazard attitude towards translation is connected to a recent uptick in claims about Tā Āpirana Ngata’s Te Tiriti o Waitangi: He Whakamārama text. Some people believe they’ve read it and can make claims based on their “reading” of his work, but that text is in Māori. If they can’t read Māori, then they haven’t read it – they’ve merely read an English translation of it. The same applies to classic literature – many believe they have read Homer, Chaucer or Beowulf, but in reality, they have only encountered translations.
Rata insists that teaching content should be “selected for its value and justified for its veracity”, and that “propaganda will be difficult to teach in a knowledge-rich subject”. Yet, as I have outlined, the word “extermination” is neither false nor propaganda; it is historically verifiable. So, is this really about “veracity” or censorship? What do we call the pre-determined dismissal of inconvenient truths? I am concerned that we are seeing censorship dressed up as curriculum reform.
I feel misinformation has led me here. Whether deliberate or accidental does not change its impact. While I do not know the members of the advisory group, I acknowledge their credentials. As a citizen, I should be able to trust their expertise. However, after seeing this post, I struggle to do so.
The minister responsible for New Zealand education has appointed an advisory group that does not have a mandate to misinform her. That same minister is the member of a party with fiscally conservative roots. If we’re about to be hurled into a new curriculum, presumably at a cost, underscored by big cuts to Māori language education, and dictated not by high regard for the English literature, but by an eerily familiar desire to sentence Māori to invisibility through the medium of English, I can save the government some money – I’ve seen that curriculum in the archives.