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Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

I’m willing to give some leniency considering this is clearly an op-ed, but not giving any sort of citations to the curriculum itself but instead saying “I read this document (?) of which 1/3 is written in a language I don’t understand… here’s my interpretation of what’s happening in classrooms!” is a little… unscientific.

> To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori.

I would be totally on board with proclaiming how harmful this is, but let’s be precise about it!

I’m having some trouble tracking down actual materials for students that espouse this. Has anyone found anything? Closest I came to a government “thing” was this student encyclopedia [0] managed by a university with funding from the NZ government. It doesn’t seem too bad to me, learning about fungus and different names for stars.

[0] https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/topics/mātauranga-māori

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This seems to be a theme with this kind of article.

A headline and lead proclaiming some school has done something outrageous, such as for example telling people to stop using terms like "white paper" or "submit" because they're supposedly offensive. It details some of the most outrageous parts of it, but you get the strong impression there's a lot they're leaving out. They never, ever have any kind of sources or hyperlinks to let you see the documents for yourself. If you do manage to find them on your own, you find some critical context (in this example, that the list of offensive words was not a school policy, but a fully optional document created by the IT department) that undermines the point the article was making -- a point they strongly imply, but never quite state, so it's not technically lying, you see.

https://ncea.education.govt.nz/change-2-equal-status-mataura...

https://ncea.education.govt.nz/mana-orite-mo-te-matauranga-m...

https://ncea.education.govt.nz/explaining-new-ncea-materials

NCEA is New Zealands main secondary school qualification.

First link talks about 'equal status' of Māori knowledge, but it talks about that in context of pathways to passing the NCEA, i.e. my reading of it is, its like a different curriculum for getting the qualification. That isn't the same as saying 'Māori knowledge has equal status with western science full stop'. It seems to be more like 'theres a path to this qualification that is based more on Māori knowledge'. Also a lot of it is about values rather than knowledge. But I've only skimmed it, thats just the impression I got.

Wow thank you! Good finds. This is exactly the content I was imagining was out there: clear details about what’s expected of teachers following this change.

That second link has quite a bit of information sorted under those “toolkit” tabs. I think your intuition is correct: that this is opening up a different way to be accredited, not optionally supplementing “western science”. Teaching under the correct cultural context for a student to get that most value from a lesson seems good. I’m also seeing a lot of values like you’re saying, which also seems like a good thing.

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