When my colleague Dr Michael Johnston took the stage at a national education conference late last month, he didn’t expect applause. Johnston, a cognitive psychologist and senior fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, chaired Education Minister Erica Stanford’s Ministerial Advisory Group reviewing the primary-school English, maths and statistics curricula. He continues to serve on the Ministry’s Curriculum Coherence Group. He was speaking at UpliftEd, a conference organised by the Aotearoa Educators Collective.
Johnston went hoping for a genuine discussion about how to lift student achievement. Instead, he met resistance – not to his data or logic, but to what they implied. He was challenging dogma that has come to rule the education establishment like a faith – beyond question and immune to evidence.
Another colleague, economist and teacher Briar Lipson, faced similar hostility in 2020 after publishing Education Delusion: How Bad Ideas Ruined a Once World-leading School System. The report exposed how progressive teaching fashions hollowed out what New Zealanders once took for granted – a world-class education built on knowledge.
Over two decades, New Zealand’s student outcomes have plummeted from world-leading to barely mediocre. Our Year 5 pupils now rank near the bottom among English-speaking countries in reading. Year 13 students stumble over the meaning of everyday words like “trivial.”
When the Labour Government piloted new literacy and numeracy standards in 2022, the results were sobering: only about two-thirds of students met the reading and numeracy benchmarks, and barely a third met the writing standard.
Stanford has launched two major reforms to reverse the slide. The first is structured literacy – systematic phonics and explicit teaching for Years 1–8. The second is replacing New Zealand’s National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA) with clear, coherent qualifications that employers and universities can trust – ending the credit-chasing that rewards fragments of knowledge over subject matter mastery.
Stanford’s reforms echo those led in Britain by Education Secretary Michael Gove and Schools Minister Sir Nick Gibb a decade ago. By mandating phonics, publishing detailed knowledge-rich curricula and insisting that exams reward substance over coursework, they turned England’s long decline in literacy into sustained improvement. New Zealand is now attempting a similar rescue.
I attended the August launch of Stanford’s proposed NCEA replacement. The people behind it are hardly extremists. The Minister’s Professional Advisory Group was chaired by Patrick Gale of Rangitoto College and included David Ferguson, former principal of Westlake Boys’. Distinguished educators from the mainstream of schooling, not radicals.
Yet they too have met hostility. Why? Because these reforms expose that our education decline is not a mystery. It is the predictable result of a philosophy that sounded humane but has proved disastrous.
That philosophy – constructivism, the idea that children learn best by constructing knowledge for themselves through exploration rather than being explicitly taught – didn’t appear out of nowhere. It descends from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher who imagined the child as a natural learner corrupted by adult imposition.
Then came John Dewey, the early-20th-century American educator, whose book Democracy and Education (1916) recast schooling as a social experiment in freedom and experience. And then Paulo Freire, the Brazilian theorist, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) turned teaching into a moral struggle against hierarchy.
Over a century, these ideas fused into what has become education orthodoxy in New Zealand: the teacher as “guide on the side,” the student as discoverer, curriculum as experience.
Constructivist approaches began as humane correctives to rote learning, born of a desire to make classrooms more engaging and inclusive. It sounds liberating because it borrows the language of respect – child-centred learning, student agency, discovery and creativity. Who could object? But a classroom is not a philosophy seminar. It’s a place where novices must become knowers. And here, romance meets the limits of cognitive reality.
The attraction of the romance is obvious. After all, children do learn to speak their first language naturally, so it feels intuitive that they should learn to read and write the same way. But speech is hard-wired into the human brain; writing is not. Reading is a cultural invention only a few thousand years old, and the brain has to be painstakingly retrained to link visual symbols with sounds and meaning. As neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has shown, those connections form only through explicit, systematic teaching.
Cognitive science is unsentimental. Working memory – the short-term memory system we use for thinking – has a very small capacity. It’s easily overloaded. We reason by drawing on what’s stored in long-term memory. That’s why novices don’t think like experts: they don’t yet know enough. For beginners, the most reliable route to understanding is explicit, cumulative teaching: show, explain, practise, check, then connect and apply.
E.D. Hirsch – author of Cultural Literacy and The Knowledge Deficit – put it bluntly: reading comprehension is domain-specific, you can’t “strategise” your way through words and references you don’t know. Dan Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist best known for Why Don’t Students Like School?, translated the research for teachers: skills ride on knowledge; “critical thinking” isn’t a free-floating technique. And cognitive-load theorists Kirschner, Sweller and Clark showed why minimally guided instruction fails novices: it collides with the limits of working memory.
None of this outlaws inquiry. In fact, inquiry remains essential when it’s built around the disciplines themselves. Students practise applying knowledge through experiments – but only after they’ve been taught it.
If the romantic model were only a style preference, we could shrug. But it defines what our children learn, or don’t. For twenty years, New Zealand has staged education like a play with no script – plenty of direction on “how to perform,” nothing about “what to say.”
The 2007 Curriculum enshrines “key competencies” such as “managing self” and “relating to others” but leaves teachers to decide what content to teach. The entire document runs to just 67 pages. For Years 12-13 history—two full years of senior secondary education – it offers just two bullet points: understand that historical events “are complex and contested,” and that “trends reflect social, economic, and political forces.”
What students actually learn – and how deeply they learn it – is a classroom lottery, dependent entirely on individual teachers and schools. In that vacuum, NCEA’s atomised credits have become the de facto curriculum for senior secondary students. Schools inevitably teach to discrete standards, each with its own assessment, encouraging short-term coaching and credit-collection over deep learning. We credential fragments and call it education.
The results are visible in every dataset and every classroom. When schools whisper content and shout competencies, affluent homes fill the gap and others cannot. Students from less advantaged backgrounds – disproportionately, though not exclusively, Māori and Pasifika – pay the highest price.
Lipson’s 2018 report, Spoiled by Choice: How NCEA hampers education, and what it needs to succeed, showed how NCEA’s credit-chasing design widened those gaps, rewarding fragmentation over mastery. We told ourselves we were being progressive. We were entrenching inequality.
It’s a classic example of what the sociologist Rob Henderson calls a “luxury belief” – an idea that flatters the educated classes while harming those who can least afford it.
So why the fury when evidence-based reform finally arrives? Because the debate is existential. Faculties of education, research agencies and unions have built careers and identities on the romance. To admit that novices need explicit teaching and a knowledge-rich curriculum would mean admitting that decades of teacher training and professional development were misguided.
Institutions rarely self-indict. And so technical reforms – phonics checks at twenty weeks, an hour-a-day on reading, writing and maths; a qualification that prizes mastery over accumulation – are met with cries of “Back to the 1950s!” and “Drill and kill!”
Strip away the noise and the reforms are unromantic in the best sense – they tell the truth about learning. Structured literacy doesn’t make readers; it makes reading possible. It teaches every child the code instead of assuming they’ll guess it. Comprehension then grows as knowledge grows. An hour-a-day on reading, writing and maths isn’t regression; it’s time on task for what unlocks the rest of life.
In secondary schools, replacing a blizzard of micro-credits with fewer, deeper assessments isn’t cruelty; it’s respect – for subjects, teachers, and students. One substantial internal task and one proper exam per subject, both marked to national standards, tell parents and employers something clear: this is what I know; this is what I can do. It also returns teaching time to teachers.
And teachers are not the villains here. They are the victims of bad training and worse ideas – expected to perform miracles in open-plan spaces with vague curricula and endless assessment. Give them a coherent map, evidence-based methods, practical materials, and honest assessment, and they’ll do what professionals do: they’ll deliver.
None of this is a right-wing crusade – as many of Stanford’s critics now claim. The knowledge-rich model is progressive in its effects, even if some of its champions sit on the centre-right. Insisting that every child, in every postcode, be deliberately taught the knowledge and vocabulary of the wider world is the most egalitarian demand you can make. When we stop treating knowledge as elitist, disadvantaged children stop being the ones locked out of it.
What’s truly reactionary is the status quo: a romance that flatters adults, feels kind, and leaves too many children unable to read fluently, write clearly, or handle basic algebra. We tried the experiment. It failed. The courageous act now is not to defend our priors but to face reality and change.
There will be pain. Change on this scale always brings disruption. When teacher education must include the science of learning and subject expertise, some programmes will need overhaul. Baselines may sting before they heal.
But the alternative is worse – to continue quietly wrecking futures. The victims don’t write op-eds. They just leave school without the words and numbers modern life demands. If your home can’t compensate for what school fails to teach, romanticism isn’t a kindness. It’s a sentence.
This is not a defence of any minister, and it’s not a policy manual. It’s an argument about reality. Children aren’t miniature adults. Novices can’t reverse-engineer literacy or calculus by discovery. Working memory is narrow; knowledge frees it. When schools teach content explicitly and cumulatively, curiosity expands rather than shrinks. When assessment rewards mastery instead of fragments, teachers teach and students learn.
New Zealand’s education establishment is fighting because these reforms expose that their romantic ideology – the idea that kids learn naturally without explicit teaching – has systematically failed. And the ones who paid were the children who needed school most.
That’s not a culture war. It’s a moral reckoning.
succinct, poetic and powerful. Thanks Roger
The ideologues lost in Australia, they'll lose in NZ too. We have Labor ministers (and union-aligned education department heads) even saying that the reading wars are over and teachers should be teaching explicitly!