Papers released earlier this year have revealed the government’s plan to cut words in te Reo Māori from primary school curricula. According to a Ministry of Education report in August, te Reo Māori will now be effectively banned from any new books in the Ready to Read Phonics Plus (RtRPP) series for five-year-olds.
This is among a series of attacks the coalition has launched against Māori, and te Reo Māori in particular. On entering government, the parties signed an agreement, pushed by NZ First, to change all public service department names back to English. Since then, various public servants have been instructed to stop using te Reo in emails and to “refer to New Zealand, rather than Aotearoa”. In schools, the government has cut funding for te Reo teacher training by $30 million.
Criticism of these attacks tends to be directed towards ACT and NZ First, but National deserves its share of the blame. Beyond simply accommodating the race-baiting tactics of his coalition partners, Luxon has openly bragged about his neocolonial approach, appearing on Mike Hosking’s Newstalk ZB show in May to denounce the “māorification” of the country. Stanford’s education reforms are clearly the expressions of that approach in policy.
Yet Stanford’s explanation of these changes has been misleading and contradictory – less a coherent line of reasoning and more a flood of justifications, meant to disorient rather than convince.
Apparently, kupu Māori are “confusing” for young children learning English and must be limited, even though the ministry admits that evidence for this is “uncertain”. Stanford insists on “clarity” for students, parents, and teachers, while refusing to define what her “knowledge-rich” approach actually means. Deploying these professional-sounding terms (see also: “phonics sequencing” and “decoding suitability”) without explanation is really a PR manoeuvre in place of an argument.
—
Figuring out the strategy here requires first considering who’s behind this. When Stanford established her Ministerial Advisory Group (MAG) for the new curriculum in November 2023, she effected a significant change in personnel. The Rōpū Kaitiaki, a group of Māori academics who led Tiriti-centred curriculum reforms under the previous government, were completely sidelined. In their place, Stanford selected predominantly pākehā pundits from her right-wing network.
The MAG include – among others – Michael Johnston, a Senior Fellow at the New Zealand Institute; Melissa Derby, a founding member of the Free Speech Union; and Elizabeth Rata, now a member of the Charter Schools’ Authorisation Board. Anyone familiar with these members should be alarmed. Derby has a history of transphobic activism, speaking at a Speak Up for Women event in 2020, and sharing a tweet saying the “trans movement” cannot be tolerated in civil society. Rata, meanwhile, has been crusading for colonialism for a number of years. In a 2022 article for The Democracy Project, she called decolonisation “dangerous” and “destructive”, explaining that “colonisation is not the problem”. In one communication to Stanford in October 2024, she described her aim as “ending decolonisation’s success”.
Both Johnston and Rata were appointed against the ministry’s explicit recommendations, and have continued to operate well outside the legal bounds of an advisory group. Information released through Official Information Act requests has revealed that the MAG is bypassing procedures to write the curriculum and influence procurement decisions, which is solely the authority of the ministry. This is a small group of conservative activists using government power to shape the future of children’s learning: in effect, state capture is claiming the field of education.
But it is worth paying attention to Stanford herself – she is, after all, the one who assembled this group. In June, Stanford visited Florida to attend the Core Knowledge Foundation’s annual conference and participate in a panel discussion called “No Boundaries, Just Possibilities: A Worldwide Call to Action for Knowledge Building in Education”. This conference gives us a much fuller picture of what’s going on here, where the rhetoric, influences, money, and organisations tie together.
Stanford’s panel was hosted by Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The AEI is a right-wing think tank promoting private enterprise and conservative values, which is connected to a set of even darker organisations, such as Moms4Liberty (a far-right anti-vax, anti-trans hate group), and the Heritage Foundation, which published Trump’s authoritarian playbook, Project 2025. Through developing draft legislation, lobbying politicians, astroturfing public discussion, and holding conferences like these, conservative influence is rapidly gaining purchase in education policy around the globe.
The key figure here is Core Knowledge Foundation’s founder and chair, E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch, now ninety-seven, is a literary critic who has had an enormous influence on right-wing education design, starting with his 1987 book Cultural Literacy. Now-familiar terms like “science of learning”, “knowledge-rich” curricula, and “sequencing” are all drawn from Hirsch’s work. At the panel discussion in June, Stanford detailed her discovery of Hirsch’s later book The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996), explaining that it became the blueprint for “transformational changes” to the New Zealand Curriculum.
—
Hirsch’s concept of education centres on investigating and addressing “knowledge deficits”. Any text, event, or concept circulating in society, he argues, relies on a certain amount of assumed information. Those without access to that information will not be able to understand the situation and so will be unable to engage in social life. In one infamous example, Hirsch complained that his college students failed to understand civil war discourse because they were not familiar with Robert E. Lee, a general in the Confederate Army. To remedy such “deficiencies”, Hirsch compiled a huge list of material representing the “necessary minimum of American general knowledge”. From this premise, “core knowledge” targets and a sequenced curriculum were born, where each new module builds deliberately on previous material.
While some of this approach may sound like common sense, Hirsch’s own example indicates some glaring problems. Who decides which information is essential? Why should we prioritise the dominant culture instead of a marginalised one? If another culture has been deliberately suppressed, would this approach not continue its erasure? Why is content (Robert E. Lee) more important than critical engagement (how Robert E. Lee leaves a racist legacy)?
If we follow these threads throughout Hirsch’s work, these problems quickly become evident. In Hirsch’s most recent book, How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation, he worries that a lack of education is leading to a decline in American patriotism. “The elementary school,” he writes, “is decisive for forming both our knowledge base and our gut allegiance”. As for different ties, “let a thousand ethnicities bloom, but not in the shared national public sphere”. In other words, take your culture somewhere else – we must teach children obedience to their country first.
Wielding literacy for this purpose is nothing new. The very discipline of English Literature was developed in the colonies a long while before it appeared in England itself. While curricula in the home country still focused on classical education (featuring Greek and Latin literature), the British administration developed a syllabus of English authors for schools in India. Here, colonists could legitimate their occupation and horrific violence from the bottom up, attempting to embed consent in children before they grew old enough to resist.
In Aotearoa, as we know, colonisation carried out on the battlefield continued in the classroom. When Governor Grey introduced the Education Ordinance Act 1847, which required English to be the medium of instruction in schools, he saw it as “speedily assimilating the Maori to the habits and usages of the European”. The foundations of the English-centric culture in this country lie directly in the violence visited on those children who tried to speak their Reo.
—
What does this history tell us about the new curriculum?
First, knowledge is not a thing that can simply be dispensed. Instead, it is always a relationship between subjects, communities, institutions, or classes. Learning a new language, for instance, can be an introduction to a particular culture. But depending on the position of the learner, it can also be a practice of domination (many early colonisers in Aotearoa spoke te Reo) or subjection (as with mandatory English instruction).
Education, then, cannot be divorced from systems of power. The “knowledge-rich” curriculum seeks to integrate students into the dominant culture, but does not enable them to challenge it. This is assimilation presented as “sequencing”, “decoding”, and “filling deficits”. No wonder it’s so attractive to anyone bent on “ending decolonisation’s success”.
Our unions recognise this danger. The PPTA recently supported the production of an education paper written by Dr Therese Ford and Bruce Jepsen of Te Akatea. In it, they describe the new curriculum changes announced by the government as the recolonising of education in Aotearoa. They call for educators to ensure that, no matter the changes, Te Tiriti o Waitangi is upheld in the classroom.
This volatile situation also makes education from below all the more possible – and necessary – if we are to resist. We can intervene in this process of colonial assimilation, inside the classroom and out. The task of attending organising meetings, producing pamphlets, publishing newspapers, unionising, marching and striking can be another means of education. Let’s hope the current teachers’ strikes, and the ongoing struggle of Maori for their rights, can provide us with our schools of struggle.
Updates
Since a version of this piece first appeared in print in mid-October 2025, significant developments have taken place. Most notably, on 4 November the government announced an amendment to the Education and Training Act.
Specifically, a proposed amendment to the Act moved by Erica Stanford affects Section 127, which “provides that one of a board’s primary objectives in governing a school is to ensure that the school gives effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi”. This includes:
(i) working to ensure that its plans, policies, and local curriculum reflect local tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori, and te ao Māori; and
(ii) taking all reasonable steps to make instruction available in tikanga Māori and te reo Māori; and
(iii) achieving equitable outcomes for Māori students.
The amended version removes mention of local tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori, and te ao Māori, and replaces it with “policies and practices for the school reflect New Zealand’s cultural diversity”. In this framework, te Reo and tikanga Māori instruction now relies on the “request of their parents or immediate caregivers”. And the school board now only “seeks to” achieve equitable outcomes for Māori students.
This amendment lowers expectations for schools to deliver a just education for ākonga Māori, removes measures to hold them accountable, and shifts the responsibility onto parents and caregivers. This is a legislation designed for easy escape.
Image: Erica Stanford (left) at the Core Knowledge National Conference, Florida, June 2025, image via Linkedin.
