ACT can reveal that a new education programme is teaching primary schoolchildren about ‘white privilege’. The Government needs to explain why.
The promise of our country is to value each person as we find them and value their human dignity without prejudice. A policy that asks children to apologise for their colour is the worst form of bigotry. Dressing it up as anti-racism is hypocrisy.
Every human shares 99.9 percent of their DNA. Government policy should focus on our common humanity and the challenges we each face as we go through life, instead of racially profiling children.
What are teachers supposed to say to a ‘white’ child who may have no money or food at home, be abused, face a learning challenge, or any other challenge? How is it that their colour makes them privileged regardless of their individual circumstances?
The Government’s latest attempt to push its version of the Treaty and co-governance in education is Te Hurihanganui, a programme being introduced in schools in Te Puke, Wellington, Nelson and Southland.
The programme has a radical goal: transformative changes to “indigenise” and “decolonise” the education system.
New Zealand children deserve a positive and inclusive education. No child should have to be apologetic about their creed or colour. On Thursday, Kelvin Davis announced a further expansion of Te Hurihanganui, claiming our education system is afflicted by “systemic racism”.
It’s concerning that such radical and divisive ideas are being introduced into the curriculum without the Government first having a wider discussion with New Zealanders, particularly parents.
The Blueprint for Te Hurihanganui explains that ‘Building critical consciousness means reflecting critically on the imbalance of power and resources in society, and taking anti-oppressive action to do something about it for the better. It means recognising white privilege, understanding racism, inequity faced by Māori and disrupting that status quo to strengthen equity.’
The reality is that Māori do face worse social and economic outcomes across the board. Good public policy like charter schools, overhauling the delivery of mental health services, and requiring rehabilitation in prisons, has the potential to deliver better outcomes for Māori. Indoctrinating young kids in radical and divisive ideas will not.
Ka Hikitia, the Government’s wider Māori Education Strategy, also uses the idea.
The Challenging Racism kit, intended for 12 to 14 year-olds, prompted the following response from a teacher: ‘An excellent discussion tool to start the vital conversation around reflection, understanding, and seeing how racism and white privilege affects the lives of indigenous people on a daily and recurring basis.’
The Ka Hikitia reading list for teachers contains a key paper which claims that ‘many whites believe their financial and professional successes are the result of their own efforts while ignoring the fact of white privilege.’
We absolutely need to debate and discuss issues around race and inequality in this country. But covertly adding ‘white privilege’ to the curriculum is not the way to do it.
New Zealand children deserve a positive and inclusive education. The Government needs to front up and tell New Zealanders why it is instead allowing such radical and divisive ideas to be taught to our kids.
David Seymour, just tell the public that you will kick this crap into the long grass come the next election. There are many issues on which ACT must make a stand. Fail to do so and ACT will never be better than the third runner. BOTTLE man, BOTTLE.
Call a spade a spade. Don’t beat around the bush like any Wellington poofter/public service jobsworth.
Thank you Mr Seymovr for your information. It is time for the people of New Zealand to wake up and take a stand if they do not like the changes this govt have put in place. Write letters or go see your local MP. Our childrens future is so crucial and paramount. Parents and grandparents can no longer be armchair critics. It is not the govt to decide what is best for our children!.
Writing letters and trying to communicate with MPs will do precisely squat. We are dealing with committed Europhobes, for the most part self-loathing pakeha who have a mental imbalance rationalized as an ideology. What healthy person loathes there own kin; it is analogous to loathing one’s own family?
‘White privilege” is part of Critical Race Theory, and a form of ‘self-criticism’. The latter is a social control mechanism that was used in communist states to impose conformity. The method has also long been used in the West among corporations and government departments in ‘team building’ programmes, part of which is designed to eliminate so-called ‘unconscious bias’. Another name for it is brainwashing.
Already there have been reports of children having to stand up and confess their ‘white privilege’. Shades of the ‘class enemies’ that knelt before the masses, with placards around their necks, to ‘confess’ their ‘guilt’ before being shot or dispatched to a ‘re-education center’.
What will this do other than encourage resentment? Precisely what the ideologues want, in re-forming a generation.
Any sign of dissent and one can expect a call from the Human Rights Commission with accusations of ‘hate speech’. One can hardly expect any objectivity let alone sympathy from the mass media.
The leftist ideologues committed to what they call ‘intersectionality’, have shelved appeals to a largely uninterested proletariat, otherwise, in this context, they might do well to consult Engels’ ‘Condition of the Working Class in England’, which makes any concept of ‘white privilege’ rather hard to justify.
To say that the Settler heritage is one of ‘white privilege’ stemming from colonial oppression is in fact an outright bloody travesty against the memory of our Settler forebears who were persuaded with grandiose promises of a better life to come to New Zealand.
As John A. Lee tried to point out 80 years ago, ‘the Maori thinks the pakeha won the land wars but we only won the debt’. Settlers were cheated out of land by well-connected speculators, while City bankers long profited from the debt accrued from the land wars. (Incredibly, the Waitangi Tribunal, so eager to place guilt on the Settler heritage, regards these speculators, Thomas Whitaker et al, as ‘progressive entrepreneurs’). That is the type of history that needs teaching; not utter crap about how hapless working class settlers somehow ‘exploited’ and ‘dispossessed’ the Maori, or accrued any advantage in doing so.
I’m White. I quite like being so. I do not feel privileged because I did not cause myself to be the colour I am, any more than people who are not White chose to be the colour they are.
One wonders if people feel privileged by being non-White in countries such as Africa or India.
A teacher at a Rotorua high school told me years ago that the problem with maori children is twofold, parents do not encourage them because they see little need for education and, more importantly, their peers pick on them as soon as they appear to be making an effort.