18 February 2005
Garnet Milne reformationtestimony.org.nz
The real cause of the NCEA scholarship failure is the pagan philosophy imposed on our education system by our
politicians - the priests and priestesses of hedonism, the religion of death.
The PPTA Principals’ Council has come out in support of NCEA in response to National’s Dr. Brash’s call to abandon it.
The principals conclude:
“The NCEA in contrast is providing opportunities that weren’t there before: a far wider subject choice for our students,
more opportunities for teachers to develop new and exciting programmes that meet student needs, and the chance to assess
students’ performance across a whole subject. “Instead of reinventing the whole NCEA system, let’s focus on the issues
that need to be addressed, and support schools and teachers in getting it right.”
There are some telling philosophical assumptions in this statement which reveal the real problem behind NCEA and New
Zealand’s education system. It is widely acknowledge that we are turning out illiterate young people poorly equipped to
read the morning newspaper let alone contribute to New Zealand’s brave new “knowledge economy”.
This “wider subject choice” trumpeted by the principals is really another way of saying, “we will ensure that our
students fail in the basics by giving them media studies and other pointless subjects which will equip them for the dole
queue” (or is it now the sickness beneficiary/dpb queue?). Incidentally one of the reasons we have to take the new
unemployment statistics with a big pinch of salt is not only that our young employable people have found a way to become
sickness beneficiaries (come to think of it my back feels a bit sore today), but we have to wonder whether these
government folk producing the unemployment figures can actually add.
But back to the philosophical assumptions: the principals are keen to “meet student needs”. Here we have this idea of
child centred learning. We find out from the kids themselves what they need and then we give it to them. I suppose we
can expect new subjects to emerge such as playing video games on the X box; rapping and learning how to text while
driving a car. The other theory the principals remind us about is the need to assess a child’s ability across a whole
subject.
Excuse me? Has this not always happened? When we sat English exams (although we should not call it English – we don’t
want to demean the other languages) in earlier decades, were these exams not an adequate assessment of a student’s
ability? Of course they were. The examination system has worked perfectly well for several hundred years until the
neo-Marxists and postmodernists got hold of our education system. Neo-Marxists desire to destroy any hegemony which
seeks to dominate society politically.
This is where we get our political correctness from. The 1993 curricula framework document, for example, requires that
in language studies (which used to be called English) “In selecting authors and texts, schools will have regard to
gender balance and to the inclusion of a range of cultural perspectives”.
The educators at the behest of their political masters have already decided the mix of “literature” that will be
studied. Plainly behind this gender and culture “balance” is the feminist and neo-Marxist desire to suppress a dominant
European, male influence in society. In order to achieve this, the student will have to read inferior “literature” and
forgo the classical influence which would help them understand their history and their place in Western culture.
Postmodernism is another pernicious influence in our education system. Francis Kelly, at one time senior manager of the
Learning and Evaluation Policy Unit for the Ministry of Education wrote: “New Zealand seeks to adopt an approach of
rigorous eclecticism with respect to the underpinning philosophies of its curriculum documents…key amongst [philosophic
approaches] are modernism, postpositivism and postmodernism”.
Postmodernism is the view that there is no single objective truth. Truth can exist in contradictory forms. What is true
for me might not be true for you. Postmodernism therefore applauds pluralism and a counterfeit equality.
This means that our schools are trying to make everyone succeed (equality regardless of ability) and assert that truth
is contradictory (all values are equally valid). With these kinds of presuppositions no wonder NCEA is such a fiasco. We
have very bright students sitting scholarship who are achieving at a lower level than less bright students whose
doodlings are considered worthy of a pass mark, even though they are unable to give an intelligent answer in an exam.
Another way of stating the official government line reflected by the education department is to say that children are
not being valued equally in our education system if the less intelligent are allowed to fail. Failure will hurt their
feelings and, therefore, we must ensure that everyone succeeds.
So we have to ask “if these kids failed scholarship, given the desire of the education system to pass everyone, perhaps
these students just did not do a very good job at answering the questions?” Of course, this could not be admitted by the
education department, because the teachers would have to concede that their students are not learning their subjects
very well at all and therefore that the teachers must be doing a lousy job. So what does the government do? It just
awards scholarships anyway. After all we cannot have students failing can we!!
What the opposition parties should be doing is exposing the morally bankrupt pagan philosophical theories that lie
behind New Zealand education across the board.
The political correctness of neo-Marxism and the dumbing-down pluralism of postmodernism, which wants to take all
competition out of life, need to be rooted out of the education system, and replaced by a return to system which
encourages competition; places the goal of excellence before all, knowing that some will fail academically and some will
succeed.
This is the real world. Labour politicians are driving New Zealand into a pagan postmodernist corner. They should be
replaced by a truly moral leadership whose vision for New Zealand is just the opposite of Helen’s feminist fantasy land.
In other words, let’s get some biblical principles back into the institutions of our society before it is too late.
We are hearing the death rattle of New Zealand Christian culture, and we can see the priests and high-priestesses of the
goddess hedonism gleefully and ghoulishly waiting at the foot of the bed to subvert any remnants of the capital of moral
decency bequeathed to us by better generations who truly honoured moral virtue.
ENDS