New Zealand schools must learn about British colonisation, rules PM Jacinda Ardern

New Zealand is currently celebrating the Treaty of Waitingi, which is considered its founding document

Credit: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images 

New Zealand is set to force schools to teach a new syllabus about the history of the country’s indigenous Maori people and the colonisation of the islands by Britain.

Schools are currently at liberty to decide for themselves if and how national history is taught, but critics say this often leads to a sanitisation of New Zealand’s past, in which atrocities against the Maori are glossed over.

The Maori people make up around 15 percent of the island nation’s modern population but were dispossessed of much of their land during the colonial period. 

Today, they face higher unemployment, lower wages and worse health outcomes than non-Maori New Zealanders.

Announcing the proposal on Wednesday at the site of the 1846 Battle of Ruapekapeka between British and Maori forces, Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, said: “Let us teach it, let us learn it and let us remember it. Let us share our history with every student in every school.”

The move “was a response to the growing calls from New Zealanders to know more about our own history and identity,” said the education minister Chris Hipkins.

The opposition National Party’s education spokesman Paul Goldsmith, who studied history, criticised the course for "lacking in balance”.

"The themes are mainly about identity and identity politics. That’s part of the story – but there are other elements to New Zealand’s history," he said. "How did we make a living as a country? How, in such a short space of time, did we attain one of the highest living standards in the world?”

However, he said he was supportive of elements of the proposal that sought to emphasise local history. 

The Government has published a draft of the curriculum and asked the New Zealand public to submit any comments by May 31, promising that “all feedback will be considered before the content is finalised.” The course is planned to be implemented in 2022.

The programme is built around three “big ideas”: that “Māori history is the foundational and continuous history of Aotearoa New Zealand”; that “Colonisation and its consequences have been central to our history … and continue to influence all aspects of New Zealand society”; and that New Zealand’s history “has been shaped by the exercise and effects of power”.

The course includes the arrival of the Maori in New Zealand (known Aotearoa in the Maori language), in the early 14th century, the British colonisation of the islands, the colonial civil war known New Zealand Wars and the development of a national identity.

The Ministry of Education’s website says that young people in the country often leave school without studying their nation’s history: “They haven’t learned where we have come from or the way people have experienced our histories differently.”

New Zealand marks Waitangi Day on Saturday, the national day which commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 between Britain and the Maori, considered the country’s founding document.