At last, the day has come: NCEA has been scrapped. Good riddance. For two decades it has been a national embarrassment, dressing failure up as success while turning our schools into factories of mediocrity.
Taxpayers deserve a quality education system for the billions they’ve poured in — not a qualifications circus that rewards mediocrity with certificates, stamps and sparkly trinkets. In fact, I suspect it would be cheaper to scrap NZQA’s entire school division and put every student through Cambridge IGCSEs and the International Baccalaureate Diploma. At least those systems demand genuine thinking and rigour. But of course, that won’t happen — not while John Tamihere and his mates are busy collecting their backhanders from the bureaucracy.
Imagine, for a moment, a high school qualification that hands out credits for picking up rubbish, emptying bins, or catching a ball. That’s not a parody — that’s NCEA. What an epic waste of time and money. No wonder we’ve bred a generation of simple-minded graduates, convinced they’re educated because they’ve been endlessly rewarded for “almost succeeding.”
And let’s be very clear: what the Minister of Education is finally admitting about NCEA today is exactly what many teachers and principals warned when it was first introduced. They were ignored. Now the whole country can see what a disaster it has been.
I’m just delighted to still be around to say it plainly: I told you so.
eN-Zed 