For ten years, Professor Stuart McNaughton had the ear of the Ministry of Education. For ten long years, as Chief Scientific Advisor, he was the guy tasked with providing the ‘evidence-based advice’ that supposedly guided the direction of our schools.
And what do we have to show for that decade of expert, top-tier academic guidance? Let’s be brutally honest. Our education standards didn’t just slip; they plummeted off a cliff. We watched as NCEA was systematically turned into an utter disaster and an international embarrassment, an absolute lightweight, fractured qualification that left employers scratching their heads and universities forced to run remedial catch-up classes for incoming students who couldn’t construct a proper essay or solve basic algebra.
While our kids were falling further and further behind the rest of the developed world in reading, maths, and science, what were the professors in our universities focusing on? They became the ultimate taxpayer-funded incubator and birthplace for every mad cow conspiracy, radical gender identity nonsense, and breathless climate change hysteria imaginable. They swapped the rigorous pursuit of foundational knowledge for ideological navel-gazing and swirly-wirly patterns, whale songs and kauri trees and that kumara garden. Like Paradise, Credibiity Lost.
You had your time, Professor. You had one job to do and for TEN years you muffed it.
Yet, right on cue, the moment a government steps in with basic, common-sense reforms that are already showing immediate, positive results on the ground, the ivory tower begins to panic. (Are they seeeing the end of their gravy train?)
Writing in the New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, McNaughton has come out swinging against Education Minister Erica Stanford’s shake-up, labeling the new policies as ‘simplism’. He is deeply offended that the government is rolling out structured literacy across all primary schools, buying actual maths textbooks, using standardised online tests to benchmark basic teen literacy, and bringing back external exams to salvage the wreckage of NCEA. ‘Deeply offended’? Add that to the universty’s last ten years of failings – the entire ‘oh I feel offended’ industry.
According to the professor, teaching kids how to properly decode words through phonics is ‘naive oversimplification’. Apparently, buying textbooks won’t work because teachers aren’t getting months of ivory-tower theory to go with them. He even wheels out the tired, predictable elite narrative that testing teens for basic literacy and numeracy somehow ‘disadvantages’ Māori and Pacific students.
Give us a break. Do you know what actually disadvantages Māori, Pacific, and working-class Kiwi kids? Sending them out into the world unable to read, write, or do fractions because their school spent years focusing on ‘ethnicities and genders and rainbows and hurty words.
McNaughton claims the science has moved considerably over the last 40 years. Well, looking at the data from the last ten, it moved entirely in the wrong direction. The complex methods the academic elite championed did nothing but widen the equity gap and erode excellence.
As Erica Stanford rightly fired back, the push for structured literacy is giving children the strongest possible foundation so they can actually unlock comprehension. ‘Once children can read, write and spell confidently,’ Stanford noted, ‘they are free to engage with literature, poetry, science, history, and the arts.’
Exactly. You can’t have critical thinking if you don’t have the basic knowledge to think about.
The swift, public pushback from the academic establishment tells you everything you need to know. Methinks the professor protests just a little too much. When the old guard starts screaming that the sky is falling because schools are returning to proven, structured basics, it’s a surefire sign the government is finally doing something right.
The experiment failed, Professor. The results are in, and the public has moved on. It’s time to hang up the cap and gown, leave the classroom to the practitioners, and let the adults clean up the mess.
eN-Zed 