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

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