The private high school in my small NZ town costs half of the before tax salary of someone on minimum wage. For a good IT job in this town, probably still 1/2 to 1/3 of your after tax salary. Private schools here are very much a minority option.

Even on my bigger-city tech salary, putting both of my kids through private high school would be about 1/3 to 1/2 my after tax income.

Yes it's an option, but it's a big sacrifice.

I think you need both.

If you teach maths in a JIT fashion, when do you learn "basic facts" like 3+4=7?

If you don't teach that stuff systematically, how do students get to the point where they feel they can apply maths reliably - e.g. adding prices together in their head?

So you need both - a solid foundation, plus applications using that foundation plus a bit more.

Absolutely you need both. We agree there. And any reasonable curriculum - in practice - will be a combination. But the curriculum will still be organized in some fashion, it's a very high-level document after all. And that's where one or the other flavor will come through.

I disagree that "3+4=7" is a basic fact of math.

Basic facts of math are for example ZFC axioms of Set theory.

I only learned some set theory in high school. My point being, that teaching math is unexpectedly surprisingly top-down, at least at first.

3+4=7 is what NZ primary school teachers mean when they say "basic facts."

Source: I have two children in NZ primary schools.

The problem is that this isn't the only news about a wacky new science curriculum. There's also the attempt to shoehorn "Matauranga Maori" - Maori (the indigenous people of NZ) "ways of knowing" in there.

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/19/what-are-maori-way...

I get the feeling the people dreaming this stuff up don't know what science is or why anyone might care about it. If it's going to be severely watered down, why bother teaching it at all?

(throwaway account, this is a hot button topic in NZ)

I hope my High School science teachers are long since retired because I couldn't imagine them suffering through this bullshit. But if the Ministry of Education is fine teaching religion perhaps they should also consider including Intelligent Design and Gaia Hypothesis too.

It’s a well written piece but I think (in a similar vein to that article) a lot of it is driven by the codification and deification of “Science”. Given down to children, their heads filled with our best theories.

There are different systems for generating information. Knowledge”, and therefore “Science”, are dangerous words.

Our modern Western Liberal colonial societies don’t have it all figured out but have a hegemony that often chafes indigenous peoples.

I think we would be better recasting what we teach, and what we try to teach as Empiricism or something similar.

Frame it around experimentation. Frame it around students own desire to learn and share their learnings. Go after the “why?” that they love so much.

I think it’s at once compatible with non “Science” knowledge systems, cultivates curiosity, and engenders that which creates knowledge.

It also protects empiricism from the urge some have to deny what lends authority to good science.