Hypocritical Chutzpah

The Education Unions are Only Being Consistent

We always knew the education unions would resist mightily the introduction of national standards testing in reading, writing, and arithmetic for government schools in New Zealand. We always knew, as well, that their resistance would be couched in "harmful to children" messaging. And so it has proved to be. Ten percent of primary schools have decided not to comply with the testing regime. It appears as though there has been little or no consultation with parents in their decision. It is becoming more apparent by the day that non-compliance is at the behest and pressure of union functionaries (whether the union of principals or the union of teachers). It is also apparent that behind the unions, the opposition Labour Party is pushing and shoving and agitating.

Now one might be left wondering, Why the brouhaha? The stated reason is that national standards testing will damage children. How come? It will brand up to fifty percent of them as failures. The psychological damage to children, we are gravely told, will be devastating. How asinine is this!

Yes, maybe, but, actually, we well understand their point of view. Government education has long been an operational arm of secular humanism. It has functioned as the church of our established religion.  Man is intrinsically good and perfectible. If children are left to mature without harmful influences they will grow up to make their perfection a reality. All evil is externally sourced. Wrongs, harms, evils are environmentally conditioned. Thus, if a child is told that they have "failed" to achieve a certain standard it will likely damage their self-esteem--their sense of worth and worthiness--thus inhibiting their gradual (and otherwise inevitable) evolution to adult perfection. This damage is merely an environmental, even political construct. Standards are man-made. They are nothing more than fashionable conventions of the day. Thus they artificially cut across the nascent perfection of the child and inhibit the child from achieving true self-actualisation. Ergo, national standards testing in primary schools will be damaging to children.

But if national standards are damaging to children, they are equally damaging to teachers. If a teacher is exposed as having failed to teach his or her charges so that can meet and even surpass the required standards of reading, writing, and arithmetic, great damage will be done to the teacher as well. The teacher will be told by the system that he or she has failed.

Now, we need to be fair here. New Zealand's dominant culture and overwhelming established religion is secular humanism. The Living God does not exist. Man charts his own destiny and is evolving ever higher. The beginning and end of all referents for truth is Man himself. What the educational unions are doing, how they are thinking, and their political agitating is entirely consistent with the entire state education system. The unions are the true sons of the system and the religion upon which it is based. Therefore they can hardly be condemned by their co-religionists--at least not without breathtakingly hypocritical chutzpah.

Our challenge to all the secular humanists who are advocating for national standards and are expressing outrage against the union actions is to at least be honest. The educational unions are being far more consistent with your religious beliefs than you are. State schools have to reflect the established religion of the day; the educational sector has taken the religion of secular humanism and has diligently applied it to its doctrine of the child, its doctrine of the teacher, and of its understanding of truth, and to its doctrines of pedagogy and so forth. The end result is a growing failure to read and write and do maths. But don't blame the unions, and don't blame the system. Focus instead upon the wretchedness of your established religion upon which they are based and which they consistently reflect.

Having said all that, as Christians we would prefer that national standards go ahead and they are properly employed, both to help young pupils and to rank teachers. We also hope that national standards will reflect fundamental competencies in literacy and numeracy. The reason we take this position is a religious one. The Almighty Maker of the heavens and the earth has ordained and commanded that language and numeracy are part of the DNA code of His entire creation--of all that He has made. We cannot serve Him, nor can we fulfil our responsibilities in any sphere without reading, writing, and arithmetic. Since even unbelievers serve His purposes and are His (unwitting, even unwilling) servants, numeracy and literacy are fundamental to human life and society. Therefore, everyone needs to learn to read and write and compute, which means that they need to be taught.

But the pervasive influence of our established and official Unbelief leads us to doubt that the national standards policy will survive. The established religion is just too strong, too pervasive, and too consistently interwoven throughout the fabric of the state school system--as you would expect it to be. So, here is how we expect it will play out: the educational unions will continue their dissent and campaign of opposition. Ninety percent of schools will comply with the new government testing programme. The educational establishment will ostensibly embrace national standards, then morph them until they become moribund. Firstly, they will call for national standards in more than just reading, writing, and maths. ("National testing is good. It's just too narrow and restricted. We need to extend it to other equally important subjects", etc.) Secondly, they will tweak the standards to reduce their meaning and usefulness. ("Language testing must reflect the diversity of our multi-cultural society. We need reading and writing tests in 'bro-talk' and 'txting' and other wonderfully vibrant lingual dynamic evolving lingual developments."). Testing in arithmetic will extend to IT skills and competency, computer use, keyboard facility, and so on.

Within five to seven years the national standards will be as meaningless as NCEA is today.

They used to say, "You can't fight City Hall". You cannot fight the educational establishment because it is such a consistent operational expression of the overwhelming, dominant established religion of our day--secular humanism. It will always win--until secular humanism itself is discredited and disgraced, and our people repent of their folly and return to "God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth."

In the meantime, Christian schools and universities are the only viable long term alternative.