Education assumes its rightful place on the debate stage

Christopher Luxon makes a pitch to lift education standards (Image: supplied))

Sat, 25 Mar 2023

If you want to know just how “back to basics” a curriculum can get, take a look at the one for England, which even goes so far as to make it a statutory requirement that teachers teach children how to “sit correctly at a table”. The curriculum document for primary school students in England runs to 200 pages and includes a list of more than 70 individual words the government thinks students should know when they are seven or eight years old. It has more in common with an overly intrusive instruction manual than the...

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