In 2018, in her opening remarks for the panel discussion at the Festival of Education held at Auckland Grammar, Elizabeth Rata mused about Māori underachievement. What if the dominant way of thinking about it, that “the issue is these children don’t achieve because their culture … is not recognised … and therefore the solution that comes from that is culturally responsive pedagogies” was wrong?

What if, instead, she wondered, the “solution is not more of the same, not more of the home culture, but in fact less of it”. What if, in other words, we have to take their ideas away from home for them to be successful?

Given the constant presence of Rata in Stanford’s curriculum reform process (and inbox), a process that Rata has stated to Stanford in writing she hopes will “end decolonisation’s success”, I have worried about the influence of these ideas on Stanford. When might we see these ideas creep out of her own mouth?

Stanford read a book during Christmas 2023 that had a profound impact on her: E D Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them. Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation in the USA. In June, she went to their conference and shared a stage with him, along with Sir Nicholas Gibb, former UK schools minister and Paul Givan, Northern Ireland’s Minister of Education. The plenary session was led by AEI Senior Fellow Robert Pondiscio.

Now, the AEI is a right-wing think-tank with connections to the Koch brothers. They were leading champions of the neoliberal project during George W. Bush’s presidency, and remain a significant force in right-wing American politics. They have a history of distorting the science of climate change, and lead campaigns for school choice, among other things.

Stanford spoke fluently about the curriculum reform process she has led – “based on your book” she said to Hirsch – and hit all the key words as she espoused the virtue of the changes: knowledge-rich, science of learning, automatising, cognitive load, serve and return … you get the idea. She also spoke about how all brains learn the same, regardless of circumstance or culture, and therefore all kids deserve this approach as it’s how we’ll address the equity gap. And she ends (almost) with this, which is worth quoting in full:

“no matter what culture … what family you’re from you have the very best possible instruction, the very best possible curriculum, a knowledge-rich curriculum based on the science of learning, that even if you’re from a poor family and you don’t have the resources at home, when you walk into that classroom you have everything you need to succeed the same as every other child – that’s the reforms we’re driving.”

But then there’s a pause, not an end. She’s almost done. The thing she says next took me right back to 2018:

“sometimes you can misdiagnose the problem and think it’s a … we need to be more cultural, that will help with our reading and writing. Well, it’ll be good because it’s important to help children feel comfortable in the classroom, but reading, writing, and maths is around the curriculum and explicit teaching in the science of learning”.

The MAG had an email thread regarding culturally responsive instruction which the Ministry has withheld. The Ombudsman is currently reviewing that decision. But I think we can begin to get a sense of what that thread was like. Recall Johnston on The Platform defending Stanford for not removing Te Tiriti from the curriculum (yet), and challenging anyone to “find any evidence of woke material” in the rewritten curriculums. The MAG, and thus Johnston and Rata, directed, and indeed wrote, significant parts of those curriculums.

Culture is only useful, Stanford is telling us here, as a way to make children feel comfortable. That’s where responsiveness ends. To try and do anything else is to “misdiagnose the problem”. The solution is, as Rata said in 2018, less of the home culture; it is a knowledge-rich curriculum, free of woke ideas and material, based on the science of learning because all brains learn the same.

Yes, a knowledge-rich curriculum brings up valid questions regarding whose knowledge. But, even more perniciously, it raises questions regarding science and its uses and abuses. I am reminded of phrenology, the empirical science that justified European intellectual superiority. I am reminded of social darwinism, the science that justified genocide across all colonised lands and, ultimately, the Nazi regime. I am reminded of being in a NZ history tutorial and asking my tutor, Giselle Byrnes, Why is it that science always seems to favour the powerful? Why indeed, she replied.

But, of course, these weren’t sciences, just prejudice wrapped up in philosophical notions with a few data points and some silky phrases strung together.