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The School Strike 4 Climate march in Christchurch.
OPINION: The climate strike last week made me reach far back into my memory files. I tried to put myself in the striker’s shoes. What made me feel fearful as an adolescent? It wasn’t climate change. Nor Bastion Point or abortion debates, issues
du jour when I was 16. No, if I’m honest there was only one fear, the ballot for military service, and that had passed by the time I was the striker’s age. It was abolished in 1972 by Big Norm, when I was 11, but I remember being terrified before then that in a few short years, if my birthdate was drawn, I’d have to kit up and risk life and limb.
Jock Phillips’ autobiography, Making History
The battle lines have been drawn over how New Zealand history should be taught in schools. On one side, fighting a rear-guard action, is Michael Bassett, whose reputation as an historian has produced as many critics as those of his political career. He is backed up by lay opinion-makers such as The New Zealand Initiative’s Roger Partridge and Chris Trotter’s Bowalley Road website.
All three see a danger in a curriculum based on the claim that, “Māori history is the foundational and continuous history of Aotearoa New Zealand,” to quote the first of the Ministry of Education’s three “big ideas” for the curriculum. The other two are the continuing effects of colonisation, and the “exercise and effects of power”.