Kevin Donnelly, Education Forum
October 2002
New Zealand's Education Forum recently commissioned Australian education expert Kevin Donnelly to review the smaller country's national curriculum. He has delivered a scathing critique of it and of the New Zealand government's current effort to "stocktake" it. His criticisms center on five concerns: (1) the curriculum's continued reliance on an "outcomes-based approach&that&has been largely abandoned by equivalent education systems such as those in Australia and the United States"; (2) New Zealand's failure to recognize the "superiority of either a 'syllabus' or 'standards' approach to curriculum development utilized by successful education systems such as Singapore, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and South Korea"; (3) uncritical and excessive use of "a process-based approach to curriculum that fails to recognize properly the central importance of educational content"; (4) undue emphasis on "a student-centered view of learning to the detriment of&.the 'structure of the discipline'"; and (5) the government's failure to undertake a proper international comparative analysis of its curriculum. U.S. and other education reformers, particularly in places that are re-examining their own standards and curricula, may find this interesting and helpful as, of course, will aficionados of Kiwi education issues. You can find it on the web at http://www.educationforum.org.nz/documents/publications/review_school_curriculum.pdf.
