Education
The decline of New Zealand’s education system has steadily accelerated under successive governments, which have granted more and more control to left-wing academics, teachers’ unions, and bureaucrats. In recent years, the Ministry of Education staffing numbers have exploded, yet outcomes are worse. Too many children finish school functionally illiterate and innumerate, and the remainder are still failed by a system that encourages mediocrity and ignorance instead of excellence and well-rounded knowledge.
We believe that the success of the education system depends on:
-
Strong families; teachers should not be social workers picking up the pieces of broken lives.
-
A focus on making sure every child masters fundamental skills—reading, writing, and arithmetic. No child is to be left behind.
-
An expectation of excellence.
We will:
-
Remove left-wing ideologies from the curriculum, including critical race theory, gender theory, decolonisation, and extremist “climate science” and sex “education”.
-
End the witch hunts against schools and teachers who do not follow the left-wing party line.
-
Promote alternatives to mainstream state schools, including homeschooling, special character schools, and early trades training.
-
Promulgate educational solutions that have been proven in the real world, rather than ideological and academic theories.
-
Ensure that schools support parental authority rather than undermining it.
-
Give teachers the tools to maintain discipline.
-
Empower and promote parents as first teachers.
-
Empower parents and local communities to drive their children’s education. Defund the failed centralised bureaucracy.
-
Encourage excellence rather than rewarding mediocrity and failure.
-
Promote trades training and on-the-job learning as respectable alternatives to university degrees. Ensure tertiary qualifications are treated as a personal investment and must pay for themselves.
New Zealand can have a world-leading educational system again. But the people who broke the system are not the ones to fix it—vote Conservative!