The New Zealand Labour Party goes full communist
And they're trying to drag New Zealand with them through your kids
If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll be familiar with the communist nut-job that is Paulo Freire. Feel free to remind yourself of some of the insane and evil things he’s written and how he’s a huge fan of Mao, Lenin and Lukac (famous communists and some of the most evil men in history).
As you might recall, he’s also one of the most influential educators of all time, adored by universities around the world (especially Cambridge) and his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most cited education textbook ever. It’s hard to believe but you can verify this easily enough. He’s best known for founding a discipline called critical pedagogy.
Freire, who was born in Recife, Brazil, in 1921 and died in 1997, is widely regarded as one of the most influential educators of all time. He is one of the central, founding figures associated with critical pedagogy: a philosophy of education which holds that teaching and learning cannot be detached from politics, democracy and social justice.
Guided by his best-known work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, critical pedagogy highlights the importance of education in awakening the individual’s ability to think critically and question the power structures that surround them.
- Faculty of Education News, Cambridge University (emphasis mine)
As you might expect, the critical in critical pedagogy is the same critical as in critical consciousness. In case you missed it, you can read more about the dark history of critical consciousness and what it means here.
Pedagogy means the method and practice of teaching. And critical pedagogy means the method and practice of teaching to achieve critical consciousness. In other words, indoctrinating children into the communist ideology. This is why Freire (openly a communist) got into education in the first place.
So if you’re unfortunate enough to be a parent in New Zealand (which I am) you might find it troubling to find references to critical pedagogy and critical consciousness and conscientisation all over the New Zealand Ministry of Education. This one, for example, has been around for a while.
Decolonising education
Engage in a critically conscious curriculum both for yourself and for your students. What is critical consciousness? Critical consciousness involves:
reflecting critically on the imbalance of power and resources in society
taking critical action in the pursuit of equity
disrupting the status quo to address oppression and strengthen equity.
Taking action
Conscientisation is becoming aware of the part I play in keeping things the same. How I support the status quo, how I perpetrate that. And becoming very conscious of how and why I am doing that and what are the implications of my actions.
… Conscientisation may make me aware but if I’m not going to do anything with that thinking, I’m of very little help to Māori students. Resistance is the “doing” following the disruption to my practice on account of the conscientisation.
This is pure Paulo Freire. At least the influence of this programme was limited - a pilot, if you will. Well I guess the pilot must have been a success because the Labour government have upscaled this into the new Common Practice Model being drafted as we speak. It’s an attempt to rewrite the entire math and literacy curriculum using Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy framework. In other words to expand the woke indoctrination to include all New Zealand children - from kindergarten to high school. No one escapes the brainwashing!
Every child and young person in Aotearoa New Zealand needs to experience success in their learning and have their progress and achievements celebrated. The Literacy & Communication and Maths Strategy aims to address inequity by lifting educational achievement for all. The Strategy and Action Plans enable the early learning and schooling system to deliver equity and excellence in literacy, communication, and maths teaching and learning.
And, just like their TKI programme, The Common Practice Model is full of critical pedagogy and communist buzzwords. So much so, it could have been written by Freire himself. Don’t take my word for it, just read what they say for yourself (I would encourage you to read the whole document to get a sense of just how bad it is). Here’s a small sample of the ideological dumpster fire that covers my favourite subject - math.
Critical maths
A critical maths pedagogical approach uses maths to develop critical awareness about wider social, environmental, political, ideological, and economic issues. Critical maths recognises the importance of understanding, interpreting, and addressing issues of power, social justice and equity in the community and the wider world. Ākonga are encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses and assumptions, including that maths is benign, neutral, and culture-free.
Data sovereignty, humanising mathematics, teaching maths for social justice (TMfSJ), ethnomathematics, maths + {conscientisation, equity, ethics, citizenship}
Needless to say, this will destroy math education if it’s allowed to take hold. Little actual math will be learned just woke ethnomathematics and conscientisation. And you can’t build a bridge or a skyscraper or an aeroplane using that.
Whether you love it or hate it, math is a fundamentally important subject. It underpins physics which underpins engineering which underpins basically all of modern life - manufacturing, transportation, building, technology, you name it. Without these, we’d still be living in the Dark Ages. In case you’re thinking this might take a long time to filter down and start wrecking the modern world (and maybe you’re good for a while), not so fast - they’re going after these subjects too!
Take a moment to compare the examples in the post above to the document produced by the Labour government. It’s strikingly similar, even down to the specific phrasing. The same, specific phrasing that they apply to anything and everything - medicine, engineering, literature, math, education, law, you name it. In other words, we’re dealing with the mantras of a cult. A lunatic cult that sees literally everything through the same crackpot lens - the lens of hidden power and privilege. Even math (fricking math!) isn’t out of bounds. They’re making the Soviets look sane.
Let’s recap. The Labour government is using the education system to indoctrinate the nation’s children into woke communist ideology. And they’ve been doing it unnoticed for a while now. New Zealand is in serious trouble. The damage they’re inflicting will haunt us for generations to come. We’re already seeing some of the devastating effects of this. And they’re only just getting started.