Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

SocietyMay 25, 2021

History in schools: what’s in, what’s not, and what should be

Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

Charlotte Macdonald, who co-convened the panel that critiqued the Ministry of Education’s draft NZ histories curriculum, explains what needs to be done to make this initiative as rich, as current and as valuable to young New Zealanders as possible.

Most of us agree it is a good thing that schoolchildren (at years 1-10) will be learning something about their own histories from 2022. But what should that history – or histories – be, and who gets to decide?

Is it the Treaty of Waitangi, WW1 and WW2, with a glance back to first arrivals – of Polynesians around 800 years ago and Europeans from the 1760s? Is it the New Zealand Wars, colonisation and settlement, followed a little later by “King Dick” Seddon’s “god’s own country”? Is it the worlds of Hinematioro, Hongi Hika, Rangi Topeora, Iwikau Te Heuheu Tūkino III or Tūhawaiki, each very different in power and place, yet all whose lives spanned a fast-changing world; what the authors of Tangata Whenua term the shift from Te Ao Tawhito to Te Ao Hou?

All of these are fine beginnings, and strong contenders for a place in a history curriculum. Some of them can be found in the Aotearoa New Zealand histories draft curriculum released for public consultation by the Ministry of Education in early February 2021.

Ngāti Tūwharetoa chiefs Mananui Te Heuheu Tūkino II and his younger brother Iwikau Te Heuheu Tūkino III (left and second from left), and Ngāti Whātua chief Āpihai Te Kawau and his nephew Orakai (second from right and right) (Lithograph from a painting by George French Angas, Ref: PUBL-0014-56. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22558972)

A response released on May 18 by an expert panel of historians convened by Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi provides a range of suggestions and recommendations on the draft. The panel strongly supports teaching New Zealand’s histories in schools. The response offers a constructive commentary in order to make this initiative as rich, as current and as valuable to young New Zealanders as possible.

Key recommendations include: that the curriculum say more about the 600 or so years between first arrival of the peoples who later come to be known as Māori and the late 18th centuries. One of the three “big ideas” that frame the curriculum draft is “that Māori history is the foundational and continuous history of Aotearoa New Zealand”. Yes, spot on. If that is so,  and if the overarching framing of “Whakapapa me te Whanaungatanga” is to speak through time, let’s take the long period of human settlement and inhabitation seriously.

Whakapapa, archaeology, changing use and shape of the land and its forests, its birdlife (moa have a history), iwi and hapū knowledge all have much to enrich this part of our history. 

For more than half a century Māori had dealings of vastly different kinds with Europeans ranging from the lettered and vain Joseph Banks to the roughest and least scrupulous of sailors salted in skin and sin. Aotearoa New Zealand is distinctive in having such a long interacting phase prior to formal colonisation. The circumstances leading to the Treaty are incomprehensible without factoring the 1760s-1840s as an era of dynamic encounter and exchange. It was one of seven theme areas signalled in the government’s announcement of the histories in schools initiative. The panel would like to see more of it present.

Family in Dusky Bay, New Zealand, drawn from nature by W Hodges ; engrav’d by Lerperniere – London ; Strahan 1777. (Ref: C-051-031. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22543351)

Let’s see more people. History is, at core, people acting and being acted upon. We urge more scope for showing the wide range of peoples for whom Aotearoa New Zealand is and has been home. There could be more women, in many guises, but including as campaigners in the world-leading achievement of the vote (surely vital in the wider curriculum goal of fostering “critical citizenship” among students).

There is a fourth big idea crying out for space: locating New Zealand’s histories on those of the global stage. New Zealand’s and New Zealanders’ histories have never been lived within bounds set by the geographies of our island borders. People, ideas and goods travel in and out, our histories connect us to the world – now and across all of our past. Nor is New Zealand’s relationship to the Pacific just one of a state relationship, important though that has been. There are many other dimensions. We would also like to see more of the 20th century. 

Most crucially, the panel would like the curriculum to clearly open the door to the excitement, wonder and discovery in the study of history for school pupils. Finding out about the past is like being a detective: clues and threads survive but not always the full picture; people, places and events can be familiar in some respects, yet different in others: the stiff clothing, remarkable and numerous hats, awesomely large bullocks being driven by men wearing moleskin trousers, huge beards and tailored waistcoats (where have the skills of bullockies gone?). It is this combination of the familiarity and the strangeness of the past that provides the tension, the spring that makes history sing (and weep). It leads us back again and again to explore more, to ask new questions. And to look for better answers. 

A bullock team in native forest in Northland in 1913 (Photo: Northwood brothers :Photographs of Northland. Ref: 1/1-010781-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22323239)

In asking those questions students are encouraged, rightly, to look at multiple narratives,  and at counter narratives to those that might have become orthodoxy – the ones we have discarded under “the Maori wars” or “the noble warrior”  or the “willing housewife”, or the larrikin child whose rightful destiny was in an industrial school (in an 1867 mindset and meagre public provision). In doing so, the first task is not to judge against the present. We can all too easily find ourselves superior and more knowing than those in the past. We know what the consequences of their actions have been. Rather, the task is to look at the evidence through which we know this story, this history: whether that is from a document, a waiata, an image in a wharenui or family album, a physical site that has been visited or studied, a newspaper from the time, or something else. It must be stronger than what the draft curriculum currently proposes as a “frame of reference”. For the panel, the goal of the study of history, to which all school pupils will be exposed from 2022, is first and most importantly, to know; to find their particular stories in the histories of this place. It is knowledge that is the source, the power, the agony and the delight.

The panel has had its say. It does so as a group of subject specialists, people who have knowledge and who care deeply about what we know, and how we know our histories. 

It is now time – and there is just time – for you to have a say.

Take a look yourself. Write your own curriculum and put down the history you would like your child, mokopuna, grandchild, neighbours to learn – or what you wished you knew. And send your suggestions to the ministry before May 31, 2021.

Charlotte Macdonald is a professor of history at Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka and co-convenor of the Royal Society Te Apārangi expert panel response to the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Draft Curriculum.

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Young girl eating mandarin in school
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OPINIONSocietyMay 24, 2021

A free school lunch isn’t just about hunger, but about dignity

Young girl eating mandarin in school
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Dr Julie Spray spent 2015 eating lunch with primary school students in a disadvantaged part of South Auckland, where she learned that providing free food can be a lot more complex than simply sating hunger.

To protect the privacy of research participants, pseudonyms are used throughout this article.

“Where’s your lunch, Caleb?” I asked the nine-year-old sitting next to me on the concrete steps outside his classroom. He shrugged. “I’m not hungry.” But he accepted a handful of cheese-flavoured puffs from Teuila, next to him, before she tipped the crumbs into her mouth and licked her fingers. This packet of chips was Teuila’s complete lunch and a staple food for the kids I worked with during my doctoral research. They were imported from Asia and families could buy them from the shop around the corner for $1 each. 

“Julie, what’s that?” Teuila asked, looking at my lunch. I told her how I made the chicken and spinach-filled wrap that morning. 

“Can I have a piece?” she asked.

“A piece?”

“Of that.” She pointed to the spinach. 

“You want a leaf of spinach?” I let her pick one out. How could I not?

For the whole of 2015, I ate lunch nearly every day with year 5 and 6 children (age 9-11) at their decile one primary school, “Tūrama School” in South Auckland. Or rather, I ate – and shared – my lunch, while the kids like Teuila ate chips or, like Caleb, nothing at all. These kids had parents who loved them very much but who really struggled, often working long hours and multiple jobs to cover the rising costs of Auckland rentals. Affording food or finding time to prepare nutritious lunches was often not possible.

Now, six years later, the Ka Ora, Ka Ako school lunch programme is providing free lunches to around 132,600 kids in low decile schools across New Zealand. As the programme expands we have started to hear feedback from parents and school principals about its positive effects as well as concerns about wastage or what happens to parental responsibilities. A number of those concerns were raised in The Spinoff’s recent story about the response to the programme in Māngere. Some, like National’s Paul Goldsmith, suggest the programme needs to target those who need it, rather than provide enough lunches for every child in a school. But as we evaluate this programme, it’s also important that we remember what it’s like when we don’t provide school lunches – especially from children’s perspectives.

A sample of FED’s term two menu for the school lunches programme. (Photo: Supplied)

My research involved what we anthropologists call “participant observation,” or participating in daily school life to learn the taken-for-granted things that are normal for Tūrama School kids and staff. Watching them every day, I learned about Tūrama School kids’ standard diet: no breakfast, chips or biscuits at lunchtime, and a carton of milk and a piece of fruit courtesy of Fonterra’s Milk in Schools and the government’s Fruit in Schools programmes. When kids had a little money they might buy chips or a pie on the way to school; other times they had no food to bring at all. 

Numerous studies have shown how this kind of food insecurity impacts kids’ learning and health. My study was unique because I was observing how children themselves were understanding and responding to their experiences of food insecurity. In our adult-centric society, we tend to overlook children’s perspectives, and imagine children as passive recipients of care. We assume that if adults provide food, hungry children will eat it. But children are people with their own social lives, who make their own decisions and make meaning from their experiences together just like adults do. 

At Tūrama School kids could request a “spare lunch”: a peanut butter sandwich pulled out of the freezer, made by volunteers out of donated ingredients once a week and often accompanied by a muesli bar or fruit cup. But these lunches were unappealing – one child described them to me as “cold bread” and, probably because it featured in the sandwiches, all the kids hated peanut butter. (I began bringing peanut butter sandwiches for my own lunch because it was the one thing kids would not “scab” (beg) from me). 

Kids also gave these spare lunches symbolic meaning. Asking for a spare lunch made a statement about the kind of parents that child had and the kind of person that child was. The kind of child who was “pōhara” (poor) or uncared for, who was only worth cold bread. 

Some kids would take a spare lunch and accept the indignity and social stigma, or, as I saw in one case, throw the lunch away under pressure from teasing. Or, at times when the spare lunch came with a popular food item like fruit cups or trail mix, some groups of children would collectively decide it was acceptable to ask for a spare lunch to get the high-value item. Then, hungry kids could make a performance out of picking out the chocolate from the trail mix, and quietly eat the rest as well. But most of the time, kids would just say “I’m not hungry.” To kids, not having food was shameful, but not being hungry was socially acceptable, reframing not eating as a choice.

Photo: Getty Images

Most concerning, though, is that kids weren’t just saying they weren’t hungry. Watching them for a year, I could see that many kids seemed to be embodying “not hungry” – they were distracting themselves from the bodily cues that signal hunger to the point where they actually did not feel that they were hungry. A ton of evidence in health psychology teaches us that our feelings of hunger are externally cued as much as they are internally – we learn to feel hungry at certain times and in response to things like plate size or memory of our last (culturally-defined) meal. When kids have to cope with chronic lack of lunch, they don’t feel hungry the way they’re supposed to anymore. Leaving kids without lunch potentially means disrupting their normal processes of bodily perception in ways that may well be carried with them into adulthood.

While children told me they weren’t hungry, politicians were telling me providing them lunch would discourage parents from “taking responsibility” for feeding their kids. In 2015 parliament was debating the “Feed the Kids Bill” which was eventually voted down with Paula Bennett telling the media that providing lunch was the parent’s responsibility. Parental responsibility has inevitably become a concern for some with Ka Ora, Ka Ako, as well. But adults may not realise that aside from the obvious question – what then happens to kids when parents won’t or can’t provide lunch – this neoliberal rhetoric of parental responsibility and lunchbox shaming also affects how children make sense of their circumstances. I heard kids blaming their parents for a failure of responsibility rather than a lack of income if they didn’t have lunch, and kids could be embarrassed that their parents were “not responsible” if they asked for a spare lunch. One girl would buy $1 worth of lollies at the dairy as her “lunch” so she could tell me her mum “always” provided her lunch.  

Free lunches don’t have to carry such shame and stigma, though. Fonterra’s Milk in Schools programme (which ended in 2020) was universal, and I watched classes handing the milk around a circle on the mat, drinking together peacefully while their teacher read them a story. They created their own rituals, like “milk ‘n cookies” on someone’s birthday or “banana milkshakes” when bananas were the fruit of the day. At first I declined the milk – it’s not something I would usually choose to drink – but I couldn’t resist the pleasure of being part of the group. The kids taught me the technique for folding the cartons for recycling, and the chant: “Drink it dry, fold it flat, send it back!” Children drank milk not only because it was provided, but because everyone had it, creating a shared social experience of togetherness where kids were nurtured and cared for.

Tūrama School children teach us that the food we give kids is not only functional but symbolic. Good quality lunches are important because they send the message that children are worth caring for properly. Appealing lunches are important because they make eating them socially acceptable. Universal lunches are important because they allow kids to socially create healthy eating habits and don’t mark some children as worth less.

Children’s perspectives might be mostly invisible to us, but they matter because children are the ones who will collectively determine the success of a programme in a given school. As we evaluate and develop Ka Ora, Ka Ako, we need to make sure that we don’t cut corners on any of these three things. We need to treat children as the valuable people they are, care for their dignity as well as their bodies, and make sure our school lunch programmes are good quality, appealing, and universally free.