I agree that a goal of education is to better equip students for the future but I would also argue that there is not one primary goal. Another equally important goal of education is to provide a wide range of knowledge on a broad range of topics. If we were talking about how we should better fund both of these ideas, I think there should be a wide range of changes within the education taught and the system that provides the education. For example, having a compulsory second language taught with emphasis on them being on the more universally applicable languages like you stated. But also a com… Read morepulsory Te Reo Māori class taught, at least until intermediate years. Not just the language but the history and the culture, for reasons I have stated earlier. I don’t think that we should have one or the other, but both and maybe in different ways. I agree that when something is forced upon one, resentment can often emerge. There is already a lot of prejudice within Māori language and culture so I can also see how this could pose as an issue. Although if the government, the representatives of NZ, don’t show there unwavering support for the learning of Te Reo, by pushing it or atleast heavily advocating it, especially because it was once shunned, who’s to say that the community would think to think any differently? If you don’t show you care, why should people care I guess is what I’m trying to say there. I would also like to add language plays a very important role in society. It influences our cultural societies and our social realities. Latin is also a dead language, but is offered in many places and is rather popular and sometimes even pushed. Whilst I understand it is the base of the English language, that’s it’s importance. Just like Te Reo Māori has its own importance, it’s the base of New Zealand.
I also agree that there should be a focus in change of how content is taught. I don’t think the problem is that it is disengaging, I for one very much enjoyed learning some of these topics. Nor do I find that we could create a way for it to be more applicable for life skills in all honesty. When you reach year 9-11 which if I can remember math is still compulsory (it’s also school dependent, the higher the year level that a certain subject is compulsory, the more complex and therefore effectively more useless to a wider group the content becomes), you branch off into a lot more complex topics of a big variety. You are learning some I do agree, useful content, that is actually applicable and can be used in life such as data analysis. Yet again the content you learn in comparison to the content you use daily or even yearly, is still a very skewed ratio. Making it more applicable or relevant would be to teach a very select area of maths, or to a very select group of people. This is obviously hard to do and perhaps even more boring and would create even further resentment to the subject. And often after the compulsory nature of maths is up, which is a very unliked subject across the world, people gain their numeracy credits off of business studies or accounting etc, subjects that provide context to math but are very much not heavily math related (not including accounting). I would also like to add that I completed Highschool with IB and not NCEA so my knowledge is not as up to par. Within saying that, I think IB subjects and teaching requirements is something that should be more closely looked at as it provides great balance with almost all of it being pretty applicable.
