Rosemary McLeod: Time to stand in the way

The education system did me proud when I learned New Zealand history - briefly - at primary school. It never bothered again. British history was much more important but there were always Weet-Bix cards to collect, which told you all you'd ever need to know about the national story.

We learned how lucky Maori were that we brought them Christianity, and that we won the Land Wars, which were called the Maori Wars. Maori seemed to have been unaware of their good fortune, but any simmering resentments were tidied away neatly with memorials erected to Pakeha soldiers who fought, and the "friendly" natives who joined our side. Since then, there's been the odd spot of bother, we can't think why. I'm pleased to see that the Ministry of Education is holding fast to that line, because we should be protected at all costs from the embarrassment of history. Knowledge can only confuse. Look what happened to New Plymouth's mayor, Andrew Judd, who took the time to read a history book, learn that there was another side to the story, and realise he'd been unconsciously racist, as many of us are, all his life. He's been reviled and spat on by upright citizens who have better things to do than read, and has no intention of standing again.

What makes his case especially interesting is that Taranaki saw some of the most vicious encounters and land confiscations in our history, at Parihaka and Waitara in particular. But the Education Ministry is right: no need for local students to have to bother with all that, especially where there is such a large Maori population in Taranaki. Uppity we do not need.

"Such a change [making learning about the Land Wars compulsory] would erode the autonomy of school boards to make their own programmes," the ministry has decided, in response to a petition. Ignorance of the past, then, is a question of the freedom of the individual.

Secretary for Education Peter Hughes advised that requiring schools to teach a specific subject would be contrary to the "spirit and underlying principles of the curriculum." So schools that prefer to ignore embarrassing history are doing just fine.

Intervention, Hughes went on, would be "likely to result in significant, negative, systemic consequences" for schools. I take this as meaning Pakeha students and their vocal parents might resent being told un-sanitised truths about our national story, and Maori students would be in grave danger of getting all radical on us. The ministry has produced 1500 Maori History resource booklets for our 2500 integrated schools. That should be plenty.

History, as they famously say, is told by the winners. We keep that tradition alive here, and at the same time rewrite other history to suit the fashionable sentiment of the times. Thus one of my kids was taught at primary school that in World War II we had been mean to the peace-loving Japanese, and should be ashamed.

That strain of apologist thinking is alive in America, too, where old soldiers are worried that President Barack Obama, who is about to visit Japan, could go so far as to apologise for America dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hastening the end of the Pacific War. War, unless it's our own lovely Land Wars, is always ugly and vicious, and neither side ever emerges untarnished, but the old soldiers are right to remind the world of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour that catapulted America into the war, and the savagery of the Pacific War. My generation remembers it because we knew older people who fought in it, but by the time we disappear New Zealand children could well believe something quite novel.

Politics - history - will always run through everything, whatever bureaucrats and school boards may say about it. This week, for example, a Ukrainian woman won the Eurovision Song Contest with a dramatic song, 1944, about the deportation of ethnic Tatars, including her own grandmother, from Crimea by Josef Stalin in World War II. He accused them of sympathising with Hitler, and as we know, Ukraine and Russia have their little tiffs today.

Left-wing people I knew as a teenager swore that any negative reports about Russia and China that followed their revolutions were a right-wing conspiracy to besmirch Marxist heavens. Decades later we know about disastrous famines, agricultural and environmental nightmares, and mass persecutions in those countries because the truth will come out regardless of whoever and whatever stands in its way. What a scary thought. We do right to stand in its way.

- Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.

- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz