ZORAN RAKOVIC: The Many Are Watching While the Few Are Being Worshipped: A Classroom Coup in New Zealand

NZ’s education system risks collapse as identity politics replaces shared learning. When schools elevate the few, the many silently walk away.

Imagine you're a parent. You send your kid to school expecting them to learn the basics—reading, writing, arithmetic, a bit of Newton, a sprinkle of Shakespeare. But instead, they come home knowing how to recite their pepeha, chant their whakapapa, and confidently accuse Captain Cook of genocide, but they can't tell you where Rome is on a map or explain the difference between a metaphor and a simile. You ask them what they're learning in science and they say, "Matariki stories." Now, let's not be misunderstood—there's nothing wrong with celebrating Matariki, just as there's nothing wrong with celebrating Diwali or Bastille Day. But when an entire education system pivots toward the ideological worship of a singular identity framework, we are no longer educating. We are catechizing.

This is not a conspiracy. This is not some right-wing fever dream. This is the inevitable result of a system that has become drunk on its own moral virtue. And as Christopher Lasch warned in The Revolt of the Elites, when elites abandon the idea of a shared national culture and embrace only the politics of recognition, the people left behind don’t become more enlightened—they become disillusioned. The children of plumbers and nurses are now being treated as the guilty offspring of an unnamed colonial machine, expected to atone for sins they did not commit.

There’s a line by Jürgen Habermas that keeps ringing in my ears: “Legitimacy must be earned through participation.” But in today’s New Zealand schools, participation only counts if it aligns with an approved set of beliefs. Speak too loudly about universal values, about the Enlightenment, about the need to master global literacy or mathematics, and you are accused of erasing indigenous knowledge. We’ve flipped the Foucauldian switch: what was once marginal is now authoritative, and dissent is framed as oppression. Yes, power operates through knowledge—but as Michel Foucault warned, when knowledge becomes a regime, it’s no less dominating just because it carries the perfume of decolonisation.

The irony, of course, is suffocating. The very people who once argued for “critical thinking” have turned schools into echo chambers where any thought that does not bow before the altar of bicultural sanctity is deemed heretical. This is how you create populist backlash, my friends. This is how you ferment a culture war—not by racism, not by hate, but by silencing debate and elevating identity over competence.

René Girard, the philosopher of desire, warned us that human conflict is not born from difference, but from imitation. We want what the other has. We desire recognition. And when the educational system explicitly signals that one culture is the sacred source of knowledge and mana, while others are mere guests in the room—well, the other children begin to want that status. Or worse, they resent it. You think you're educating for justice, but you are feeding the very resentment that justice was supposed to extinguish.

Let’s pause here and take a quick trip to Karl Marx. No, not the bumper-sticker Marx of Soviet breadlines, but the Marx who wrote in The German Ideology that ideology becomes dangerous when it hides its power behind morality. In New Zealand today, our education system presents itself as moral, healing, inclusive. In reality, it has become an engine of exclusion: of parents who question the doctrine, of students who do not identify with the sanctioned identity, of teachers who resist the compulsory indoctrination seminars dressed up as "professional development."

Once a teacher whispered over a coffee that her Year 7 class was being told to “centre the Treaty” in every assignment. Even maths, she said with a nervous laugh. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. This is the moment when Rousseau's warning in The Social Contract strikes with eerie accuracy: “The moment a faction takes control of the general will, it ceases to represent the people.” When a curriculum becomes a faction, we are no longer a democracy. We are an ideological training camp with national funding.

There’s a beautiful, terrifying moment in Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism where she says that the most dangerous moment in a society is not when people believe in lies, but when they no longer believe anything at all. That’s what happens when public education loses its universal credibility. If everything becomes a narrative, then nothing is truth. If colonisation becomes the framing device for all knowledge, then Newton becomes an oppressor, Euclid a thief, and Darwin a white supremacist. The very intellectual tools that once empowered humanity to solve disease, build cities, land on the moon—they become suspect. And in their place, we are told to deconstruct everything and reconstruct nothing.

Francis Fukuyama warned in Identity that democracies fracture when we substitute universal values with dignity politics. We are no longer trying to lift everyone, but to consecrate certain groups. Dignity is no longer a shared inheritance—it is a badge to be earned by historical suffering. The worst part is, this is being done in the name of “equity”. But what kind of equity is it when a struggling white boy in rural Canterbury is told he’s privileged, while a Māori child in Auckland gets resources not because they’re poor, but because of whakapapa?

This is not how you build cohesion. This is how you inflame the sleeping dragon of resentment.

Let me channel Robert Putnam for a second, from Bowling Alone. He argued that social capital—the trust and networks that hold communities together—collapses when people feel unmoored from one another. If your kid’s schooling feels radically different from what you grew up with, if you can’t help with their homework because it’s laced with political code, if the values being taught at school are at odds with your family life—then of course you withdraw. You disengage. And slowly, school becomes not a civic institution, but a symbolic battlefield.

Even John Gray—no populist—points out that liberal institutions die when they mistake moral crusading for governance. A school is not a pulpit. It is not a truth commission. It is a place where facts must be taught, skills acquired, minds sharpened. But try telling that to a bureaucrat who has just discovered the term "mātauranga" and now wants to reframe physics as a colonising force. These are the useful idiots of our time—not out of malice, but out of a desperate desire to be seen as on the right side of history.

But history will judge this moment differently. When the pendulum swings back—and it always does—people will look back at this educational madness and ask: how did we let our schools become temples to tribal myth? How did we allow politics to swallow pedagogy?

Antonio Gramsci saw it coming. He said: “Every revolution has been preceded by an intense work of cultural penetration.” What we are witnessing in New Zealand is not merely reform. It is a slow-motion revolution—a Gramscian crawl through the institutions—where even the meaning of learning is up for negotiation. In a decent society, Māori language and culture should be cherished, absolutely. But cherished alongside, not above. In harmony, not in hegemony.

Because here is the hard truth: the more you elevate the few, the more you risk alienating the many. That’s not a racist claim, it’s a sociological one. Arendt, Habermas, Girard, even Marx—they all understood that systems that treat equality as a game of symbolic compensation rather than structural fairness end up producing disaffection, not progress.

And what happens then? Populism. Cynicism. Charter schools. Parents quietly pulling their children out of public education. Donors disappearing. Teachers burning out. A thousand silent exits from a system that no longer feels like it belongs to all of us.

The danger is not that we have a Treaty-based education system. The danger is that we have only that, and that anyone who questions it is told to sit down, shut up, and check their privilege. This is not education. It is ritual theatre with bureaucratic scripts. It is the illusion of knowledge. And as Socrates warned, the illusion of knowledge is worse than ignorance.

So, if you care about public education—if you care about New Zealand as a society where everyone gets a fair go—then stop whispering your concerns at kitchen tables and start speaking plainly. Say it: all kids deserve excellence. All cultures matter. History is complex. Science is not a coloniser. And identity should not determine what a child learns.

If we don’t do this now, we will look back in twenty years and wonder how the most inclusive generation became the most fractured. How an education system built to uplift the few ended up abandoning the many. And how, in the name of justice, we quietly sacrificed the very idea of a shared future.

The classroom is the new frontline. And right now, the many are watching while the few are being worshipped.

Eventually, they will walk away.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand. His substack is HERE