This thesis examines history teaching in New Zealand primary schools between 1900 and 1940, situating the discussion within an intertwined framework of the early twentieth-century New Education movement, and the history of Pakeha settler-colonialism. In particular, it draws attention to the ways in which the pedagogical aims of the New Education intersected with the settler goal of ‘indigenisation’: a process whereby native-born settlers in colonised lands seek to become ‘indigenous’, either by denying the presence of the genuine indigenes, or by appropriating aspects of their culture. Each chapter explores a particular set of pedagogical ideas associated with the New Education and relates it back to the broader context and ideology of settler-colonialism. It examines in turn the overarching goals of the New Education of ‘educating citizens’, within which twentieth-century educationalists sought to mobilise biography and local history to cultivate a ‘love of country’ in primary school pupils, exploring the centrality of the ‘local’ to the experience-based pedagogy of the New Education. Next, it argues that the tendency of textbook histories to depict governments – past and present – in an overwhelmingly positive light, served important ongoing colonising functions. Next it examines the influence of the Victorian ideal of ‘character’ in textbooks, particularly during the first two decades of the twentieth century, through a pedagogy centred upon the assumption that the lives of past individuals or groups could be instructive for present generations. / By the 1920s and 1930s, the normative models of behaviour represented by character had come under challenge by the more flexible notion of ‘personality’ and its associated educational aims of expression, creativity and self-realisation, aims that emerged most clearly in relation to the use of activity-based methods to teach history. The juxtaposition of textbooks and activity-based classroom methodologies in the primary school classrooms of the 1920s and 1930s brought to light some of the broader tensions which existed within the settler-colonial ideology of Pakeha New Zealanders. The longer-term impact was a generation for whom the nineteenth-century British intrusion into Maori lands and cultures from which Pakeha New Zealanders massively profited was normalised.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/269961 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Patrick, Rachel |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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