Mike's Minute: Erica Stanford was right, the backlash is disgusting

I tell you what I like about all the educators whinging away over the curriculum redo and the Treaty treatment: they are at least standing their ground. They are having their say and that is no bad thing. 

It struck me yesterday when I read Roger Gray's speech, Roger Gray of Auckland Port. When he talked of “No Zealand”, of the naysayers, of the cruise people in Miami and their view of NZ not wanting a cruise industry. Of Jacinda Ardern calling them Petrie dishes.  

Where were the Roger Grays when she was actually in charge and wrecking the place? 

The educators are bold enough to tell the current government they don’t like what's going on, but where was the business community when their companies were being shafted? 

In the prizes for gonads and backbone, the educators win hands down. 

Not that they are right of course, and in that is the gargantuan irony. The educators complain about rules and change and yet are irrefutably on the wrong side of history, given the education outcomes produced in this country. 

And yet business was nowhere to be seen or heard, despite the fact we all knew the country was being strangled by power freaks, and they would eventually be proved right. 

But as much as I defend an educator's right to speak up, there is something deeply insidious about the way educators, particularly unions, operate. 

The list, the signatories of principals who have signed this protest to the Education Minister over the curriculum change is driven by, the Education Minister told us, unions. 

And it’s a standover tactic. It’s an intimidatory play. You are bullied and harried and cajoled into signing, hence she claims, you then ring her up and tell her you signed reluctantly. 

That sadly, says something about a principal that acts out of fear – sort of like businesses hating the decisions but saying nothing. 

Fear is no way to live, but for some I get it: life is short, who needs the grief? 

But if that is the mentality in education, if that is the modus operandi of unions, what sort of world are our kids entering into? What sort of brain washing, whether overt or subliminal, do our kids get subjected to?  

The Minster, in telling us all this on Tuesday, said it is disgusting – anyone want to disagree? 

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