30/08/2026
Jean Piaget said this in 1988.
It sits in almost direct opposition to the direction education in Aotearoa is currently heading; back toward older models, older frameworks, older definitions of what success looks like, older ways of measuring whether a child has learned anything worth measuring.
But the world our tamariki are growing into does not need them to repeat what previous generations have done. It needs them to do things that have never been done before. To solve problems that do not yet have solutions. To navigate complexity, uncertainty, and change with the kind of creative, flexible, genuinely curious intelligence that a standardised system was never designed to produce.
Piaget spent his life studying how children actually think — how they construct understanding through experience, through play, through the active, hands-on process of encountering the world and making meaning from it. His research was not ambiguous. Children are not passive recipients of knowledge. They are builders of it. And they build it best when they are given the conditions, the freedom, and the genuine respect to do so in their own way.
A curriculum that asks every tamaiti to repeat the same content, in the same format, toward the same predetermined outcome is not preparing them to do new things. It is preparing them to do old things reliably. And in a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence, economic disruption, and challenges no previous generation has faced in quite this form — reliable repetition is not enough.
Our tamariki deserve an education built for the world they are actually going to live in. Not the one that was convenient to measure.
What new thing do you hope the tamariki in your care will go on to do? Tell us below. 👇
