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If someone threatened to burn down your house but instead left an unsavoury on your lawn, you might well find yourself feeling grateful. You might even feel more empathy towards your assailant’s complaint. Read more

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to a group of 13-year-old South Island students on a college excursion to the capital. Their teacher had introduced them to me as specially “gifted and talented” but their main gift appeared to be an inclination towards state action. Read more

Tonight, and probably on my own in New Zealand, I am celebrating a geopolitical anniversary. On this 9th of November, 30 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Read more

Philosopher George Santayana famously said, “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” – unless it was too intense and bad for our mental health. Wait, no, that’s not right. Read more

Too many children pass NCEA without being functionally literate. Minister Hipkins committed, in his 2019 NCEA change package, to address this by raising the bar. Read more

For too long many New Zealanders have viewed low-decile schools as lower quality. And it is easy to see why. Read more

In his speech last week at the NZEI conference, Education Minister Hipkins reminded the audience of primary school teachers that he had scrapped national standards because he was listening, and because the standards were neither national nor standard. It was catchy rhetoric that, if we follow his logic, has implications for our national curriculum, too. Read more

Determining what works and what does not is important for any business developing better products and services. And keeping a close watch on quality control matters a lot too. Read more

Finding that water flows downhill is not all that surprising. But it can be vey much worth knowing how fast that water moves, and how badly wrong we can be if we assume the waters are still. Read more