Posts Tagged ‘Asia NZ Foundation’
Asia. Eventually our hearts and minds will follow the money. Oh, and teachers too
Our future lies with Asia, right.
BigCake thinks a lot of Kiwis say this, without really believing it’s true.
And consequently they don’t do anything much about it. A case in point are our secondary schools.
An Asia New Zealand Foundation survey of the heads of departments in New Zealand secondary schools shows a sometimes half-hearted approach to including Asian subject matter.
Meanwhile Asia is not just our future, it’s already a hell of a lot our economic present.
In 2008 – 09 our exports to the rest of the world dived, but they would’ve looked worse if it wasn‘t for China (exports up 43.2% to $3.63 billion), Singapore (up 27.5% to $1.1 billion) and Hong Kong (up 13.4% to $794 million). India chipped in with a solid increase as well.
Exports to our two leading export destinations, Australia and the US were down 8.6 and 9.8% percent respectively.
Australia will come back, but our export stats tell a story of the Asianisation of our economic ties.
Only four of our top 10 trading partners now come from the ‘West’.
Eventually our hearts and minds will follow the money.
Not that you’d notice this right now in some of our secondary school curricula, but this probably just reflects the current limited headspace most New Zealanders assign to Asia.
The Asia New Zealand Foundation survey found:
• Just one-third of heads of departments have included Asia specific topics or projects in their programmes in the past two years and this teaching is concentrated primarily within subjects that can be viewed as the ‘traditional home’ for Asia-related content: geography, history and to some extent social studies.
• Just one-quarter of heads of departments say they include these more than once each year.
On the good side:
• The majority of larger schools teach Asian languages. Small schools, however, are much less likely to do so. Almost three-quarters of surveyed schools with 50 to 499 students do not teach any Asian languages.
• 97% of schools have some kind of link or relationship with Asia. The majority of schools have had visitors to their schools from Asia and enroll international fee-paying students from Asia.
• Nearly two-thirds of schools employ Asian staff members and 59 percent have sister relationships with Asian schools or cities.
The survey report says that according to heads of departments, the main barriers to including more Asian content are availability of professional development, student subject choice and availability of resources.
The report concludes: “As many teachers focus on the assessment criteria provided by NCEA achievement standards as guidelines for curriculum development, there is a strong need for achievement standards in all relevant subject areas to include a focus on Asia-related content. This would provide significant influence in motivating heads of departments and teachers to include Asia-related content in their teaching…”
But as Colin James indicated in The Dominion Post, the Government still sees choice as king in our education system.
There’ll be no centralised drive to get more Asian studies into our schools.
Parent and pupil demand will have to drive change.
This is the slow boat. The majority of Kiwis haven’t yet ‘got’ the fact that teaching mandarin is more important than teaching French, that Japan’s history is more relevant than Italy’s and the Mekong River is more interesting than the Rhine.
While this remains the case, and the Government won’t take a lead, some of our opportunities in Asia are going to go to waste, though BigCake understands businesses may step into this education breach.
Cleaning up with cleantech
In the Dominion Post, Phillip Mills, executive director Les Mills International, talks up the prospects of New Zealand’s clean technology sector.
Not sure where and when the head of the purveyor of the “world’s best group fitness formulas” got converted to cleantech, but he’s right about the opportunity such technologies represent for New Zealand.
He sees the sector as “an entirely new economic engine to power us into the future.
“This isn’t just another short-lived green fad. It’s commonsense capitalism that benefits us all.
“Cleantech is an area in which New Zealand has many comparative advantages – if we move fast enough.”
Mills believes New Zealand agriculture and renewable energy cleantech businesses have an opportunity to “do a Denmark”. The Scandinavian country championed wind energy and now supplies more than half the world’s wind turbines.
But there are challenges for New Zealand cleantech companies even in dirty countries like China which are spending a lot of money on the problem. I recently wrote a piece for the Asia New Zealand Foundation on this:
“Massive official funding of environmental projects in China presents huge opportunities for New Zealand clean-tech companies on the one hand and significant challenges in realising them on the other.
“The financial risks also are in some ways even greater than for companies exporting more traditional goods and services, because of the long lead-times before investments generate revenue. This has not, however, deterred a small band of trailblazing New Zealand companies from taking up the challenge.
But… “As at the end of 2009, some of these projects had only generated costs of the six figure variety…”
We haven’t always been very good at leveraging our competitive advantages into worthwhile international commercial enterprises (talking billion dollar businesses here, so wine’s one honourable exception).
Maybe this time.
One opportunity is through the Domestic Centre for Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research and in the Global Research Alliance to lead the world on reducing agricultural greenhouse emissions.
Time to leverage all that sh*t.