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In this episode, Michael talks with Dame Elizabeth Rata about her documentary lecture series on the history of education in New Zealand.

They discuss the 19th-century origins of free, compulsory and secular schooling, why Māori leaders pushed for village schools taught in English and Rata's argument that sociocultural knowledge has displaced subject knowledge in New Zealand classrooms.

The New Zealand Initiative · How New Zealand built its education system on classical liberal values Read more

In this episode, Michael talks to Kevin Donnelly, an Australian educator and author who co-chaired the review of Australia's national curriculum. They discuss why schools across the Anglosphere turned away from knowledge-rich teaching in the 1970s and 1980s. Read more

In this episode, Michael talks with Oliver Hartwich, Executive Director of the New Zealand Initiative, about two new reports, New Zealand by Comparison and New Zealand by Numbers, which chart how New Zealand measures up against 28 other countries and how it has changed over recent decades. They discuss why a country that attracts migrants from around the world keeps losing so many of its own people, how Australia matches New Zealand on almost everything but the economy, the Eastern European economies closing in, and wellbeing rankings that still sit near the top of the world but are slipping. Read more

Wellington (Wednesday, 22 July 2026) – Two weeks ago, New Zealand by Numbers asked whether New Zealand was improving. A new report from The New Zealand Initiative asks a harder question: is it keeping up? Read more