When students across New Zealand say they are not learning anything at school, we should listen. 

After nearly six months speaking with New Zealand’s schools and universities, I have witnessed firsthand how this nation has become the unwitting laboratory for one of education's most destructive experiments.   

Over the past fifty years, New Zealand has plummeted from the top tier toward the bottom of industrialised world’s rankings. The culprit is not lack of funding or teacher dedication. It is 20th century educational ideology that neuroscience has revealed to be fundamentally flawed.  

Student-centred approaches dominating New Zealand schools sound appealing: let students discover knowledge naturally and minimise memorisation in favour of poorly defined “critical thinking skills.”   

But brain science reveals a harsh truth - these methods systematically undermine learning. It is just too hard to recognise mathematical patterns or develop the fluency for higher-order thinking if you do not know your times tables.  

Education schools have become echo chambers, training teachers in outmoded methods that violate everything neuroscience reveals about memory, learning, and skill development.   

These institutions resist change. Too many careers and reputations are built on failed theories. 

But students need foundational knowledge stored in long-term memory to think critically. They need explicit instruction for complex academic content. They need practice to develop procedural fluency.  

Disruption offers opportunity. New Zealand could pioneer new schools of education deliberately developed outside traditional education schools, freed from the failed orthodoxy.   

These new schools could create new, "trilingual educators" — teachers fluent in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and evidence-based pedagogy. These new teachers could provide fresh blood to support the lonely, talented teachers who come up after my talks, cheering the clarion call from neuroscience supporting approaches they knew all along to be best for students.  

As Briar Lipson notes in New Zealand’s Education Delusion, in the year 2000, out of 32 countries, New Zealand’s students proudly ranked 3rd in mathematics on the PISA test for International Student Achievement. By 2018, they had declined to 19th—losing the equivalent of nearly a year and a half’s worth of schooling.  

But a turnaround is possible.   

When Taiwan experimented with mathematics teaching methods like New Zealand’s current methods in the 1990s, their math scores plummeted. When they moved away from those approaches, mathematics performance quickly improved.  

The choice is stark: continue the decline under educational theories that neuroscience has invalidated, or pioneer the future of evidence-based teaching. New Zealand's students — and global reputation — hang in the balance.