What New Zealand Can Teach Us About Education

The other day I was on an email chain with two other US-based author/speakers who focus on connecting cognitive science and education (they were my two co-hosts for Season 3 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast). One mentioned he would be in New Zealand in January. I wrote back that I was in New Zealand now—what a coincidence! The other then wrote that he would be in New Zealand in a couple of weeks.

Why are so many of us flocking to New Zealand—which isn’t exactly a hop, skip, and a jump from the United States? Basically, because as far as I know, New Zealand currently has the only national government in the English-speaking world that has enthusiastically endorsed the idea that curriculum and instruction should be aligned with the findings of cognitive science.1 [Update, September 7, 2025: Since this post was first published, I’ve been alerted to some promising developments in Northern Ireland, which has undertaken an effort similar to New Zealand’s. See here, here, and here for government newsletters with more information.]

I was invited to New Zealand to speak at a conference organized by a nongovernmental organization that helps schools implement “structured literacy.” Decades ago, along with some other English-speaking countries—including the US, England, Australia, and Canada—New Zealand embraced the “whole language” approach to teaching reading. Beginning in the 1990s, that segued into the “balanced literacy” approach, in which most of today’s reading teachers in those countries were trained.

Both approaches share an aversion to systematic phonics instruction and encourage children to guess at words rather than sound them out. That aversion may be even more deeply rooted in New Zealand than in the other countries where these approaches to literacy instruction have been dominant. Marie Clay, a leading light of the whole-language movement whose ideas became highly influential in the US, was a Kiwi.

“Structured literacy” is the term some have adopted to refer to an approach that, in contrast to balanced literacy, grounds reading instruction in evidence from cognitive science that supports systematic instruction in phonics.2 As in the US, the primary emphasis of reading reform in New Zealand so far has been on that aspect of reading instruction. But unlike most of the discussion in the US, the conversation among high-level policymakers has expanded to include the evidence from cognitive