"It is sometimes forgotten that New Zealand is a securely post-Enlightenment society..."

"It is sometimes forgotten that New Zealand, as a neo-European society, is a securely post-Enlightenment society... a very particular example of post-Enlightenment experimental practice…. The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment … [argued] that men were governed by interest if not reason and that those interests could be orchestrated for beneficent purposes….
    “[W] e still live in a world first codified then, a world seen as 'a unified and self-sufficient Nature, governed by orderly laws, and including man within itself as part of Nature'….
    “Such a view underwrote 'the autonomy and sovereignty of knowledge'…. Thereafter the world was to be located and constituted through knowledge….
    “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century economic and moral progress would be widely considered fruits of knowledge. The myth of the Garden of Eden, where knowledge brings the Fall, had been stood on its head.”

~ Erik Olssen, from his article 'Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment in Post-Enlightenment Experimental Practice' [NZJH (Vol. 31, No. 2, October 1997), pp 198-200]

"I begin with my conclusion: The 'public' school system is the most immoral and corrupt institution [in NZ] today, and it should be abolished."

"I begin with my conclusion: The 'public' school system is the most immoral and corrupt institution [in NZ] today, and it should be abolished. It should be abolished for the same reason that chattel slavery was ended in the 19th century: Although different in purpose and in magnitude of harm to its victims, public education, like slavery, is a form of involuntary servitude. The primary difference is that public schools force children to serve the interests of the state rather than those of an individual master.
    "These are—to be sure—radical claims, but they are true, and the abolition of public schools is an idea whose time has come. It is time for [all of us] to reexamine—radically and comprehensively—the nature and purpose of their disastrously failing public school system, and to launch a new abolitionist movement, a movement to liberate [more than three-quarters-of-a-million] children and their parents from this form of bondage.1"

~ C Bradley Thompson, from his post 'The New Abolitionism: Why Education Emancipation is the Moral Imperative of Our Time'

Note 1. On the nineteenth-century antislavery abolitionists, see C. Bradley Thompson, ed., Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2003)

[Hat tip Louise Lamontagne. Contextualised to NZ.] 

.

"New Zealand was born free without having to become so"

 

 "Self-government and the rule of law came to New Zealand from above. These great principles were ordained by imperial authority. The result, to paraphrase Tocqueville, was that New Zealand was born free without having to become so. It never had to fight for self-government, or win its rights by armed struggle."

~ David Hackett Fisher, from his book Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States