It's been a big week at NZGeo. First the viral response to last week's newsletter about Ned the leftie snail—BBC, Washington Post, CNN, NBC; it's been wild. Then preparing the glittering finalists of our Photographer of the Year awards, which we also detail below. By all means, scroll down to check out those stories—but first, a newsy bit...

Among the proposed changes to NCEA is the axing of Outdoor Education from the senior curriculum subject list. Are these kids just pedalling around on mountain bikes and calling it school work, or is there more to it?

Sarah Belcher, the EONZ rep for Auckland, laughed when I put this question to her. “I don’t think the subject’s well understood,” she said. “In Outdoor Education you’re creating situations where students are exposed to risks in a controllable manner. The risk is real, and the decisions they make matter. Students nowadays are often not exposed to enough risk, they don’t have the chance to learn how to assess it.”

Outdoor Education will likely remain available as 'vocational pathway' for those wanting to pursue it as a career, but few schools will offer it, and the course will lose its academic rigour. Besides, she says, education is not just about literacy and numeracy, and carrying yourself in the modern world requires a wider set of skills.

“It’s not just teaching kids about how to handle themselves in the outdoors, these skills are also used in financial situations, in relationships, in employment conversations. For these students it’s about processing the infomation around them, and making clear and calculated decisions even if the siutuation is dynamic or stressful.

“It’s about building resilience, getting along with people you don’t necessarily like, and connecting to our environment. These are skills for life.”

I should disclose here that my daughter is in her final year of school, pursuing an academic pathway next year at Otago University, and is nonetheless doing Outdoor Education as an elective subject. She has learned to rock climb, to roll a kayak mid-stream in a whitewater rapid, and to cannonball down a hill on a mountain bike. The camps have been mid-winter fend-for-yourself affairs. It has been academically rigorous. Her OE classmates are her closest friends and the subject has done more for her confidence and sense of capability than the rest of the classes put together.

Could she have learned these things on weekends? Not in such a structured and comprehensive way—it would have been like learning maths on weekends.

My daughter is now preparing a submission to government. “This is insane and completely unfair,” she txt’d me. “OED is one of the best things that I’ve been able to experience and more people deserve to know that it’s being removed.”