Wider Teaching Of Maori Urged

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31588, 27 January 1968, Page 12

Wider Teaching Of Maori Urged

“I am sick and tired of hearing my people blamed for their educational and social shortcomings, their limitations highlighted, and their obvious strengths of being privileged New Zealanders in being bilingual and bicultural ignored,” Mr K. M. Dewes, a lecturer in Maori at Victoria University of Wellington, said yesterday.

Mr Dewes was speaking to the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science on the place of the Maori language in the education of Maoris. Even in predominantly or wholly Maori schools, Maori language as an optional subject was not taught as widely as it could be, he said. “Every day children are discriminated against (i. e., their privileged status as bilingual citizens treated as a social and educational handicap). Their lack of progress in English and other subjects is never recognised as being the fault of unskilled teachers of English.” With a few exceptions State schools headmasters had not implemented the recommen-

dations of the 1955 Committee on Maori Education and the 1962 Commission on Education. Generally the study of the Maori language was restricted to Maori children, and the teaching of it was confined to secondary schools. It would seem that the recommendations that efforts be made to foster Maori language teaching in schools with many Maori pupils would not be implemented so long as principals of most State schools and teachers’ colleges remained complacent about, indifferent to, and prejudiced against the Maori language. Mr Dewes said the number of State secondary schools teaching Maori had not increased very significantly during the last 20 years and no primary or intermediate school taught Maori as an optional or second language, al, though there must be at least 200 Maori primary school teachers and a fair number of pakeha teachers qualified to do it. Maori should be taught in as many State primary schools as possible, it was urged in a resolution passed by about 30 delegates who remained after a symposium on the question at the congress. It was also decided to ask that instruction in Maori langauge teaching be incorporated in teachers’ colleges.