Te Kohanga gives infants head start

Press, 26 February 1980, Page 17

Te Kohanga gives infants head start

Nga Tapuwae College and the private Maori schools, indeed most secondary schools that have Maori pupils, are conducting rescue jobs. By the time children are old enough to enter the high schools their futures', are pretty much determined, and only big efforts —- such as those of the -,private schools ■ — can change their course. Although grateful. for extra assistance because of the type of school she runs, Mrs Anne Gluckman, Nga Tapuwae’s principal, would like to see much more effort made further down the line, in the primary and pre-schools. One serious attempt at

“doing something further down the line” has been made. Unfortunately, like the private schools, its founders have discovered that success does not mean very much when the time comes for the experiment to be extended and large . amounts of money spent. Dr Jane Ritchie, a teacher at the University of- Waikato, and Nancy Gerrand, an experienced primary school teacher, began Te Kohanga (the nest) pre-school in 1974. .Children from 36 families took part in the Te Kohanga Project in the two years it ran, .15 in the first vear and 10 in the second. All were Maori

and none would have had pre-school education otherwise.

Jane Ritchie’s aim was “to do something that made a difference.” Maori children attend pre-schools in much the same proportions as Pakeha children. Why was there a need for a special one? ■ V

". To Jane Ritchie the existing pre-schools had not made much of a. dent in the miserable achievements, as a whole, of Maori pupils-in secondary schools.

One of the problems, perhaps the main one, says Jane Ritchie, was that pre-schools assume their students know cer-

tain things. Add to that a high proportion of working mothers and families without transport — no guarantee that attendance at pre-school will be regular.

Much of the teaching at pre-schools is based on “readiness” and. learning proceeds at the pace the child dictates. The children tend to retain both their advantages and disadvantages unless special steps are taken. One of the first pupils at Te Kohanga was a girl, who, although she lived across the road from a farm, had no words in her vocabulary for sheep or cows. No-one in her family had told her.

Another knew what a dog was — unfortunately she gave all four legged animals the same name. Others, although • “ they knew the objects, had no names for com, peas, pears or peaches. Body parts were another problem — toes, feet, fingers were unfamiliar names to some of the children.

Connections, such as wool from sheep or eggs from hens, are difficult to make without the words to think with. Many of the children at Te Kohanga, all four-year-olds, could not do so. Mos't of them had ■ no names for colours, a lack that makes the main modern aid for arithmetic teaching — cuisinaire blocks — of .little use. For many children these things are learned before any kind of formal education begins. Conversations with parents, bedtime stories, and reading books are the means by which this is ‘achieved.

Reading , a book is a skill in itself — left to right, front", page, back page ; — automatically acquired. if children make contact with them" at the earliest stages ' When the children at Te Kohanga began their , term, the- plentiful supply of books was left, untouched, and would have remained so, in favour of the jigsaws, dolls and other toys. A reading programme with constant testing and more importantly, tons. of encouragement, helped change that. As enthusiasm and increased, the children were given books to take home and gradually parents and their other children were drawn into the orbit at the school.

Te Kohanga also had a van that Jane Ritchie or Nancy Gerrand drove to pick up the children and take them home. It was essential . equipment . to ensure that the children .made* it .to the school regularly; working moth-

ers and families . without cars would have made it impossible otherwise. The van had two other advantages. Most of the children knew little of Hamilton and outings in the van changed that. Contact with parents, many of whom were a little intimidated at first, was almost daily, and gradually the trust grew, When Te Kohanga started, an objection was made to the regimented (compared with other preschools) programme and to the selection of only Maori children for the school.

The children, after some time at the school, reacted quite differently. “There was a fantastic attendance rate,” said Jane Ritchie. Before one bus Trip, there was a cry from the class: „ “Couldn’t we have a lesson before we go.”

The first students from Te Kohanga have been at primary school’ for five years now and the first signs Of their progress are encouraging. Teachers have noticed a big difference in their performance compared with other children from similar backgrounds.

The children did better on IQ tests than other Maori children, both with and without pre-school education. At primary school, as a group, they have completed basic reading and arithmetic courses faster. . . The children from T§

Kohanga, in Jane Ritchie’s words, have a chance to be equal and, as the school is still operating, perhaps 30 a year will continue to have that same “advantage.” The lessons of Te Kohanga, if official acknowledgement is. anything to go by, have once again in Jane Ritchie’s words —- “sunk like a stone.”

Informally, the school has had quite an impact. Other teachers, recognising the value of the work done there, have come to watch and borrow. The reading programme has been modified and is howused in some South Auckland primary schools. When Jane Ritchie published a book about the school, the Director General of Education (Mr Bill Renwick) wrote a foreword. Other than that, the department has done little else to see the lessons of Te Kohanga applied elsewhere.

Mr Neil Leckie, director of the early childhood education division of the department, disagrees, and argues that Te Kohanga has been an example for other schools, testing techniques which they can adapt for their own purposes. There is no doubt that Te Kohanga has had the effect Mr Leckie describes, but will it be enough?

After the first two years the school was taken over by the local .education board and the school was opened to. other than

Maori children. However, in the area the school serves, one quarter of Hamilton city, there are not many normal Pakeha children with the same remedial needs, and the school retains an all predominantly Maori roll. Even then, it does not cope with the demand. The present head teacher, Marie Drury, is amazed at the demand for the programme and the trust which parents place in the teachers there. The school has been recognised as one which copes with the needs of the Maori Community. Certainly the cost of establishing similar schools elsewhere would be high. The low teacher-pupil ratio, the van (which those who have worked at Te Kohanga regard as essential), all cost money — more than is being spent at present. The demands on teachers are also high. Before teaching can begin, there are the health problems to deal with; the. teacher must be . something of a nurse as well. At Te Kohanga the midday meal, often the best meal the children will have all day, also needs preparing and the daily routine of piloting the school’s van through the suburbs to pick up the children who otherwise could not attend is another duty which those who work there cannot escape.

Why cannot the parents by some sort of self-help arrange try to accomplish the same 1 thing either at home, by themselves, or band together in a group?

It has been tried. In the last 15 years a pre-school movement, developed and staffed by Maori parents, has grown — and withered, for a variety of reasons. Facilities were poor (a parent’s garage), the teachers had little or no training, and the objectives of the schools were nowhere near as closely thought out as at Te Kohanga, nor were they _as often attained. Finding enough-non-working mothers to staff the schools was also a problem. Most of the problems the Maori parents faced were of the • kind the resources of the State can be used to solve with comparative ease. The question is: would the effort, and expense, be worth it? Jane Ritchie sums up the experiment at Te Kohanga: . “Potentially the children we took in were at risk of becoming nonreaders, non-leamers, teacher’s nightmares. We could not transform the less able into geniuses, but .we could turn them into learners — which is. all that any teacher could reasonably expect.”