Ways to Help

Te Ao Hou, December 1962, Page 48

Ways to Help Realising the importance of Maori education, the Commission devotes a whole chapter to it in this Report. It makes it clear that there is a very great effort needed now by all concerned with the education of our Maori children. There are so many of them who have the ability to do well at school but who, for a variety of reasons, are not successful. There are so many who, because they have not been able to get the most out of their education, must always stay in jobs that make use of only half their intelligence. The Commission makes twenty-three recommendations in connection with Maori education, all of which, it thinks, will help your children in one way or another. While the report deals with the problems of teaching Maori, of providing scholarships big enough to meet the cost of boarding-schools, of meeting the needs of the pre-school child, most attention will probably be focused on the suggestion that the Department of Education should aim at handing over all Maori schools to Education Board control within the next ten years. At first sight this looks as if it will be a most unpopular suggestion. We all know how proud many settlements are of their Maori schools and how strongly they have opposed this change in the past. What the report proposes, however, is going to give far more than it takes away and deserves careful thought on the part of all Maori parents. At the present time only one-child of the Maori children at primary schools attend the Maori schools which are administered by the Department of Education. The other two-thirds attend schools run by Education Boards, even though some of them have only Maori children on their rolls. The Commission proposes that all schools with more than a certain proportion of Maori children should be classed as ‘Maori Service’ schools, being given special assistance on a higher scale than Maori schools receive at present. These Maori Service schools would have extra money for library books, extra teachers to help children overcome reading difficulties and other specialists to guide the pupils in their school work and to advise parents how to help their children. This would apply to secondary schools as well as to primary.