Are there Differing Needs?

Te Ao Hou, December 1963, Page 13

Are there Differing Needs? Should we then draw a distinction between Maori and white children and speak of them as having differing needs? The existence of Maori schools in the country points to such a difference. The N.Z. Year Book says of the schools run by the Education Department … ‘the schools are not completely English in outlook as Maori arts, crafts, songs, legends and history are taught … methods of teaching are practical and objectives closely related to the special needs of the Maori people’. These special needs appear to be cleanliness and craftsmanship, a typically puritan pair, for the Year Book goes on … ‘In many Maori schools woodwork rooms, cookery rooms, model cottages, baths, hot and cold showers and laundries are supplied. Health education is featured in every Maori school.’ But, and here is a problem, only 26.6% of Maori pupils are educated in Departmentally run schools, while 67% attend schools run by Education Boards. These generally lack the

special equipment provided by the Department, or else they share it with other schools. As far as curricula are concerned Maori schools use the same syllabus as Board Schools, with the exceptions noted above. We might well ask then whether Maori children are getting a square deal educationally. Is there a case to be made out for establishing Maori schools in the city, or should it be that all primary schools should have the amenities available in Maori schools, and that methods of teaching should be ‘practical and objective’, whatever that may mean. I think the answer is fairly clear cut. Firstly, arguments for separation for any reason, good or ill, are completely out of fashion. Secondly, it is part of the Government's policy of integration, of which I shall have something to say shortly, to transfer control of the Maori schools to the Education Boards. The fact remains that there still appears to be a belief that Maori children have needs which white children don't have. When it speaks of the teaching of myths, games and traditions, the Education Department is probably on safe enough ground; when it speaks of health, education, manual training and the like, I suspect that there is an overtone of nineteenth century paternalism which fails to express clearly the nature of the special needs. Whatever the case it is certain that if these are amenities provided in the Department's schools but not in the Board's schools, then most Maori children don't get the benefit of them anyway. We might ask then just what differences exist between the main ethnic groups by the time children leave primary school. When, in 1958, I was teaching at an inner city school, the most important difference was in the expectations of the children. In general the Maori children in Form II expected to make their own choice of post primary course with little assistance from their parents. Other children were receiving more parental direction. In 1956–58 most of the Maori children leaving Form II at that particular school were a year or more older than the white children. Many of them reached the age of 15 in their third form year. They mostly left school then, apparently by their own choice, so that they gained little or no advantage from their post primary schooling. Now I don't know how widespread this situation was but I suspect that it was and still is the case in all the inner schools. How far this condition was the result of being a Maori, I don't know, nor am I prepared to guess. Clearly at that time there was a failure of communication between the school and the parents, particularly the Maori parents. Clearly there was a difference in values between the white and Maori parents, but both differed widely, in what they valued from the ‘middle-class’ teachers who had charge of their children. The inner city schools, remember, had the children of half the Maori immigrants in Auckland and possibly many more. If there was a case for making special schools, how much greater is the case for adequate social science research into the whole field of urbanization. Having glanced briefly at the background of Maori primary education I now want to turn to the field of educational principles. Many of us tend to think of schools as being analagous to factories; they work on the children, their raw material, and send them off after so many years crated and labelled first grade, second grade and so on for further processing. This is a particularly easy kind of analogy to make. An evaluation in terms of the amount a child knows is a similarly easy and misleading way of looking at the effectiveness of schools. Let me make a primary distinction between education and schooling. The effectiveness of schooling can be measured in terms of the amount of knowledge gained by a particular child, the number of exams passed, marks gained and so on, or so the theory runs. There are educationalists who think otherwise, that these ‘quantity’ measures may not in fact be of much use.