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Te Ao Hou, March 1968, Page 43

continued from page 27 made by the education committee which prepared the report, that ‘a change of administrative control and a change of name has not altered the fact that many Maori children have special needs requiring special provisions’. ‘The Board must be awake to recognizing where these special needs exist and must cope with them adequately. An active school committee which draws in Maori parents as members is an excellent safeguard by which Maori parents can ensure that the special needs of their children are in fact discovered and provided for. This reference extends beyond the recognized disability of the Maori child in English language and literature, to that broad, rather vague and controversial concept—Maoritanga. Here is a specific need, and an important one. The director of the English Language Institute at Victoria University of Wellington made these two encouraging observations: ‘The child whose mother tongue is not English is basically a privileged child … investment in these children is not a regrettable duty but a profitable venture.’ Critics of this point of view rely on the argument that the language is dying if not already dead, and it is but a matter of time when Maori custom and practice will also disappear. This argument of course is not true. Maori is the language of the marae, the church, the daily language of the people of the East Coast, Northland and the Urewera; and for any Maori with aspirations of a place of prominence among his people he must be conversant in Maori. If Maoritanga is to find its true place in the schools, it is surely the Maori community that must agitate to achieve this end, and places where such agitation pays off include, among others, the small, humble, and inconspicuous school committee.