Failure in maori terms

Tu Tangata, Issue 18, 1 June 1984, Page 12

Failure in maori terms

A highly educated young maori woman faltered with emotion when she told a maori education conference that although she was a success in pakeha terms, she felt a failure in maori terms.

Kathy Cameron is a lecturer in maori education at Palmerston North’s Massey University. She was taking issue with a speaker who said every person at the conference was an example of how well the education system had catered to maori people’s needs.

“If it weren’t for the education system, we wouldn’t be here,” he said, referring to the fact that most of the delegates were well qualified people. In view of this he said he was surprised by all the talk of how much the system was failing maori children.

“All I heard yesterday was failure, failure, failure,” he complained. “I do not think the Education Department should be downgraded for the very sincere efforts it has made for us in the last 10 years.”

The speaker was opposing a motion that maori people be encouraged to set up an alternative education system. But Ms Cameron said she did not agree that success had to be measured in terms of pakeha academic acheivement.

Fighting back tears, she said she felt whakama that she did not know the maori language well enough to understand or respond in maori to people who spoke it fluently.

But that, she said, was because she had never been taught the maori language, although she was trying to learn it.

“I am a product of the system we are talking about today,” she told delegates.

“Everything I know of my taha maori, I learnt through my own efforts or those of my family,” she said later. “I did not learn it through the education system.”

Delegates said after the conference that the overall feeling emerging from the hui was that the education system should offer more taha maori to its pupils.

One woman said she wanted a system which offered children “quality education in both” taha maori and taha pakeha.

Because she knew her children’s taha maori would not be catered for at a state school, she had sent them to a maori boarding school.

Now, no matter how>they spend their lives, “I can die happy knowing that my children will never have to feel

whakama about their taha maori,” she said.

Waikato University research fellow Ted Douglas said although most of the people at the hui had done well out of the present education system, they were rejecting it because it had rejected their taha maori.

He said all the maori university graduates now living would not fill the Kimiora dining hall at Turangawaewae marae.

The country had had universities for more than 100 years, but no maori women graduates until 1949, and no maori women doctorates until the 1980 s. Green Bay High School head of maori studies Pat Heremaia said: “What they are wanting is public debate on these issues, and a new system which does not label them as failures.”