Maori girls worst off

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

Maori girls worst off

Maori girls were the saddest victims of New Zealand’s middleclass pakeha-dominated education system, according to an Auckland maori language teacher.

And maori language teachers felt as if the education system had invited them to be mourners at the tangi of their own culture and language. Hillary College, Otara teacher Maiki Marks wrote this in a discussion paper

for the Maori education conference at Ngaruawahia’s Turangawaewae marae in March.

“It’s often said that the worst sins in New Zealand society today are to be young, to be Maori, to be female, and to be the child of working-class parents,” Mrs Marks wrote.

“I see these girls coming into high school with their selves battered and bruised after eight years in the system...” she said.

“They have little confidence. Their behaviour often reflects their inner pain and confusion. And all the school does is to yell at them, to punish them, to expel them.”

But Mrs Marks said some third-form maori girls managed to work things out, be proud, get on well with others, and help others.

“That is not necessarily to say that they are the students the teachers like,” she added. Despite their inner confidence, they could still easily be knocked down. Their strategies for coping with rejection, boredom and confusion ranged from inattention to dropping out.

“And, of course, some girls succeed in using the system to their own advantage. I’m one of them. And you have got to be hell of a strong to do that,” Mrs Marks said.

But maori language teachers had the feeling that “the education system has invited you to be a mourner at the tangihanga (funeral) of your culture, your language and yourself.” Mrs Marks said the system which produced these feelings required maori language teachers to teach the language as though it were dead, and only for passing exams with. The system did not aim to save the language, but to “preserve” it like Latin and Greek. Schools were designed to teach pakeha pupils, “and middleclass ones at that”. Maori teachers given an “extra role” in the school were likely to be asked to hand on “gimmicks and tricks to their pakeha colleagues on how to control maori kids”.

If the school had any “taha maori”, it was usually confined to a maori club or times for languages, arts and crafts. But it was unlikely the school had changed itself so that it felt good to maori pupils and worked to give them and equal chance. Mrs Marks said teachers’ limitations were passed on to their pupils. ‘‘What the teacher is, is what the student gets. If the teacher is monocultural and almost all of them are then so is the class’s work,” she said. She complained that even committees set up to look at maori problems were ‘‘probably stacked with middleclass pakeha for whom it’s all just another academic exercise.”