Pakeha culture reigns totally unchallenged

Tu Tangata, Issue 18, 1 June 1984, Page 13

Pakeha culture reigns totally unchallenged

The indifference and antagonism of many pakeha teachers often frustrated maori teachers’ efforts to run effective maoritanga programmes in schools, a former teacher has claimed.

A former school-teacher and now part-time lecturer Judith Simon made these claims in a discussion paper she prepared for the Maori education development conference at Ngaruawahia’s Turangawaewae marae in March. Ms Simon wrote a master’s thesis on maori education matters.

“These (pakeha) teachers not only fail to reinforce the maori teachers’ efforts, but in some cases openly reveal negative views of maoritanga to their pupils,” she wrote.

She described many teachers’ attitudes towards their maori pupils as “deficit” views, whereby their believed maori children were limited in language and experience, which in turn limited their learning ability.

Ms Simon attacked attitudes towards maori children which she said continued to make them feel inferior, and continued to reinforce the dominance of pakeha culture and interests.

She said the education system was structured around pakeha interests and pakeha-determined goals. Any inroads into that system by maori interests “must be seen as a threat by those intent on maintaining pakeha dominance.”

For example, she said the “deficit” policy of the 1960 s saw maori children as “problems” for education, while hiding the bias in favour of pakeha dominance.

Efforts to correct that injustice by asserting that maori children should be seen as “culturally different” did little to change things. The term “soon became a catch-phrase eagerly taken up by teachers in making spurious claims that maori educational needs were being recognised and catered for.”

It thus served to conceal the continuation of the “deficit” attitude, and under such a system, maoritanga could never be more than “a mere appendage” to the school curriculum.

That only served to reinforce the belief that the pakeha-orientated curriculum was the “real” curriculum, she wrote.

The National Advisory Committee on Maori Education in 1970 came up with a policy which said maoritanga and maori language should be integral parts of the school curriculum. This was to enhance maori children’s selfimage and thereby equip them to realise their full potential. It would also serve to develop in pakeha children on awareness of maori cultural values. But by the 1980 s, Ms Simon said she found most principals and teachers were still operating on the “deficit” idea. “Besides providing teachers with a built-in excuse for ineffectual teaching, the perpetuation of these negative stereotyped views of maori children disadvantage maori pupils further by inevitably producing low teacher expectations that become self-fulfilling prophecies,” she wrote. In such schools, she said a patronising view of maoritanga was communicated to the pupils. Where maoritanga was made a “club” option competing with other activities, pupils got the message that it was neither significant nor important in education. Such ways of catering for maori pupils tended to have the opposite effect of the intended enhancing of their

self-image, and reinforced feelings of pakeha superiority in pakeha pupils, she said. As a result some maori teachers were reluctant to have maoritanga officially included in the school curriculum. They recognised that to focus on maori cultural heritage, and then treat it with contempt, was a “greater act of violence” than failing to acknowledge it at all. Ms Simon also attacked the principle that teachers should not treat their maori and pakeha pupils any differently on the grounds that “we are all New Zealanders”, or “they are all children to me”. Such views often accompanied the view that a special catering to maori pupils was “separatism”, but in Ms Simon’s view they were responses to a threat to pakeha dominance. Such rationales merely served to allow pakeha culture to reign “totally unchallenged”. Another excuse offered by schools was that they did not have time to incorporate maoritanga programmes. “This view denigrates maoris and their culture by implying that maoritanga is less significant and less ‘real’ than pakeha culture,” Ms Simons wrote.

The country’s education system is now coming under scrutiny not only for the way it educates maori children but also for the way it incorporates New Zealand culture into the school curriculum.

Parent dissatisfaction is now emerging over the inability of some schools to cope with children from the kohanga reo, and they’re demanding answers. Recent hui have highlighted one response to go it alone with maori schools.

However that’s a daunting task in most cases beyond the resources of the people.

The alternative is to change the education system to better suit maori and Polynesian children, and also better represent New Zealand culture.

One school that’s taking a midway course is Hato Petera College in Auckland. After fifty years as a private Catholic boarding school for maori boys, it was integrated into the state education system in 1981.

It’s one of seven maori schools in New Zealand sharing five per cent of maori secondary school students. The others are Queen Victoria, St Stephen’s, Turakina, Hato Paora, Te Aute and St Joseph’s.

However the school board of Hato Petera have now decided to restore the former fluency of students and staff in the maori language. Beginning in 1986 will be a total immersion programme in maori language. It’s objective is to put the maori language back into the school as an equal partner to English, and to reemphasise it as being a maori school for maori boys.

The programme was proposed by a parents’ representative on the Hato Petera College board, Mr Ted Douglas, and was presented to the Post Primary Teachers’ Association at a recent education hui at Waahi marae.