ness of schools and teachers and it is not achieved by blind subservience to subject mastery. Has all this any relevance for Maoris? I think it has. Recently there has been a good deal said about the importance of education as a sort of Jacob's Ladder to the delights of an integrated society. The reasoning would seem to be that a more extended education will help to develop a Maori middle class which will have a stabilizing effect on race relations. I agree that wider use can probably be made of educational facilities but then nobody can be smug about this. The inference to be drawn from a lack of Maori use of these facilities is that the educational values expressed have not convinced people of their worth. If this is the case, then it is for all of us to ask why. This is not to say that a great deal of thought does not go into our educational system. Certainly the bread and butter problems of administration are being taken care of, but the real problems are those of aim, philosophical direction and social significance, and these seem to be neglected. Perhaps the area in which we stand in most need of a consideration of the importance of education is that of race relations.

Victoria Values in Education New Zealand culture is an offshoot of the culture of Victorian England. It is provincial and has developed apart from its parent stock, so that resemblances between the two are now fairly slight. None the less many Victorian values in education are still asserted. Also, in the course of our development, we have acquired some rather flattering ideas about ourselves. The first sentence of the Maori Affairs Department's booklet. ‘Integration’ runs, ‘for many years New Zealand has been recognized as one of the nations in the vanguard of those building multiracial societies …’ This must be true, we say it ourselves. A few lines further down there is a reference to ‘some iconoclastic individuals’ who claim that ‘this apparent harmony is more the result of self-delusion and lack of contact between the two groups than it is of genuine tolerance’. The writers concede an element of truth in this.

Auckland the Testing Ground Auckland has now become the testing ground for New Zealand's capacity to build a multiracial society; it is in this city that the actual confrontation of Maori and white is taking place. So far the signs of tension are slight but I for one am less optimistic than the Maori Affairs Department about the future. Let me restate a point that I made earlier. The problem is made not so much by the number of Maoris involved as by the quality of the contacts between the groups. Maoris are ‘visible’ to whites, that is they are distinguishable in a mixed group even when their actions are in no way different from those of other members of the group. For most white people the terms in which they think are those of, ‘that Maori!’ For white people Maoris are too often, ‘faceless’, to use James Baldwin's word, and the same applies to the reverse situation. Understanding of Maori values by whites or indeed by Maoris for that matter, is slight, our artists and writers have not yet sought to explain them to us, so that the relationship between the two groups is rather that of a truce, a kind of live and let live based on mutual ignorance. For the moment this may be good enough. In some areas where a scatter of Maoris through a white community is taking place, evaluation of the Maoris by the whites seems to be in terms of person to person relationships without much reference to stereotypes. But will this continue, I wonder, as more Maoris and other immigrants crowd into the city, as the white community becomes more resistant to changes over which it seems to have little control. What happens when economic levels drop, employment becomes harder to get, and money, the great leveller, becomes scarcer? In the housing advertisements one frequently reads ‘No Maoris’, ‘Europeans only’. A friend of mine buying a section on the shore was assured by the agent that ‘of course there are no Maoris in the district’. (The agent was lying: the next door household was mixed.)