Is this situation any concern of the schools? Children seem to be fairly free of prejudice; is there any way in which they can be prevented from developing racial prejudice? There have been a number of ideas followed up in other countries; study of the background of the group, inter-group camps, increased contacts, adoption of another school, propaganda, adult education and so on. All have some worth and applied together they probably have value. Increased contact is certainly important but it is by no means the whole answer. Once more, it is the quality of the contact that counts. Consider for a moment the situation in two schools in which I have taught in the last five years. In one, a city school, all the children came from homes of lower socio-economic status, many with a very limited educational background. In this school friendships across ethnic boundaries became fewer as the children grew older, and occurred mainly in two groups: the most intelligent, and those most actively in rebellion, the outcasts.

Contact can Create Prejudice The other school is in a middle-upper income area, where there are probably not more than four or five Maori children out of the five hundred in the school. Here these children were absorbed without comment. In one school prejudice frequently showed itself, in the other the question barely arises. Contact can create prejudice. I should like to quote to you what Norman Podhoretz, Editor of the American journal ‘Commentary’, has to say of this. Podhoretz describes his boyhood in a lower class immigrant section of New York. He tells of how he was bullied by Negro children and of how it became impossible to bridge the gap by direct communication and goes on to describe the conflict between his own feelings and his present convictions. He says ‘I have told the story of my own twisted feelings about Negroes … in order to assert that such feelings must be acknowledged as honestly as possible so that they can be controlled and ultimately disregarded in favour of the convictions.’ I would go so far as to say that most white New Zealanders do not acknowlede their negative feelings about Maoris or other nonwhites not because they do not have them, but because they do not have to do so. Would increased contact between Maori and white children help? All I can say is that I don't know, but as a practising teacher I am ready to try it and to this end am attempting to arrange a series of exchanges between my own class and one in the inner city involving each class spending one day a week for some weeks in the other's school. I am not sure that the value of this will be lasting but it is worth a try.

A Mutual Ignorance At least part of the problem of race relations in the school is the teachers themselves. The child does not know what the teacher wants or doesn't much value it, and the teacher is ignorant of what the child has been taught to value. Teachers are recruited from the middle class on the whole, and their models of good behaviour and the good society are middle class ones. Their pupils, however, may have quite different models. Maori teachers are recruited from almost the equivalent stratum of Maori society. Each may be faced with a similar dilemma in understanding Maori pupils, with the Maori teacher perhaps a little worse off since he or she will be expected by some magic to be hip to what Maori children think, want, and do. Although I have no programme in race relations I think that at this point at least something can be done by the simple expedient of ensuring that teaching trainees have a really tough course in race relations with special reference to New Zealand. This approach could be extended, I think, to secondary school students as part of their social studies work. There are other reasons for suggesting this. Consider, for a moment, the ways in which ethnocentricity can express itself in New Zealand thinking. In an infant classroom I have heard children singing ‘Ten Little Nigger Boys’, there is a popular book called ‘Little Black Sambo’ and another reader on sale in Auckland called ‘Nigger My Dog’, or some such title. A child hears phrases like to work like a nigger, the nigger in the woodpile, to Jew someone out of something, to be as black as a nigger. Or hears a parking meter called a Jewish juke box, a certain kind of beetle called a Maori-bug, and he may even go to see such a thing as the ‘Black and White Minstrel Show’.

More Subtle Attitudes These are crude examples of white superiority attitudes. But there are more subtle kinds of ethnocentricity, attitudes of tolerance and patronage, of the some-of-my-best-friends kind. Most subtle of all is the kind of attitude held