We are grateful to the editor of ‘Education’ a magazine issued to schools, for permission to reprint his interview with Mr Ball. If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now Douglas Ball began teaching in 1914, and was appointed Inspector of Maori Schools in 1929, becoming Senior Inspector of Maori Schools eight years later. In 1950 he was appointed Assistant Director of Education, a position he held until his retirement in 1955. From 1961 to 1971 he was Chairman of the Maori Education Foundation. Mr Ball, one of your first tasks as an administrator in the thirties was to make an appraisal of the effectiveness of fifty years of European schooling on Maoris. What were your findings at that time? Well, when we think back to that time, we've got to think of what State education was like in New Zealand and, even more, we've got to think of the position of the Maori population at the beginning of the century; because, that was the time when the population was declining so fast that there was very little hope felt for the future of the Maori. Then you've got to remember that nearly all the Maori people in New Zealand in those days lived in isolated areas, and very few Europeans knew anything about them. Another condition in those early times was, of course, the formal nature of education. It was the English type of education and one of the most difficult things in those days was to make sure that you passed from standard to standard. In 1929, when I started inspecting the native schools, I had two years when I had to examine every child in every subject and, as an inspector, pass or fail them. That'll give you some idea of the sort of education it was. Thinking back now to 1930, would you say that the sort of education that the Maori children had been having was serving their needs? Partly. Looking back again from this position with the knowledge that we have in social sciences and so on, we're inclined to wonder why Pope* James H. Pope, the first Organising Inspector of Native Schools. It was from this name that Maoris came to refer to all inspectors as ‘Te Popi’. W. W. Bird was Pope's successor. and Mr W. W. Bird insisted on our European and English education for Maori people. And they didn't only insist on it, it was a belief with them—it was a philosophy. Now, they'd acquired it from the Colonial Office; one of our earliest Governors, Governor Fitroy, laid down a policy of assimilation—that the only salvation of the Maori was to become a European—and these men really believed this. But never under-estimate the great work they did, because with Maori co-operation Douglas Ball