land has been that, right from the beginning. Until 1955, when the National Committee on Maori Education was set up, there was no organised way of getting Maori opinion in this country. What it meant, of course, was that the European, the department, the Pakeha, was giving the Maori what it or they thought the Maori needed and they believed this implicity. They were genuine. It was a real effort made by the Pakeha, but in essence it was patronising. It assumed the old idea that went right back to Bird and Pope and earlier that our way of life was superior and theirs was not worth worrying about. Once you've adopted that attitude you've had it. It's only in recent years that real progress has been made. How important was the movement of Maoris from the isolated areas to the more populated areas? Very important. This is what really made the European teachers see there was a problem. You see, until then they just didn't realise. For example, I was an organising teacher in Taranaki in '27 and '28, going into all these back country schools (there were no native schools in Taranaki, the Maoris refused to have them) and the Maoris would be in these one-teacher and two-teacher schools. Where did you find them always? In the back row, nobody taking any notice of them. They were nothing—forget ‘em! And the same attitude was applied to me—the organising teacher. But weren't there, in the thirties, a large number of Maoris being trained as teachers? Yes, and I thought with Maori teachers we'd really get Maori spirit into the schools. But again, I forgot the pressure of tradition and ritual and so on. These young Maoris had gone through our schools and they'd been taught our English education. They went to the training college and they were trained as English teachers. They went back to their schools and they taught the English way. Most of them might just as well have been white! You've had a whole life in this field—where do you think we should be focussing our attention now, and where should we be focussing it in the next ten years? Our teachers have got to understand what makes the Maori personality, which is totally different from ours, and until teachers do that they won't really be very successful. So the first thing is that the teachers' colleges have got to amend their training programmes. Now, the second thing also concerns training. Teachers have got to learn that the language that the Maori children speak when they come to school, whether it's Maori or so-called English, is not their English—it's a vernacular type of English. The children don't understand the teachers, the teachers don't understand them. They can't get together and communicate. This impediment in the language and attitudes of the Maori child could partly be overcome by good pre-school education. This means, I think, that we've got to develop, and I hope the Government will develop fully, a pre-school system. Now, whether they do it through the voluntary associations as they are doing now, or do it any other way—I don't care, but, from the Maori point of view, these Maori children want a really good pre-school education. Now I'm further convinced that the play centres have got to increase the time they give to these children—it's got to be more often. Somebody's got to do a bit of solid thinking about pre-school education, and then introduce it into this country for every child who needs it, not only Maoris. The other thing is (and we've ignored this) adult or parental education for the Maori. A lot was done in the early days through district nurses, who were really educating the parents while they were fixing up the children. But there's been no real attempt to get adult education to the Maori people. You see the result with young Maoris getting into trouble. Many of them are highly intelligent; they've left school and they've nothing to do to really absorb their interests and their energy. We've got to find out the sort of things they want and provide them through adult education. We could do this so easily because we have Maori organisations now to do it. Not tell them what they ought to have—this is the point. And having found it out then provide it, and provide