What's Maori About Maori Education?

By Wally Penetito

A unique critique of the history and contemporary practice of Maori academics, this examination argues that equality of education has been promised but rarely delivered in New Zealand. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that ordinary Maori in a few key communities throughout the country courageously stepped outside the mainstream system and created an alternative Maori system in order to enhance their own interpretations of what it means to achieve equality, social justice, and fairness through education. Engaging and thorough, this insider' s account explores the Maori point of view and asks what “ an education for all New Zealanders” really means.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781776563920

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VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Victoria University of Wellington

PO Box 600 Wellington

victoria.ac.nz/vup/

Copyright © Wally Penetito 2010

First published 2010

Reprinted 2011

Reprinted 2021

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers

National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Penetito, Wally. What’s Māori About Māori education? : the struggle for a meaningful context / Wally Penetito.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-86473-614-7

1. Maori (New Zealand people)—Education. 2. Education— Social aspects—New Zealand. [1. Waihanga. reo 2. Ako. reo 3. Mātauranga. reo 4. Tikanga. reo] I. Title. 371.82999442—dc 22

Ebook conversion 2021 by meBooks

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgements

Preface

PART IFRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS

Introduction to Part I

The Problem

Structure of Part I

Chapter 1Māori Identity: Being, Learning, Living

Introduction: The Emergence of the Problem

The Politics of the Education System: Identity, Culture and Context

The Politics of Identity: Invention, Construction or Both?

Tuakiri Tangata: Identity and the Evolution of Consciousness

Agency, Power and Identity

Chapter 2What Counts as Education: Scholarship, Philosophy, Ideology

Introduction: The Problem and the Argument

Ways into the Study

1. Māori Education and Cultural Politics

Facing the Bias and Entering into a Philosophical Response

Looking at Achievement: The Role of Ideology

Looking at Māori Education: Cultural Politics and Ways of Being and Knowing

2. Race Relations and the ‘Politics of Interpretation’

3. Social Justice and the ‘Best of Both Worlds’

4. Philosophy of Education and the ‘Logic of Sameness’

Ascertaining Meanings

Critiquing the Knowledge Base

5. The Sociology of Education and the Sociological Imagination

Reading Sociology

Creating a Sociology of Māori Education

6. The Issue of Mediating Structures

Hiding Behind Liberality

Chapter 3What Counts as Maori Education: Socialisation, Education, Dialectic Relationships

Introduction: Two Epistemological Traditions

Māoritanga Model

Liberal Education Model

Setting the Models Side by Side: The Social Control Thesis

Socialisation and Lifestyle

Education and Life Chances

Māori Education and Dialectic Relationships: Native Schools as Transition

Chapter 4Mediating Structures in Māori Education: Connectedness, Consent, Control

Introduction: Accounting for Educational Disengagement

The What and Why of Mediating Structures

Social Expressions of Connectedness in Māori Society

Mediating Structures: Sources of Conservatism or Agents of Change?

The Nature of New Zealand Society and its Education System

Mediating Structures in Māori–Pākehā Relations

Treaty of Waitangi

Native/Māori Land Court

Native/Māori Schools

NZEI–Te Miro Māori

Te Ohu Whakatupu

The ‘Tū Tangata Way’

Mediating Structures in Māori Education: A Sociological Perspective

Functionalism – Reports on Māori Education

Interpretivism – Processes of Consultation

Humanism – Institutional Marae

Structuralism – Māori Medium Schooling

A Theory of Mediating Structures in Māori Education

PART IIMEDIATING STRUCTURES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MĀORI EDUCATION

Introduction to Part II

Chapter 5‘Our Māoris’: Reports on Māori Education (1960–2000)

Introduction: Finding an Ideology

Methodology, Argument, Approach

Reports, Writers, Readers

Ka Awhi Noa i Waho, 1960–1977

Background

Synopsis and Analysis

Report 1: Report of the Commission on Education in New Zealand (1962)

Report 2: Report of the National Advisory Committee146 on Maori Education (1970)

Report 3: Department of Education, Maori Children and 150 the Teacher (1971)

Report 4: Report of the Committee on Communication Between Schools and Parents: Parent–School Communication (1973)

Report 5: Report of the Committee on Secondary Education, ‘Towards Partnership’ (1976)

Summary, Purposes, Discourses

Mā Te Kānohi Miromiro, 1978–2000

Background

Synopsis and Analysis

Report 6: Report of the National Advisory Committee on Maori Education, He Huarahi (1980)

Report 7: Review of the Core Curriculum for Schools, Department of Education (1984)

Report 8: Report of the Taskforce to Review Education Administration (1988)

Report 9: Māori Participation and Performance in Education – A Literature Review and Research Programme, Report for the Ministry of Education (1997)

Report 10: Māori Education Commission, Reports for the Minister of Māori Affairs (1998/99)

Summary, Purposes, Discourses

Māori Education Reports as Mediating Structures

Chapter 6‘We’re all New Zealanders’: Processes of Consultation in Māori Education

Introduction: Participation from Inside–Out

We’re all New Zealanders

What is Consultation?

Constructive Dialogue as the Mode of Inquiry

Consultation as the Hegemony of Consent

Education Strateg y for Māori: Methodological Considerations

Working Within the Official Parameters

Planning the Consultations

Interpretivist–Humanist Sociolog y: Eliciting the Information

An Initial Analysis of the Data

Analysis of Question

Discussion

Policy or Politics?

Key Issues that Arose

Positive Image

Support Systems

Māori Medium Education

An Autonomous Māori Governance Authority

Treaty of Waitangi and Mainstream Accountability

An Overarching Māori Educational Philosophy

Research to Empower Māori

Consultation as a Mediating Structure

Chapter 7‘Tangata Whenua, Tangata Tiriti’: Institutional Marae

Introduction: Participation from Outside–In

What is a Marae ?

Traditional Marae – Tūrangawaewae for Tangata Whenua

Institutional Marae – Tūrangawaewae for Tangata Tiriti

The Case for Institutional Marae

Institutional Marae on Campuses: Reasons for their Establishment

Lifestyles or Life Chances

Institutional Marae as Mediating Structures

Chapter 8‘Our Pākehās’: The Onward Rise of Māori Medium Schooling

Introduction: Taking Responsibility and Being Equal

Finding a Way Through the Web: Structural–functionalist Sociology

The Rise of ‘Māori Medium’ Education: A Catalyst for Transformation

What is ‘Kaupapa Māori Schooling’?

Assertion of Māori Cultural Capital

The New Right and the Educational Reforms

Cultural Mobilisation

Does This Feel like Transformation?

Kaupapa Māori Schools as Mediating Structures

Contextualising Māori Knowledge for New Zealand Teachers

The Moral Dilemma of the Ownership of Knowledge

The Relationship Between Particularism and Universalism

Distinguishing Socialisation from Education

Conclusion

Part IIIPLACE AND THE POLITICS OF WHĀNAU, HAPŪ, IWI AND MĀORI EDUCATION: EDUCATION FOR ALL

Introduction to Part III

Mainstreaming and/or Separate Development

Beyond Mediating Structures

Chapter 9He Kōingo mo te Tuakiri Tangata – a Hunger for Identity, Meaning and Self-worth

The Argument So Far

An Education ‘to be Māori’: The Ontological Issue of Identity

Toward a Theory of Schooling : The Epistemological Issue of Meaning

Whānau, Hapū, Iwi Education: The Axiological Issue of Collective Self-worth

The Politics of Educational Change

Problem Definition

Strategic Directions

Assessment and Performance

The Best of Both Worlds: A Theory of Education for All

Principles for Change

Whānau/Hapū/Iwi Education Plans

Empowering ‘voices from the margins’

Whānau/Hapū/Iwi ‘Identity’ as the Locus of Intervention

The ‘mobilisation of bias’

Being Māori ‘goes all the way down’

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Tables

Acknowledgements

Thinking about those to whom I owe a debt for the story that is told throughout these pages fills me with mixed emotions. My late father, mother and sister were the first to see me enter the world of higher education and they have frequently been in my thoughts at those times when I considered giving up through lack of motivation, failure of purpose or some other excuse that took me away from the sometimes desperate struggle of completing the task at hand.

Kei a koutou oku tūpuna, anei toku koha ki a koutou.

To the hundreds of students I have had the good fortune to have in my classes for more than 40 years, who have challenged me and compelled me to seek out better ways of helping them to learn and understand, I have nothing but respect and a warm sense of mutuality that comes from the gift of sharing.

Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka akongia ai tātou.

I have also had the good fortune in my career of having worked alongside many hundreds of teachers at every level of the education system. Some of them had a profound influence on me, and I list such geniuses from the school sector as Jim Laughton, Alwyn Richardson and Anne Lopdell. In the Māori education world were other giants like John Waititi, John Rangihau, Ranginui Walker, Katarina Mataira and John Tapiata. The most inspirational academics for me at tertiary level have been foreigners like Basil Bernstein, Paulo Freire and Pierre Bourdieu, while at a more personal level the intellectual engagement with scholars like Courtney Cazden, and Graham and Linda Smith has always been a great source of strength for me. Within New Zealand, Richard Benton, Judith Simon, Richard Harker and Roy Nash made firmer my resolve with each work they produced. The contributions they all made to my thinking, my writing and my teaching for more than four decades have been huge.

Ko te pae tawhiti, whaia ki tata, ko te pae tata, whakamaua kia tina.

To those who saw me through the hard slog of completing a doctoral study, Dr Geraldine McDonald, Dr Keith Sullivan and Professor Cedric Hall, I owe a special debt of gratitude. They persisted with me even when I failed to believe in myself. They challenged me to learn how to write like an academic while continuing to think like a Māori educationist. They gave me the faith needed to convert the subjectivity of a relatively comprehensive educational experience into the scholarly requirements of a doctoral study. I thank them for the generosity of spirit they shared with me.

I am eternally grateful for the expert editorial guidance of Dr Ginny Sullivan without whose patience and skill this book would not have been completed, and of course Victoria University Press and the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor Research for supporting me in this publication.

To my immediate family, Sheena whose love and affection must have been severely tested on many occasions, and Kim, Grant and Dougal who put up with and tolerated my deep resolve to understand what was happening for Māori in education in Aotearoa New Zealand I owe a debt of aroha I cannot really repay. On many occasions for more years than I care to think about, I was not as intimately available to them as a husband, as a father, and as a friend and companion as they or I would have liked. I look forward to a wealth of new exchanges and new opportunities with them, with my mokopuna and with my extended family.

No reira, tōku whānau me te whānau whānui, tēnei tōku koha aroha ki a koutou.

No reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora tātou katoa.

Preface

This is a reflexive study of education in New Zealand viewed through graduated lenses that are part Māori, part mainstream and part imbricated. Although I would not consider myself an expert in any one of these perspectives, I have, nevertheless, toiled for more than 40 years to try to understand something of the world of Māori education in New Zealand and how it works for Māori; in many instances, I have also tried to understand why it does not work.

The research I undertook for my doctoral thesis on which this book is based was a major longitudinal study and at times an underlying preoccupation when I thought I was actually doing other things. In trying to understand the complexities of Māori education, I have always begun from my own stance as a Māori person and from what I perceived other Māori people saw was happening in the process of schooling. Having to draw on other perspectives – those found in disciplines like anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, social geography and sociology – seemed to occur naturally as I progressed through my career. However, if there was an orientation that I found most appealing and insightful, it was the sociological, especially that brand of sociology that practices a ‘reflexive’ approach.¹ In basic terms, it is a sociology that sets out to oppose the falseness of dichotomous, dualistic ways of viewing reality ‘because they lead to mutilations’, for example, between theorists and empiricists, between subjectivists and objectivists, and notably, between structuralists and interactionists. I have learned to see sociological perspectives within the folds of these other disciplines.

Sociology entails, as Peter Berger maintains, ‘a way of looking at the world’. Unlike many other disciplines, from my point of view, sociology sets out to apply a scientific ethic to an exploration of social phenomena without seemingly having to replace or diminish the magic of those who hold strongly to metaphysical interpretations of the world. It is this deliberate interface between the sacred and the secular that draws me most of all. Every other appeal to analysis in Māori education pales into insignificance compared with what is going on at the precise juncture between what Māori are demanding in education and what the mainstream education system is prepared to accede. Māori education, like sociology, encourages and even demands that the researcher learns to mix categories, to indulge in inter-disciplinary approaches, and to seek out alternative understandings and meanings to critical concepts. Some of these concepts such as science, rationality, objectivity, relativity, power and authority are rarely central themes in research on Māori education – and that is a major weakness in a field that has for generations been thought of as an educational problem area. Even though discourse in education, outside the academy, chooses to set these critical concepts aside in preference to notions like curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and evaluation, it cannot and should not avoid the deeper and often more abstract debates that constitute the thinking associated with first principles. It is contended here that the prioritising of the latter set of concepts (curriculum, pedagogy etc.) over the former (science, rationality etc.) is a serious part of the problem experienced in Māori education. For example, there is always unnecessary haste to address the concerns of curriculum without first considering the implications of a selection of knowledge outside the asymmetrical power relationships between Māori and Pākehā. The decisions that flow from that limited discourse hinder rather than help Māori participation in education.

The New Zealand education system is based on the principles of what Karl Popper called an ‘open society’ and, as a result, so we are to understand, is defensibly scientific and rational and, therefore, culturally neutral. But contrary to this existing orthodoxy, I argue that an education system that sets out to prioritise a particular set of characteristics – an English-speaking New Zealander, strong-willed as an individualist, a go-getter who sees him/herself as self-sufficient, a person with a have-a-go attitude to life, someone who is fair-minded with a strong inclination toward the practical and who is totally committed to moving forward – is as much essentialist as it is open.

There are many policies, practices and strategies in place to encourage Māori participation in mainstream education, and much of the research about policies, practices and strategies focuses on issues such as participation. But what makes an education system ‘mainstream’ is not the medium of instruction in its institutions. Rather, it is a question of whether those institutions come under the auspices of the Education Act 1989. In this sense, there is only one education system in New Zealand, the mainstream one. The so-called Māori education system is a label that allows us to talk about those schools, policies and practices that are specifically designed to address Māori interests and concerns – or, at least, that is the system’s claim. The concept of mainstream education is normative, it is about what ought to be. Discussions of its efficacy are founded on attempts to match its practices with the identity of this particular version of a New Zealander, that is, one who is English-speaking, independent, acquisitive, practical, fair-minded, and consumer- and future-oriented. In other words, what we do in education is justified by who we are as New Zealanders. This is the orthodoxy of scientific and rational education spelled out in terms of cornerstone values.

Māori education, like the Māori people, has survived as a distinct entity with a distinct culture, albeit modified comprehensively after more than a century of colonial domination. In today’s world, the bulk of the Māori population continues to view itself complexly as Māori with whakapapa (genealogies) and whānau/hapū/iwi (family and tribal) identities, as well as being New Zealanders with the status of tangata whenua (indigeneity).

Māori education is not about prioritising Māori practices over others, and indeed, one of the major criticisms I have of mainstream education is the assumption it makes in prioritising Pākehā New Zealand education over any other. If I have a conviction, it is that when culture and structure are seen as part of an equation that supports and promotes the individual, then agency has far more to offer society than when there is a disjunction between the structures of society and the personal and/or cultural. An education based on this sort of equation helps to open people’s minds to the increased possibilities of keeping cultures intact and strengthening them rather than distorting them through policies of co-option like assimilation, integration and multiculturalism.

Education is an art form as much as it is a science, a practical activity and a legal requirement. As such, it operates according to a number of different logics. Given the practical nature of education through schooling , teachers become involved in what could be called a ‘logic of praxis’. Teachers are often criticised for not having a deeper understanding of the theories that underline their practices. The praxis of New Zealand educationists is a mixed bag of often contradictory beliefs. The educational bureaucrat is keen to maintain in her work a ‘logic of authority’ to ensure policies align with the desires of the minister of education as well as within regulation and law. In the eyes of others involved in education, government officials are considered powerful but remote from reality. Educational researchers and academics are seen as being in continuous pursuit of valid evidence and are only satisfied when they can produce research that either substantiates or refutes their claims. Theirs is a ‘logic of evidence’. Academics are as prone to intellectual fashion as bureaucrats are. Academics are also perceived by the educational world as being overly zealous about ideas and theories even if they have no idea how they will work in practice. The practitioner is preoccupied with a ‘logic of what works’ and takes into account questions of authority and evidence only when there is irrefutable proof that what they do for certain groups or categories of students is not working. Together, bureaucrats, academics and teachers make up the ‘logic of praxis’ that determines the shape and direction of Māori education, and they do this through what are called in this book mediating structures.

The four mediating structures analysed here are Māori education reports, processes of consultation, institutional marae and kaupapa Māori schooling. Māori play an important role in each of these and therefore acquiesce to some degree in their own exploitation. The first two arise out of official, mainly Pākehā, sources, while the latter two are from mainly Māori sources. They are all instituted in the official interests of Māori students. They each succeed in some ways and fail in others. It is argued that, jointly, they are successful as mediating structures in that they give Māori an authentic sense of participation in the education system without encouraging any full-blown challenge to the status quo. Mediating structures are mechanisms for maintaining equilibrium between Māori and Pākehā, between officials and practitioners, and between the state and Māori communities. A problem arises if one of the parties to the mediation is repeatedly placed in the position of having to acquiesce in order to assure equilibrium. It is a hypocritical compromise when acquiescence is assumed on the grounds that the minority partner to an historical agreement occupies a lower place in a hierarchy of power in order for democracy to prevail. There does not have to be a policy or a regulation to maintain this position if ideological mechanisms such as mediating structures can be relied on to deliver the same result. A similar point was made by Marx and Engels more than 150 years ago:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas; i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.²

In New Zealand, and from the perspective of Māori, it is culture rather than social class that plays the prominent role in shaping the nature of the relationship between Māori and all others. I argue here that the ‘logic of the market’ coupled with the promises of ‘secular salvation’ through liberal education, so much loved by Western societies, will always keep Māori in a subordinate position vis-à-vis mainstream society. Real salvation for both societies requires Māori to move away from unidirectional mediating structures and to implement a true acculturation, that is, one that legally and ethically operates as a two-way process. To achieve this goal, there need to be two recognised, officially mandated education systems which have some aspects that operate independently of each other, some aspects that are integrated and require cooperation from each other, and some aspects that remain intact within the parent body but have areas of negotiated overlap where collaboration is required in order for either party to meet its requirements. I have referred to this overlap as an imbricated form of acculturation.

There is no question about the fact that Māori as tangata whenua are demanding the right to be treated equally under the law. In most cases, this right is recognised although often challenged by Māori. But Māori are asking for more than that: as tangata Māori (those who choose to assert their heritage as Māori, those who choose to live their lives as Māori), they want to be treated as equals. The two principles are similar but they are not the same. If you have to treat people as equals, then they are not equal to start with. Being treated equally assumes a state of inequality that can be rectified through legislation, policy and practice; being treated as equals asserts essential equality and the levelling of hierarchies and status. Where the justice system has a critical role to play in ensuring the former principle is upheld, it is the education system that has the paramount role to play in giving substance to the latter principle. On those grounds, there is much that remains to be done.

The study is presented in three parts. Part I establishes a framework for the analysis of mainstream and Māori education and hypothesises a theory of mediating structures within theoretical, philosophical, sociological and international contexts. It comprises an introduction followed by chapters one to four. Part II is made up of the data or evidence used to argue the case about mediating structures as major limiting entities in the development of both mainstream and Māori education. Beginning with an introduction, it is a mixture of literature-based data (chapters five and eight), empirical data (chapter six) and archival data (chapter seven). Part III suggests a practical outcome of the research and what might be required to move beyond the constraints of mediating structures as they are discussed here. The introduction to Part III and the final chapter (chapter nine) serve to recommend a way forward for education in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This is an ambitious project but one in which I have been professionally involved for more than 40 years. In that sense, it is more than what is usually considered the brief for a doctoral thesis, the origins from which this book emerged. But it is arguably also only a beginning, a place from which to stand and see how Māori education is in Aotearoa New Zealand and what it can become.

PART I

FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS

Introduction to Part I

The Problem

This study is about how Māori education has developed over the last 40 years (1960–2000). The purpose is to show how this object called Māori education, beginning in the native schools and in an unbroken sequence to today, has traditionally and currently been used by the state as a mechanism of cultural control rather than for educative purposes. Running alongside this argument, I intend to show that during the last 20 years Māori have also distorted Māori education, not for any control function, but rather as a mechanism for cultural revitalisation. In this sense, both mainstream and Māori have appropriated schooling away from its educational purposes, and there has been a constant struggle for the dual agendas of cultural control on the one hand and cultural revitalisation on the other. Described in these terms, Māori education is an ‘ideology’ in that it serves the interests of particular parties or groups. It is not suggested that the appropriation of Māori education to serve cultural control and cultural revitalisation perspectives is used exclusively for these purposes, but it is maintained that cultural control and cultural revitalisation are the central themes respectively instead of the mandated purpose, that is, education of the young.

Given the power differentials between the two adversaries, the less powerful group either has a really compelling reason for the agenda it is promoting or the revitalisation agenda holds some basic social justice appeal which, if or when satisfied, some argue, will benefit both parties. A prior question might be, assuming both these assertions to be true, what is the problem? Assuming that there is a hierarchy of cultures within New Zealand society where relations of domination and subordination operate, should we be surprised that the dominant culture is seeking to maintain control or that the subordinate culture reacts to these attempts at control by taking the offensive and promoting the revitalisation of its own culture? Neither of these actions is surprising ; what is surprising, though, is the apparent balance between compliance and resistance that both parties display.

Historically, Māori want more of their knowledge, values, practices and philosophies injected into the system, but they tolerate, albeit grudgingly, what they are actually permitted. They are faced constantly with the fact that the hegemonic system expects Māori to offer new knowledge, directions and practices from their culture as required, but remains vigilant about the quality of these offerings in its determination to retain hegemony. Is it a consensus? If it is, then how is that consensus arrived at? What is the consequence of the consensus? The answers to these questions are explored in the analysis of four mediating structures that encapsulate and sustain the status quo in the power differential. The mediating structures are explored further in chapter four, and in chapters five to eight in Part II.

Structure of Part I

Part I of the book explores the status of Māori and Māori education within New Zealand society. Three broad questions are discussed as part of a contextualising of the book:

•What is Māori education in relation to mainstream education?

•How have Māori and mainstream education contributed to the construction of Māori identity?

•By what means has the state been able to constitute a subject – Māori – that thinks of itself as being free and autonomous and acts as though its responses to the system are the consequences of principles it itself has chosen?

Subsidiary and related questions are also addressed such as:

•Why a sociological approach?

•What is meant by ideology?

•Why do notions of identity remain central concerns for Māori?

•How does the construct of mediating structures contribute to Māori internalising subordination?

Chapter one sets out the argument of the book and the educational questions I faced as a pupil, student and educational practitioner. By approaching the question of identity it focuses on the key concepts of the study and how these will be interpreted within the context of consciousness and agency theory.

Chapter two poses the question of what counts as education, and confronts the concepts of differential achievement and deficit. It examines the parts played by power relations and socialisation in education, and dissects philosophical and pedagogical approaches to Māori education in order to understand how Māori education has been approached so far.

Chapter three brings the focus more closely on to Māori education, first of all by looking at two epistemological traditions, the Māoritanga model and the liberal education model. It argues that education has been about socialisation rather than the upholding and learning of knowledge, and that Māori education specifically has been an expression of power disparities and knowledge hierarchies that has led to Māori attempts to establish an alternative education system, and certainly to reassert a Māori kaupapa.

Chapter four outlines a theory of mediating structures that sees them both as vehicles of connectedness and as mechanisms of control. The functions they serve are discussed, and the role they play in Māori–Pākehā relations, beginning with what is now being referred to as New Zealand’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi.

In order to contextualise the role of mediating structures within education, two major dimensions are clarified. The first relates to the highest ideals shaping the development of New Zealand society, and the second, the nature and characteristics of the education system that it nurtures. Māori education is a microcosm of these developments, both affecting and being affected by them. It is appreciated that Māori education and mainstream education are not equivalent entities and that, in the final analysis, a modern, democratic, capitalist society such as exists in New Zealand will evolve institutions such as we have in education,¹ in law² and in most other ideological state apparatuses, where social control is at the heart of each structure. The key question then becomes, as we are reminded by Sheleff, ‘whether social control (through education) is to be extensively imposed and rigidly enforced, or whether it is to be no more than a flexible guideline for action’.³ From the assumptions about the nature of New Zealand society and its education system, three distinctive cultural capitals (one Māori, the other Pākehā and one an overlapping or imbricated cultural capital) are hypothesised.

CHAPTER 1

Māori Identity:

Being, Learning, Living

Introduction: The Emergence of the Problem

When I trained to teach 40 years ago, I was prepared to go anywhere and to teach any primary school-age child. I was qualified to teach in New Zealand and in most other Commonwealth countries. As it turned out, apart from one year in England as an exchange teacher, all my teaching practice took place in this country and all the schools I taught in had significant Māori populations. After seven and a half years in rural and urban schools, I decided to teach in a designated Māori school, motivated by at least three factors that weighed heavily on me at the time: I needed the challenge of running a school as its principal; I wanted to teach with my wife and daughter in a predominantly Māori environment where the school was part of the community; and I desperately wanted my young family to spend their early years close to Māori people where they could learn to relate to and develop sensitive understandings of the Māori world.

My wife is a Scot who had lived and trained in Edinburgh and whose family were all in Scotland; our children are both Māori and Pākehā (non-Māori, European) and we wanted them to be part of both worlds. I knew that entry into and familiarity with the Pākehā world would not be difficult for them if they waited a few years until we moved back to urban settings and the different advantages they bring. It is relatively easy for a Māori to fit into the Pākehā world, if that is her choice, because most things in society are positioned to assist that transition. This is what the assimilationist policies in New Zealand are all about: how to hasten the demise of Māori by getting them to forget being Māori and to take on the values, attitudes and practices of Pākehā. The prevailing belief among Pākehā is that deep down Māori really want to be like Pākehā. It is far more difficult choosing to be Māori even when you are Māori, but if you do not look as though you are Māori, for example, if you have fair skin, then choosing to be Māori has to be deliberately demonstrated publicly, even among Māori. This must be what people mean when they refer to the ‘double-whammy’.

Teaching Māori children in the metropolitan environment had already raised questions for me. I knew that Māori could safely be Māori in their own communities and could move within the Pākehā world with some equanimity. But it seemed to me that in doing so, their identity was threatened and compromised, and in particular that Māori entering the Pākehā education system were inherently compromised. I also wanted to know why it was that children in classes I taught who came from Samoa or the Cook Islands quite often performed better academically than Māori children in the same classes. Some of them had parents who could barely speak English, and the children were often no more advanced linguistically when they arrived at school. I wanted to know why Pacific parents often outnumbered Māori parents at official parents’ evenings. I was frustrated by the number of Māori students who had behaviour problems inside and outside the classroom, the most common being aggression, swearing, challenging authority or chronic withdrawal. I wanted to understand what was behind these behaviours. My fear at the time was that there might be some inherent flaw in Māori cultural development that left scars on the Māori psyche. I had some very good reasons for deciding to teach in a significantly Māori school in a traditional and rural community, a setting where I could rejuvenate my own cultural batteries and where I had the time and the opportunity to explore some of the answers to these troubling questions.

The school my wife and I chose and taught in for eight years was established as a native school in 1884. It served a traditional Māori community in the sense that it was located on a papakāinga (kin-based traditional homeland) with the whānau (families) situated around a marae (traditional gathering place), and where the residents were, apart from those who had married into the community, of the same hapū (sub-tribe) affiliation. Most of the members of the community belonged to and practised diligently the Ringatū religion (a Christian faith founded by the warrior chief Te Kooti) and had some facility in the Māori language (te reo Māori), although conversations with children were almost exclusively in English. Many of the kaumātua (elders) were bemused by our attempts to resurrect the use of te reo Māori among the children by encouraging them to speak the language in the classroom. The response of the elders was fairly typical: ‘When we were at school the teacher used to growl at us if we spoke our language and sometimes we even got strapped, and now you want to teach our moko and our tamariki to kōrero Māori [our grandchildren and children to speak Māori]. But what if you teachers change your minds again? Koina te mate o te kūware; kaore e mohio he aha te aha?’ (That’s the trouble when you don’t know anything ; you don’t know what’s what.)

I did not have a satisfactory answer for the kaumātua then and the proper reply still eludes me. They were expressing