Maori Education

In 1941 as part of the Centennial Surveys A.E.Campbell, later Director-General of Education, wrote Educating New Zealand. The word Maori does not appear in the index. The assumption behind his text was that education began in these islands when the settlers arrived. This is not true.

Human learning in Aotearoa began from the moment the first settlers waded ashore from their canoes. The new environment demanded it. I wonder what these new arrivals thought at their first sight of a moa. For centuries from their settlement Maori passed on received and acquired life skills and knowledge through an advanced oral tradition. The European arrival saw a new dimension, the written word. To spread their word the missionaries produced bibles and texts in the Maori language.

The colonists had a different agenda than the missionaries. Campbell says: 'He [the colonist] may, indeed, become more … than ever wedded to the old, for nostalgia is one of the dominant influences in his life, and culturally, and educationally, he is less interested in adapting himself to his new environment than in surrounding himself with the institutions and ideas that formed the background of his existence in the homeland. Especially is he concerned to give his children an education an education that will link them to the life he has known. Cultural continuity is to the colonist of even greater importance than practical adaptation. This is the key to the understanding of colonial life.'

Providing food and shelter meant improvisation, but education would be conservative. It perpetuated the class system of the homeland. My research into our nineteenth century poetry written in English brought home to me how strongly this mindset was embedded in British settler culture. Despite rhetoric about equality, our schools, especially secondary, perpetuated this division. A small "in-group" were treated as superior, privileged beings. Treated as successful they were successful.

After 1840 each English-speaking settlement developed its own system of education for its young people, all modelled upon the mother country. The churches were the main providers, though some individuals established fee-paying schools, while the wealthy employed private tutors. In 1847 Governor Grey promoted an idea an idea for “education of youth … in New Zealand.” Basically using the services of the three main missions he wanted to assist in the education of Maori children. The idea was never launched. The Wellington newspaper The Southern Cross was adamant in its criticism, “European and native youth cannot be educated together.”

The sectarian rivalry between the three missions complicated the provision of schooling which explains why in the first attempt at some coherence Nelson colony established a "free, compulsory and secular" scheme. In 1877, after much debate, Parliament transferred this approach into a national system for children between the ages of 7 and 13. The compulsory element did not include Maori although their children had the right to attend state schools.

Parallel to this system there were native village schools. In 1879, control was shifted from the Department of Native Affairs to the Education Department. At that stage there were 57 of these schools. By 1903 there were 103 schools. Use of the Maori language was actively discouraged, indeed forbidden even though in many cases it was the pupil’s only home language. That usage has been estimated as high as 96.6% as late as 1930. That year a group of teachers advocated that the Maori language be taught in these schools. The Director of Education, T. B. Strong responded, “the natural abandonment of the native tongue involves no loss on the Maori.”

There was clearly interflow between the two systems. My grandfather walked with his brothers and sisters over the hill from Okuti valley to the native school in Little River for schooling. His mother, an illiterate linen worker from Dundee, taught herself to read from their books. I recall watching her in her late 90s painstakingly reading the newspaper with a magnifying glass. One of her sons became a Cabinet minister in the Peter Fraser government and subsequently High Commissioner to Canberra.

Shortly after World War 11 ended the native school there was amalgamated into Little River main. Twenty-two years later – I had been secondary teaching for nine years – control of the last of the native schools was handed over to the local education boards.