Failed experiment should be left to die
THIS PAST week the Te Kohanga Reo national trust won a pyrrhic victory at the Waitangi Tribunal after the latter declared that the Government had been beastly to the former.
It’s pyrrhic because the preservation of the Maori language isn’t worth the hundreds of millions thrown at it if Maori don’t want to learn. And they don’t.
In fact, so lacking in confidence are Maori parents that they have abandoned kohanga reo in droves. From more than 14,000 kids in 1996, the trust caters for just 9000 preschoolers nationwide. That’s about one-in-five Maori kids of the relevant age.
Parents don’t send their kids for all sorts of reasons. But the most important is that, compared to other early childhood education centres, kohanga reo can’t cut it. They don’t have the staff, the curriculum, the professionalism or the facilities.
The Government, and its Ministry of Education, knows this. So it has been trying to upgrade the trust and its centres by setting proper educational standards, upskilling staff and making sure that the glorified baby-keepers were being weeded out.
The trust didn’t like this so it used its own Maoriness to fight the upgrade. Maori do Maori things in Maori ways, was their basic argument. You can’t treat us like other early childhood centres. We’re all about te reo and te whanau. Leave that honky stuff at the door.
Over the past generation, successive administrations have done just that. Which is one of the reasons Maori fail so badly in the education system. The silver bullet that was separateness has been proven not to be silver.
The truth is that kohanga reo is a failed experiment. It has failed to arrest the decline of Maori speakers, it has failed to uplift Maori educational standards and it has failed to properly engage Maori parents.
So my kid can speak te reo, they shrug. That’s not going to get them a job, except maybe teaching te reo to other kids. It’s a circular existence.
And even if all Maori were completely articulate and literate in their own language – again, so what? New Zealand is a country buffeted and bashed by international competition. Doing some feel-good cultural course of relevance only to one’s own culture is educational onanism. This is not to suggest that the Maori language isn’t worthy of preservation or even promotion. Rather that it should be allowed to find its own equilibrium rather than be kept in a coma and on a permanent transfusion of taxpayer funds.
One of the accepted virtues of the recent national standards release was that it confirmed just how much educational excellence is associated with ethnicity and culture. Long before secondary school, Maori kids lag behind other races in reading, writing and maths.
Letting the Te Kohanga Reo national trust argue that they should be somehow exempt from having a wider education imperative will only accentuate that failure. That’s their argument in a nutshell. We want to do our own thing with your money.
The Government’s response should be simple. Trust the majority of Maori parents. They have figured out that kohanga reo doesn’t work. Don’t continue to fund failure.