Kendall Clements is the corresponding author of the letter.

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The bigger issue is a basic problem of information asymmetry between the universities that “sell” research and education services and the students and taxpayers (represented by public commissioning agencies) that “buy” their services. They are not selling shampoo or even silicon chips. The 18 year-olds signing up for 3 to 5 years of debt and foregone earnings don’t know if they are being sold a lemon. If they peruse the public resources that supposedly help them choose a university, they are advised to consider the “vibes” of the place, along with amenities and support services. The internet bears traces of an earlier initiative to make information on degree costs and career outcomes available to students, but the promised ‘key indicators’ are so well-hidden I suspect they do not exist. There are no accessible, independent measures of how well  universities have taught their students. It is inherently hard to assess the value of university research. If it could be assessed on the basis of commercial outcomes, it would not need to be publicly funded. The case for public funding of both research and teaching is a strong one: there are enormous potential positive externalities to both. But only if the research and teaching are well done.

If the research and education are not well done, simply freeing the universities to compete and innovate will waste public and private resources. For a vision of such a future, we can see what has happened in the United Kingdom. There, attention tends to go to the small number of elite universities that enjoy high prestige. But freeing the system as a whole to compete and innovate on the basis of taxpayer-subsidized public lending to students has led to high fees, grade inflation, and a proliferation of mediocre degree programmes.

New Zealand universities are facing more than a cashflow crisis. In the words of one senior academic, ‘we no longer deliver on the most important part of what we promised.’ Why not?

Managerialism

The sector excels at regulations, policies, metrics and documentation requirements. Centralized, intrusive directives have created a compliance culture heavy on paperwork, processes, and performative quality assurance systems. This is likely one reason for the bureaucratic bloat that universities carry: New Zealand universities appear to lead the world in the ratio of non-academic to academic staff. Managerialism also diverts academic time. In some faculties, the number of academics with some sort of “dean-ship” or equivalent in their job title has increased nearly threefold in a decade. The compliance work affects all academics, making the creeping growth of managerialism an enormous barrier to quality and innovation at the coal face.

Moralism

Universities have become very preachy places. Moralistic goals adopted by university leaders are distorting almost every aspect of what we do. This moralism is often justified under the general banners of “equity”, “fairness” and “inclusion” which have been adopted across the English-speaking world. Here in New Zealand, we have a specific version driven by deference to the Treaty of Waitangi, which has become a trojan horse for politicization – as it must, in a country where very obviously there is no broad social or political consensus about the role of the Treaty. An agenda of  “indigenising” the university radically overturns the traditional mission of the university.

The moralism makes institutional neutrality – the idea that a university in its corporate form should not take sides on issues of current social and political contestation – impossible. Evident institutional non-neutrality erodes the credibility of teaching and research.

Moralism of the protective sort, that seeks to prevent “harm” and protect “wellbeing”, to promote “diversity” and “honour Te Tiriti”, also curtails academic freedom and freedom of expression. Not only does such moralism create an overall chilling effect on freedom of expression, it is given bite in official speech codes, research ethics requirements, promotion criteria and curriculum requirements. The university policies that put the decolonization agenda into the myriad managerial policy frameworks of the organization ‘invoke a particular, static, idea of the Treaty as if debate about it has been resolved’; they also place the individual academic in the peculiar position of being an agent of the Crown, unable to contest supposedly foundational Treaty principles as asserted by university management.

Disciplinary degradation

Academic disciplines are the guardians of knowledge. They are responsible for the gatekeeping that maintains standards and rigour. For a whole variety of reasons, including managerialism and moralism, the disciplines have become degraded as institutions for responsible, scientific gatekeeping. Moral agendas, rather than scientific merit, now overtly influence editorial policy at many major science journals, to the detriment of disciplinary rigour.

Epistemic relativism – the idea that there is no objective knowledge (even as something to pursue or work towards) and that science as a method of knowledge discovery is just one of many ‘knowledge systems’ or ‘ways of knowing’ – has moved from the fringes of the humanities and social sciences to take hold in much of the institutional apparatus of the university. Not all academic research is infected; much of the academy retains rigorous peer review processes.  But the creeping relativism makes it harder for those who want to defend disciplinary standards.

Institutional incoherence

It is impossible to see any strategic direction for the tertiary sector. The government’s tertiary education funding agency and watchdog, the TEC, has a “tertiary education strategy that talks about wellbeing, achievement, identity and other platitudes. It could be talking about the kindergarten sector. The other so-called guardian of our education system, the NZQA, is so agnostic about actual educational quality it will accredit colleges of wellbeing and homeopathy. The last government’s review of public sector science and research funding looked more concerned with embedding the Treaty of Waitangi across the entire science system than actually producing a more effective one. No wonder New Zealand suffers from long-term and severe educational mismatches: the percentage of the school leaving cohort going on to university has expanded hugely since the 1990s, but large areas of society suffer from critical skill shortages.

I initially thought of these problems as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, university-style. But on reflection, they haven’t come galloping up brandishing messages of doom. Instead, managerialism, moralism, disciplinary degradation and institutional incoherence are more like termites. They are largely invisible to outsiders and they silently eat away at the foundations of the university system.

There is still great value in our universities. I want to see the sector thrive and believe it has an essential role to play. But these termites function as de facto taxes on the research and education spend. And that’s the optimistic reading of the situation. The worst-case scenario is that they threaten to bring the whole house down.

This is an edited version of an address delivered by the author at a symposium on the Future of the Universities organized by the New Zealand Initiative, Wellington, 15 May 2024.

Photo by Roberto Carlos Román Don on Unsplash

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“our Polynesian ancestors could not have crossed the largest expanse of open water

on the planet without developing a deep knowledge of astronomy, astrology, science,

maths and engineering.

They called it Mātauranga, an indigenous view of the world that includes all of those

subjects we have lumped under the acronym Stem (Science, technology, engineering

and maths) in our schools.

But we need to be telling these stories in our schools to inspire our young people that

this thing we call Stem is in their DNA.”

It is unclear whether Sir Ian meant this literally as a genetic predisposition towards science, metaphorically as a cultural predisposition, or something else entirely, but suggesting that science “is in the DNA” of Māori is problematic for several reasons.

First, complex skills such as ocean navigation were not something that all Māori inherently possessed, but rather skills that were practised and taught by specialists. People skilled in traditional methods of oceanic navigation today such as Jack Thatcher must be fairly bemused at the idea that Māori are born with skills that it took them decades to master, and that they take such care and effort to pass on to others.

Second, why is it necessary that in order to participate in science, students must believe it’s “in their DNA”? Doesn’t this view encourage Māori kids to believe that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, rather than through their own efforts to learn and master it? Conversely, does Sir Ian think that there are races for whom science isn’t in their DNA? Does that mean that some races are inherently better at science than others? If not, what does it mean? 

Third, if Māori students are told that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, but then they don’t experience success in science, could this bring their identity as Māori into question because they’re not succeeding in something that they’re apparently supposed to be good at? In situations where children do not experience success in something they think they’re expected to, they tend to blame themselves. The ‘science is in our DNA’ narrative, then, may well harm motivation and self-efficacy,  which can in turn affect educational outcomes, and lead to further disengagement. Thus, while Sir Ian’s intentions were well meaning, the weight of expectation may have unintended negative consequences.

Fourth, there are some interesting corollaries to Sir Ian’s view. If Māori are genetically predisposed to science because some of their ancestors developed ocean navigation and fortifications, does that mean that they’re not predisposed to skills in which their ancestors did not engage traditionally, such as literacy? In other words, should Māori not be expected to be good at literacy because their ancestors didn’t have a history of it? Such a view is clearly complete nonsense (Māori had very high literacy rates by mid-nineteenth century), but it’s consistent with what Sir Ian is saying here.

Science as a field of discovery is fundamentally accessible to all humans, if they have the interest and aptitude and are prepared to accept its basic principles. This is the message we should be conveying to our young people. All peoples adapted to their environment by developing the technology needed to survive, whether they lived in the Kalahari Desert, the Arctic, the Amazonian rainforest or on islands in the Pacific. We all use technology each day, but few of us understand the science behind how it works. We need to know that technology works, but not necessarily how or why it works. Artisans have been making wine and cheese for thousands of years without understanding the microbiological and biochemical processes involved, only that they reliably happened. Science is about explaining natural phenomena such as these. If indigenous technological solutions are seen as science then science just becomes what people collectively learned to do to survive in their particular environments. In this sense, equating oceanic navigation with science misrepresents modern international science, which is based on a set of universal principles, practices and norms, and especially the notion that all empirical claims must be provisional and open to test. Sir Ian seems to understand the last of these, but if so, why don’t we teach the best available solutions to problems, whether they are traditional or not?

It’s hard to see Sir Ian’s reference to DNA as anything other than a form of no doubt inadvertent racism. This view is consistent with the ideology of identitarianism, where the best way to characterise someone is based on their identity group, not their individual character, abilities and attributes. In his book “Woke racism”, the African-American linguist John McWhorter refers to this viewpoint as neo-racism.

To be fair to Sir Ian, he is putting his money where his mouth is in education by materially supporting Māori students to participate in science. It’s all very well saying that Māori kids engage with his material, but is there any evidence that they come away with a better understanding of STEM than when taught without emphasising race? We agree with teaching an understanding of mātauranga Māori in our schools, but teaching it as science, and especially suggesting that some races are somehow better at science than others, is problematic. The one thing we can all agree on and work toward is that Māori children should have the same opportunity to engage with and excel in science as anyone else.

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The push to decolonise casts science as Western, and racist, and therefore antagonistic to Māori. Dubbing science as Western insults the many non-Westerners who contribute to science, and denies the role Middle Eastern, Chinese, Indian, and Arabic civilizations played in early science. Racism was indeed widespread in Europe in the colonial era, and science sometimes reflected that, but science depends on continual self-challenge and self-correction. Science itself has made the strongest case against the very idea of distinct “races” of humans, showing that we all recently evolved in Africa and that diversity is greater within than between populations. 

Some decolonisers claim, against the historical evidence, that reading, mathematics, and accuracy are “not a Māori thing” (for a critique, see here). The demonization of science and the deprecation of learning as Western and alien reduce the chances of young Māori students. The distinguished African-American linguist John McWhorter has recently argued that casting precision and learning as uncool or “white” has similarly limited the achievement of generations of Black students.

Ideas of decolonisation spread in New Zealand late in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, leading thinkers of colour are questioning that goal. The Nigerian scholar Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Professor of African Political Thought and Chair of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, has presented in his Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto (2014) what he calls “a no-holds-barred, full-throated defence of ‘modernity’ and why it offers Africa the most promising path for getting out of the ‘misery corner’ of the globe.” In 2021 his Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously earned praise from many leading scholars and champions of African and Asian advancement. The Ghanaian Ato Sekyi-Otu comments that “Táíwò shows that ‘decolonisation’ has become an idea promoting indiscriminate hostility to forms of thought and practice wrongly tarred with malign colonial auspices. The ironic result is a rhetoric that gives short shrift to African agency. It’s time to drop the erroneous conflations and recognise our right to inventive appropriation of the human commons.” The distinguished Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes about Táíwò’s book that: “To sloganise for cultural and ideological decolonisation is to deny history and agency to Africa.”

This resembles the points made by scholars of Māori descent when they stress Māori eagerness to read and write in the nineteenth century, or Māori incorporation of European knowledge into mātauranga Māori, or Māori leadership in the Suppression of Tohunga Act of 1909, or the crucial role of high Māori educational achievement in the present  (see the work of Melissa Derby (Ngāti Ranginui), Charles Royal (Ngāti Whanaunga, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Tamaterā and Ngā Puhi), Mere Roberts (Ngati Apakura, Ngati Hikairo), Michael Stevens, Atholl Anderson, and Te Maire Tau (all Ngāi Tahu)).

            If New Zealand students and New Zealand scientists are made to pledge allegiance to the contradictory falsehoods that mātauranga Māori is equivalent to science, on the one hand, but that science is Western and racist, on the other hand, and if bullies continue to secure disproportionate research funding for ideologues who make these claims, our students and scientists, including Māori, will suffer. Our science and education will become a laughingstock, and less able to attract the international cooperation and funding and the international student participation that offer the nation its best hopes of a future enriched by research and innovation. Parents who can afford private schooling or housing in zones where schools choose other qualifications than NCEA will opt out of mainstream schooling and widen the divide between Māori and non- Māori achievement.

            Mātauranga Māori reflects the skills of observation and experiment and the creative imagination of explanatory storytelling found in any traditional knowledge. It deserves to be preserved and researched and to be drawn on where local ecological knowledge can enrich science. But teaching it as science will harm science and both Māori and non-Māori students and divert from the real problems of educational underachievement pervasive in New Zealand.

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The term etymology refers to the linguistic origin of a word. An etymological fallacy is committed when the meaning of a modern word is taken to be the same as that of an old word from which it derives. 

Like many words in the English language, education has Latin roots. It comes from educere, which means, ‘to draw out’. Believers in certain progressive theories of education love this. They use it to commit the etiological fallacy. Often.  

“Education”, they say, “means to ‘draw out’, not to ‘put in’. So a teacher’s job must be to facilitate children teaching themselves. A teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage”. 

By committing an etymological fallacy of my own, I can prove them wrong. 

The etymology of teacher is the old English word, tæcan, which means to give instruction, train, assign or direct. Obviously then, a teacher’s job must be to do these things, not to ‘facilitate’.  

(Incidentally, the origin of facilitate, is another Latin word, facilis, which means ‘easy to do’. That might help to explain why progressive teachers like this approach so much.) 

A minor problem with the notion that children can teach themselves, is that they can’t. Not, at least, things that took the human race many thousands of years to work out – things like literacy, arithmetic and science. 

Progressive educators would like to avoid this problem by refocussing education on things that children can acquire without being directly taught. In the New Zealand Curriculum, these things are called ‘key competencies’.  

The key competencies include ‘managing self’, ‘relating to others’ and ‘participating and contributing’. Placing these things at the heart of the curriculum leaves teachers free to ‘facilitate’ and releases them from having to teach the hard stuff. 

I propose abolishing education and replacing it with edification. If we did, progressive educators committing etymological fallacies would cease to be a threat to children’s learning. 

The etymology of edify, also from Latin, is aedificare, which means to build or establish. Edification, then, is much more consonant with an etymological interpretation of teacher than education is. A teacher instructs, trains, assigns and directs, in order to build up and establish knowledge. 

If we’re going to commit etymological fallacies, let us at least choose ones that don’t entail wasting human potential. 

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As a philosopher, I’ve been following closely the debate regarding the ‘refreshed’ science curriculum in New Zealand schools. What interests me is the understanding of science that underlies the new curriculum. This is not clearly expressed in what I have seen of the Ministry’s proposals. But one of the most vigorous advocates of the new curriculum has been Rosemary (Rose) Hipkins, the mother of our Prime Minister, who in 2019 was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to science education. So I have turned to Hipkins’ writings, particularly her 2006 PhD thesis, which sets out a programme very similar to the one being proposed.

The question addressed by Hipkins’ thesis is how to teach students about ‘the nature of science’. (In a university context we call this ‘the philosophy of science’.) Her understanding of the nature of science is strongly influenced by writers in the field known as ‘Science and Technology Studies’ (STS). These writers focus on the day-to-day practice of science and the social and political contexts in which this practice is carried out. One of the most interesting of these writers was the late Bruno Latour. Latour’s work is extensively cited in Hipkins’ thesis and she credits it as her primary starting point. So if we want to understand the conception of science that underlies the new curriculum, it is a good place to begin.

Latour is best known for what is called ‘actor-network theory’. According to this theory, the practice of science is not a purely intellectual endeavour, but is sustained by ‘networks’. These networks are made up of human beings, the objects with which they are interacting, and the social and political institutions of the surrounding society. Latour is also an advocate of a ‘relational ontology’, in which objects do not pre-exist the relations into which they enter. Things are what they are – they have a particular identity – only because of those relations. Coupling his actor-network theory with a relational ontology, Latour suggests that the practice of science helps to create the objects it investigates. When scientists studying the body of Ramses II claimed that the Pharaoh had died of tuberculosis, Latour suggested this could not be true, since the scientific practices that co-create the tuberculosis bacterium did not exist in ancient Egypt.

Latour was much criticized for that suggestion and he later admitted it may have gone too far. (Latour’s career was marked by outrageous claims, which he would later qualify.) But remarks like this show how easily Latour’s ‘actor-network’ understanding of science can go off the rails. It is in particular danger of going off the rails when it comes to the question of science and politics. The practice of science does involve interactions between people, objects, and institutions. Some of the institutions involved are political. So it is not surprising that politics can play a role in science, even to the point of influencing its theories. (To take a famous example, Darwin’s account of competition in the natural world may be influenced by the competitive spirit of British capitalism.) But this need not mean, as Latour once remarked, that science is merely ‘politics pursued by other means’. Taken at face value, this would suggest that science is not an attempt to understand our world; it is merely one of the arenas in which humans engage in political struggles.

Hipkins does not explicitly endorse this view, but she appears to believe that the teaching of science should have a political dimension. Using one of Latour’s distinctions, Hipkins argues that science teaching should begin with ‘matters of concern’ rather than ‘matters of fact’. (The four subject areas of the proposed new curriculum – earth science, biodiversity, the food-energy-water nexus, and infectious diseases – are matters of concern.) A traditional approach to science teaching would begin with matters of fact and leave matters of concern for discussion outside the science classroom. With regard to climate change, for instance, it would help students understand the science that studies the climate, while setting aside the question of what we should do. But if science teachers start with matters of concern, they will be faced immediately with ethical and political judgements, a consequence Hipkins seems to welcome. She suggests, for instance, that the learning of science should give rise to political action. As she writes, it is not what can be tested by an exam, but ‘what students do in the world’ that is the ultimate test of their learning.

Hipkins backs this up with the idea of ‘ontological politics’, which comes from the work of John Law. Latour’s theory is an instance of what Hipkins calls a ‘participatory epistemology’, which holds that we participate in creating the objects of our knowledge. But if this is true, questions about scientific practice are not merely questions about discovering how the world is. They are questions about ‘what there should be in the world, about politics or ethics’. In Hipkins’ words, science ‘should work towards making some versions of reality more “real” while eroding others’. It follows that the practice of science is inseparable from politics; science apparently is politics pursued by other means.

What are we to make of these ideas? I would certainly include them in a philosophy of science course. But I would also include the criticisms that have been made of them. Some criticisms relate to the idea that the practice of science co-creates the objects it studies. It is easy to see that social science can shape its objects. As the philosopher Ian Hacking has argued, human behaviour is very susceptible to ‘feedback effects’. The very naming and describing of a psychological condition, for instance, can lead people to act it out. But the natural world – the world studied by physics and chemistry – is more resistant to our practices. One can also criticize Latour’s focus on matters of concern. The seventeenth-century founders of modern science chose to focus exclusively on matters of fact, regarding ethical, political, and religious debates as beyond the scope of their inquiries. This enabled individuals of widely differing ethical, political, and religious views to work together. One could argue that focusing on matters of concern risks fracturing the scientific community (or a school science class) along political lines.

Hipkins’ approach to science education owes something to the tradition of ‘critical theory’, developed by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. One of the founding texts of this movement was Max Horkheimer’s essay contrasting ‘traditional theory’ and ‘critical theory’. Traditional theory is marked by a detachment from politics and a separation of knowing subject and known object, while critical theory recognizes the knower’s involvement in the historical process and seeks to reshape society. But Horkheimer was not advocating that we replace a detached science with a politically committed one. In his view, traditional science would remain important, for it plays an essential role in contributing to our knowledge of both the natural world and society. Latour’s view of science, by way of contrast, can be understood as collapsing science into politics.

The problem with Hipkins’ thesis is criticisms of this kind are barely mentioned. A particular view of science is presented as though it were established and uncontroversial. It is this that really worries me. Teachers could, in principle, do in high schools what I do at the university. They could present students with a variety of views about the nature of science, of which Latour’s would be only one. But school students barely have time to learn the basic principles of science, without grappling with difficult philosophical questions. Nor are most science teachers trained to deal with them. What worries me is that the ‘refreshed’ curriculum will not so much discuss this controversial view of science, as take it for granted, embedding it in the topics it covers and questions it asks. This really would be a tragedy. Inculcating controversial views in ways that do not allow them to be discussed is indoctrination, not education.

Greg Dawes has published extensively on relations between science and religion.  He teaches philosophy at the University of Otago.

Cover image by by Clint Patterson on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/CgIFBwOkApI

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Revolutionary moves to decolonise mainstream education are outlined in two Ministry of Education documents. 

‘Te Hurihanganui  A Blueprint for Transformative Systems Shift’ confidently asserts that ‘through decolonisation of the education system Māori potential will be realised’ while the Curriculum Refresh also prescribes a hearty dose of the same medicine.  

Decolonisation, according to Te Hurihanganui ‘means recognising white privilege, understanding racism, inequity faced by Māori and disrupting that status quo to strengthen equity’. There will be opportunities for an expansion of the decolonisation cadre as ‘Māori exercise authority and agency over their mātauranga, tikanga and taonga’. 

The Curriculum Refresh, meanwhile, proposes that ‘knowledge derived from Te Ao Māori will sit at the heart of each learning area, along with other knowledge-systems that reflect the cultural uniqueness of Aotearoa New Zealand.’

Decolonisation is a key strategy of He Puapua’s ethno-nationalism agenda. Political categories based on racial classification are to be inserted into New Zealand’s institutions. In education this means that the universal, secular system set up by the 1877 Education Act will be replaced with a radically different system based on two racial categories – Māori and non-Māori, despite the fact that such categories deny the reality of both New Zealand’s multi-ethnic population and Māori  multi-ethnicity. According to 2018 census over 45 percent of those identifying as Māori also identified with two ethnic groups with approximately 7 percent identifying with three ethnic groups. Some Māori families have a parent who does not identify as Māori. 

While decolonisation is underway in all the nation’s institutions, education is the key ideological institution. The Curriculum Refresh’s ‘other knowledge-systems’ approach re-defines academic knowledge as just another knowledge-system, rather than what it actually is – the universal knowledge developed across the disciplines and altered for teaching at school. 

Destroying confidence in the science-culture distinction, a distinction which is one of the defining features of the modern world, will be decolonisation’s most significant and most dangerous victory. According to the International Science Council, science is ‘the systematic organization of knowledge that can be rationally explained and reliably applied. It is inclusive of the natural (including physical, mathematical and life) science and social (includingbehavioural and economic) science domains . . .  as well as the humanities, medical, health, computer and engineering sciences.

In contrast, culture is the values, beliefs and practices of everyday life – the means by which children are socialised into the family and community. For a Māori child, this may well involve immersion in marae life – or it may not.  But the experiences of everyday life should not be confused with the ideology of cultural indoctrination, what I call culturalism or traditionalism and others call decolonisation. It is this ideology which is permeating the government, universities and research institutes, the Royal Society Te Apārangi, and mainstream media. Here we are presented with an idealised Māori culture of what should be, not what it actually is.  

Indeed, the spiritual is a central theme in decolonisation. The belief is promoted that Māori are a uniquely spiritual people with a mauri or life force providing the link to their ancestors – the  genetic claim for racial categorisation. Political rights for the kin-group are justified in this claim.

However the evidence does not support an idealised picture of Māori spirituality. According to the 2018 census 53.5 percent of those identifying with Māori ethnicity had no religious affiliation. The number identifying with Māori religious, beliefs and philosophies is small and declining, from about 12 percent in 2006 to 7 percent in 2018. As more Māori enter the professional class it is likely that this trend will continue. 

Given that over 50 percent of Māori already have no religious affiliation, it is doubtful that there is a constituency for a spiritual-based education. This is where decolonisation plays its part with Te Hurihanganui and the refreshed curriculum promoting the ideological version of culture. Those hesitant Māori who are suspicious of the ideology will be outed as ‘colonised’, in obvious need of decolonisation. Those who are now racially positioned on the other side, officially the non-Māori, will require decolonisation to ensure support for the new moral and political order. Numerous consultants are already on hand to provide this profitable reprogramming service. Intransigent dissenters, who determinedly refuse the correct thinking will be ostracised as fossilised racists and bigots.  

The tragedy is that this decolonising racialised ideology will destroy the foundations of New Zealand’s modern prosperous society. The principles of universalism and secularism are its pillars in education as elsewhere. Academic knowledge is different from cultural knowledge because it is universal and secular. We could certainly live without this knowledge – our ancestors did,  but would we want to? 

The formidable task of acquiring even a small amount of humanity’s intellectual canon is made even more complex and remote because abstractions are only available to us as symbols – verbal, alphabetical, numerical, musical, digital, chemical, mathematical – creating two layers of difficulty. While it is unsurprising that the much easier education using practices derived from action rather than abstraction is more attractive, to take this path, as teachers are required to do, is a mistake.

We humans are made intelligent through long-term systematic engagement with such complex knowledge. Yet decolonisers reject the fundamental difference between science and culture claiming instead that all knowledge is culturally produced, informed by a group’s beliefs and experiences, and geared to its interests. Indigenous knowledge and ‘western’ knowledge are simply cultural systems with academic education re-defined as the oppressive imposition of the latter on the former. 

What is deeply concerning is the extent to which this ideology is believed by those in education and uncritically repeated in mainstream media. A secondary school principal is quoted describing the ‘dangers of prescribing a powerful knowledge curriculum’. Such an ‘Eurocentric’ approach is ‘a colonial tool of putting old western knowledge ahead of indigenous communities’ rather than an emancipatory knowledge that liberates Westernised, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, African and indigenous groups.  Elsewhere another teacher goes further, calling educational success ‘white success’ and in opposition to succeeding ‘as Māori’ – which, to follow this logic, would mean not learning English or reading. There can be only one solution in this scenario – replace the oppressor’s knowledge through the comprehensive decolonisation programme now revolutionising New Zealand education. 

It does however put limits on how it is included. Students can be taught in social studies, history, and Māori Studies about the traditional knowledge that Te Hurihanganui describes as the “rich and legitimate knowledge located within a Māori worldview’. But this is not induction into belief and ideological systems. The home and community groups are for induction into cultural beliefs and practices.

What about the proto-science (pre-science) in all traditional knowledge – such as traditional navigation, medicinal remedies, and food preservation? This knowledge, acquired through observation and trial and error, as well as through supernatural explanation, along with the ways it may have helped to advance scientific or technological knowledge, is better placed in history of science lessons rather than in the science curriculum.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. Its concepts refer to the theorised structures and properties of the physical world, its methods are those of hypothesis, testing and refutation, its procedures those of criticism and judgement. 

The inclusion of cultural knowledge into the science curriculum will subvert the fundamental distinction, one acknowledged by mātauranga Māori scholars, between naturalistic science and supernaturalistic culture. Ironically, decolonisation ideology is justified using the universal human rights argument for equity. But the equity case misrepresents the problem. As with all groups, it is not ethnic affiliation but class-related cultural practices that are the main predictors of educational outcomes. Māori children from professional families are not failing. Rather it is those, Māori and non-Māori alike, living in families experiencing hardship and not engaging in cognitive practices of abstract thinking and literacy development, who are most likely to fail at school. This is not inevitable. Education can make a difference to a child’s life chances but it requires all schools, Māori medium immersion and mainstream alike, to provide quality academic knowledge taught by expert teachers. 

Te Hurihanganui’s claim that ‘the Blueprint is based on evidence of what works for Māori in education’ gives no indication that the evidence is seriously compromised. Are Māori students in full immersion Māori education (MME) more successful than those in mainstream schools? At first glance this claim does appear substantiated. In 2020, 83.7 percent of Māori students in MME attained NCEA Level 2 compared to 71.8 percent in English medium education. However the numbers of students in each school type reveal a different picture. According to 2021 figures, 8,056 (4.3 percent) of Māori students attended Māori immersion schools where 51 percent or more of the instruction is in the Māori language. Another 29,499 Māori students (15.7 percent) are in mixed medium education with varying degrees of Māori language immersion or instruction. A full 80 percent (150,318 Māori students) attend English language or mainstream schools. 

Given the sizeable difference between the numbers of Māori students in mainstream schools and those in full and mixed immersion education combined, any comparison should be considered unreliable, even meaningless. In addition, a nuanced comparison would need to compare the NCEA Level 2 subjects taken by Māori students.  The extent of abstraction in a subject creates varying degrees of difficulty, something found, for example, in the difference between physics and communication studies. 

Do parents of Māori children want a decolonised cultural-based education system? Here too, the evidence suggests otherwise. Under 5 percent of Māori students attend full immersion education where over 50 percent of instruction is in the Māori language. Even the flagship kohanga reo is in long-term decline from a peak of 767 kohanga in 1996 to 434 in 2021. 

The 1990 Education Act established kura kaupapa Māori recognising its founders’ aims – to increase Māori achievement, to contribute to the revival of the Māori language, and to produce bilingual and bicultural citizens for New Zealand. 

However the citizenship aim, one based on the democratic principle of the universal human being, cannot be met by a decolonising agenda. The universal and secular principles of the 1877 Education Act were intended to create a collective consciousness – the People of New Zealand as the Act’s title states – for a racially and culturally diverse population. 

The exemptions in the 1877 Act reveal a fledgling liberal culture, a mix of idealism and pragmatism now recognisable as a distinctively New Zealand character. Parents who objected to Protestant history lesssons could remove their children from class. Māori opposed to government provision were exempted from compulsion. Private and church schools were permitted and a pragmatic accommodation for the country’s climate and geography, and for the regular outbreaks of disease, can be seen in flexible attendance regulations. 

The separation of public and private, of society and community, makes room for both science and local culture. (The recent commonplace practice of using ‘community’ for ‘society’ is one of a number of indications that the separation is being undermined.) Valuing culture and devaluing science in a merger of the two fatally undermines the universalism and secularism that creates and maintains a cohesive society out of many ethnicities and cultures.

Decolonisation will indeed divide society into two groups – but not that of coloniser and colonised locked into the permanent oppressor-victim opposition used to justify ethno-nationalism. Instead one group will comprise those who receive an education in academic subjects. These young people will proceed to tertiary study with a sound understanding of science, mathematics, and the humanities. Their intelligence will be developed in the long-term and demanding engagement with this complex knowledge. It is to be hoped, though this cannot be assumed, that they will have the critical disposition required for democratic citizenship, one that is subversive of local culture and disdainful of ideology.

The second group comprises those who remain restricted to the type of knowledge acquired from experience and justified in ideologies of local culture. Distrustful of academic knowledge as colonising and oppressive, ethnically-based cultural beliefs and practices will provide the community needed for social and psychological security. In this restricted world they are insiders. And as there are insiders, there must be outsiders – in traditionalist ideologies these are the colonists who are seen to have taken everything and given nothing.

A revolution is coming. The government’s transformational policies for education make this clear. It will only be stopped by a re-commitment to academic knowledge for all New Zealand children, rich and poor alike, within a universal and secular education system. Colonisation is not the problem and decolonisation is not the solution.

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It is no secret that Māori learners experience disproportionately low outcomes in literacy (i.e. reading and writing) compared with their non-Māori peers. Research says that such outcomes can have a far-reaching and long-lasting impact on a child, both in terms of their formal educational experiences and outcomes, and beyond. In fact, studies are quite clear about the impact that low literacy skills, particularly at school-entry age, can have on a child’s outcomes later in life – affecting their health, standard of living, employment opportunities, and engagement in civic and community affairs, to name but a few areas.

Does all this sound rather depressing? Well, it should. New Zealand’s literacy rates are in free-fall, and Māori learners, mostly those who come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, are over-represented in the group of children who are not achieving well. (NB: those Māori learners who underperform in literacy do not do so because they are Māori. The reasons for particular outcomes are numerous, varied, and complex – and are for another blog!) In light of this overrepresentation, and with an awareness of the significant impact that poor literacy skills can have on a child’s life far beyond reading a school journal with their peers in the classroom, the need for fundamental change in a range of contexts is stark.

Resistance to reading and writing

With all of this in mind, I had a goal when I entered academia that I’m sure most early career researchers have when they start out – to change the world! – in my case, at least, to change it for those children who struggle with learning to read. I had (and continue to have) a particular focus on supporting Māori children and whānau with early literacy, so that these children start school with the best possible chance of success in reading. I didn’t think I’d encounter any resistance to such an effort.

So it was a jaw-dropping reaction from me when I was first met with resistance – this in the form of a query about why I was “bothering with Māori kids learning to read?” followed by a catchy one-liner: “Literacy”, I was told, “is not a Māori thing”. My jaw hit the floor. Other gems along the way have included a suggestion that “to insist Māori children learn to read is an act of colonisation”, and that “Māori children speak and learn with their hands not books” – so why, some asked, wasn’t I focussing on that rather than on reading?

Deficit discourses about Māori (even ones that are ostensibly benevolent) are rife and often erroneous. In light of report after report highlighting the overrepresentation of Māori children in the cohort of learners that have lower literacy skills, to suggest that literacy experiences and outcomes for Māori children is “not something we ought to be concerned about” is baffling at best, and wicked at worst. In fact, acclaimed academic Thomas Sowell argues that for many children, a good education is often their only hope of changing their trajectory in life. It makes no sense not to be concerned about the disproportionate number of Māori children who struggle with literacy, especially when a high standard of literacy is a key ingredient in positive educational experiences and outcomes.

Literacy is most definitely “a Māori thing”

As I mentioned, even though we increasingly live in a world where to repeat something often makes it true, endless assertions of deficit discourses about Māori cannot be substituted for solid evidence. What the historical record shows is that literacy is indeed “a Māori thing” and is not a uniquely Western competency. Further, to be concerned with ensuring Māori children are achieving well in reading is not an act of colonisation, as some suggest.

When Pākehā settlers began arriving in New Zealand in the early nineteenth century, they brought with them a multitude of different technologies, ranging from agricultural tools and household items, to new forms of storing knowledge. The arrival of the written word had a significant influence on tribal groups, changing the exclusively oral nature of Māori society and even altering previously entrenched social hierarchies.

Māori actively embraced print culture, reading, and books, and did so at an astonishingly rapid rate. Learning that occurred after mission schools were established flooded into communities – the more literate Māori became, the more their perceptions and knowledge expanded; and the more their perceptions and knowledge expanded, the higher the demand for reading materials was.

Accounts of the speed and enthusiasm with which Māori adopted literacy are manifold. For example, an early trader observed: “If one native in a tribe can read and write, he will not be long in teaching the others. The desire to obtain this information engrosses their whole thoughts, and they will continue for days with their slates in their hands”. In 1834, it was recorded in the Missionary Register that “the writing of the senior classes was really much better than that of most schoolboys in England” (p. 60). And that: “Such is the wish of many of the Natives to learn to read, that on several occasions they have brought pigs, which would weigh from fifty to an hundred pounds, and offered them as payment for a book.” (Missionary Register, 1834, p. 119). In fact, Māori literacy prowess was such that at the turn of the 20^th century, Māori had proportionately higher rates of literacy than Pākehā.

Literacy has been entrenched in Māori society for more than 200 years, meeting needs that range from serving a political purpose to reading purely for pleasure. Literacy is not solely a Western competency, and Māori striving for excellence in literacy is not an act of modern-day colonisation. Instead, what the evidence shows is that literacy is a skill at which Māori have excelled, and can excel, without compromising their identity as Māori. I challenge us to be conscious of the discourses underpinning statements related to Māori learners, however well-meaning those statements might be, and reiterate that literacy is indeed “a Māori thing” – both historically and in contemporary times.

The post “Literacy is not a Māori thing”: Debunking the deficit discourse appeared first on Open Inquiry.