New Zealand is too small for separate natural history or ethnographic museums.  Instead, the four largest museums (in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin) are encyclopaedic general museums where science (natural history, e.g. botany, zoology, geology) and culture (human history, e.g. ethnology, history, applied arts) must co-habit.  Among their duties these museums must prominently promote their science half.  Science museums (and therefore the science part of encyclopaedic museums) have “an ethical responsibility to safeguard scientific integrity” and need “loyalty to facts and evidence.” 

Politicisation of museums

New Zealand museums have increasingly embraced identity politics.  This is evident in many museum planning documents.  Future Museum, Auckland Museum’s 2012 “strategic vision”, for example, includes two major policy documents, He Korahi Māori: a Māori Dimension, and Teu Le Va: Pacific Dimension.  The latter offers “pathways of acknowledgement and inclusiveness” within the museum, based on the idea that “Pacific people have a special place in Aotearoa.”  No other ethno-cultural groups get their own guiding documents. 

He Korahi Māori ensures a Māori dimension in “all of the museum’s plans and activities”.  What might this mean?  It is hard to imagine a Māori dimension to an exhibition of English pewter or Chinese porcelain, when pre-contact Māori society had no metals or pottery.  Importantly, He Korahi Māori overlooks that specific cultural dimensions have little relevance to science in museums.  This is because the scientific method serves to overcome the limitations of local cultural perspectives by inviting criticism from everywhere.  There is only one version of science, which is universal and understood internationally.  Investigations or findings are either science, open to any informed criticism, or not science.  Science has no shielded local or cultural varieties.  Despite Hitler and Stalin, there is no “Aryan science” or “communist science” with special bodies of protected knowledge.

Many museum planning documents push a particular view of the Treaty of Waitangi, and any perceived principles of the Treaty are political.  The original 1840 “Articles Treaty” can be distinguished from the recently-developed “Principles Treaty“.  The contemporary reinterpretation of the Treaty as a “partnership”, favoured by the political Left, is contestable.  Former Labour prime minister David Lange stated: “The treaty [of Waitangi] cannot be any kind of founding document, as it is sometimes said to be.  …  The Court of Appeal once, absurdly, described it as a partnership between races, but it obviously is not”. 

Auckland Museum’s administration now talks about challenging “colonial narratives” and making the museum “tikanga-led” (led by Māori culture, values and knowledge).  I checked word-counts in the two most recent annual plans of Auckland Museum and annual reports of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington).  All four documents show the same pattern: culture is privileged and science marginalised.  The word “science” appears 0–5 times in each document and science words like zoology, botany and archaeology get 0–2 mentions.  Meanwhile, the documents are swamped with cultural key words: Māori (44–81 mentions per document), iwi (= Māori tribes, 16–43), culture (9–37), mātauranga (= Māori knowledge, 7–26).  Te Papa’s recently-developed natural history exhibition gives further signs of ideological positioning.

Te Papa’s natural history gallery

In tandem with their large natural science research collections, museums provide secular space for major long-term natural history exhibitions presenting evidence-based explanations of the natural world.  These exhibitions contribute to a world-wide intellectual movement to advance science, a mission bigger than, and different from, parochial political or cultural concerns.  Museums may mount temporary exhibitions with different disciplines combined for special effect, but core, long-term galleries generally cover single broad subjects. 

Te Papa disrupted this traditional arrangement, when in 2019 it unveiled a new principal natural history gallery (Te Taiao / Nature).  Instead of devoting Te Taiao / Nature exclusively to science, as in the natural history galleries it replaced, Te Papa incorporated Māori cultural material throughout, to contrive a novel science-culture gallery.  Spiritual beliefs now sit alongside scientific knowledge.  To be clear, it is thoroughly appropriate that museum displays cover mātauranga Māori.  My objection is to the shifting of the Māori view of nature from ethnographic galleries (Te Papa has two permanent Māori galleries) to science galleries.  I question the asymmetry whereby human history galleries continue to present just culture, but science galleries now get one local cultural system mixed in with universal science.

Te Taiao / Nature is a new “nature and environment zone” that explains the natural world “through mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) alongside science”.  Exhibition developers refer throughout to the demigod Maui, who “can shapeshift into a bird, a lizard”.  “He helps us understand the nuances of Te Taiao [nature] from a Māori perspective.”  The Māori view of nature makes no distinction between nature and culture and includes mythology and spirituality (Roberts, M. Auckland Museum Annual Report 1999–2000: 45–47).  So, labels in Te Taiao / Nature state, for example, that the jostling of tectonic plates is “the shifting of Ruaumoko, god of earthquakes”.  A “mauri stone placed by a hinaki [eel trap] kept eels thriving”.  The creation story of Maui fishing up the North Island gets a mention.  

Museums need to maintain academic standards but Te Taiao / Nature makes a category error.  Mātauranga Māori is the counterpart, not of science, but of the folklore about nature that all societies around the world developed from their beginnings.  Modern science emerged before and during the European and North American Enlightenment, transcending local folkloric explanations of the natural world and becoming an international system.  Mixing parochial mātauranga Māori and international science may confuse visitors and undermine young people’s developing understanding of science.  Local academics have recently noted, for example, that science and mātauranga are “intrinsically contradictory approaches to knowledge that resist both combination and interrogation of one by the other” (Anderson, A. 2021, [Letter to the editor], Listener 277(4211): 6–7) and that placing science and indigenous knowledge alongside each other “does disservice to the coherence and understanding of both” (Ahdar et al. 2024, World science and indigenous knowledge [letter], Science 385(6705): 151–152).  Putting a system that depends on unrestricted openness to criticism, as if on a par with a system that depends on protection from criticism in the interests of faithful transmission, is problematic.

By putting the Māori view of nature in the single science gallery, Te Papa seems to promote the postmodernist ideas that there are no universal truths and that all knowledge is culturally derived.  This confused and simplistic ideology seeks to undermine science and other narratives construed as Eurocentric and colonial.  Te Taiao / Nature implies by its mixed content that science is unremarkable—just one of many equivalent world views—and that indigenous “ways of knowing” are somehow equivalent to science.  By shrinking its science contribution in this way, Te Papa wavers from its truth-seeking mission.

Risk to reputation

Until recently, science remained unaffected by postmodernism, an ideology that many consider has damaged the humanities.  The imposition of postmodern views in the science sphere is a serious concern that scientists must oppose (Krauss 2024, Alan Sokal’s joke is on us as postmodernism comes to science, Wall Street Journal). 

To protect their public credibility and reputations, here are three suggestions for New Zealand museums:  1.  Regain political neutrality in your organisational viewpoints.  2.  Restore science and science thinking to its equal place as a core museum component alongside culture.  3.  Maintain or restore science galleries, which by definition can present only knowledge, not a mixture of knowledge and belief.

Museums could choose to continue traditional pride in the universals of science and world cultural heritages alongside increasing support for the renaissance in Māori culture and knowledge.  This does justice to all and minimises reputational risk.  They should avoid the fashionable politics of aggrandising one while playing down another.  Making science exhibitions share space with cultural content, and challenging “colonial” narratives, is risky.  If politicians, donors, and the visiting public tire of a bias of culture over science, then visitation and funding may be threatened.

Brian Gill has a PhD in zoology from the University of Canterbury.  He was Curator of Land Vertebrates at Auckland Museum for 30 years.  Brian publishes in ecology and palaeontogy and has undertaken field-work in New Zealand, Australia and Pacific Islands.]

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As Johnston and Kierstead have described, in New Zealand our ratio of non-academic to academic staff of 1.5 to 1 is much higher than in Australia, the UK, or the USA (where it is about 0.8 to 1). If research-only staff are treated as academic staff this ratio still only improves to 1.4 to 1. Numerous “managers” and support staff have appeared in areas such as Human Resources, Health and Safety, Student Learning Support and Pastoral Care, Outreach, Māori and Pasifika directorates, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

This growing administrative cost has to some extent been offset by the growth in international student business. By 2019, over 117,000 enrolled students delivered the country a total economic benefit of around $5Bn. University international 2019 student fee revenue was about $600m, or around 15% of universities’ total revenue.  International students pay up to five times the domestic student fee rate. Covid-19 dramatically reduced the number of international students studying within New Zealand, though partly replaced by students enrolled for on-line studies. Mid-2020, universities faced a year-end financial shortfall from lost international enrolments of about $200m, and this was expected to rise to $400m in 2021. The financial hangover for the universities has been major, damaging, and aggravated by financial commitments to ongoing new building projects.

Looking now at what and how we teach, it is usual for the universities to periodically rationalise their course offerings with the aim of greater administrative efficiency and to contain costs, particularly where courses may have low enrolment numbers. I note at the outset that what is important is not necessarily the low enrolments in a particular course, but the total of the taught Equivalent Full-Time Student (EFTS) count for each academic staff member. Many courses are important but will have low enrolments because they are specialised, or they are pitched at postgraduate level. A staff member’s personally attributable EFTS, added up over their undergraduate and postgraduate teaching plus supervision commitments, tells us how much they earn for the university. Most academics who teach large enrolment courses teach small enrolment courses too. This reality should be part of the analysis in current curriculum transformation projects. If a narrow view is taken simply of the enrolment numbers per course, the richness and diversity of course offerings will be damaged.

A critical and controversial factor in the current course rationalisation exercises is the increasing pressure to include courses that reflect relativist postmodern views (“other ways of knowing”) and Te Ao Māori (specifically matauranga Māori), even within science programmes. This situation raises questions that must be answered.

The University of Auckland has stated, “The rationale is to reduce workload to allow time to develop relational pedagogies, to address timetabling constraints, and to reduce costs….”.  One can infer that “relational pedagogies”, mean relativist views that come through in traditional knowledge courses, for example, where we are seeing courses offered in science programmes that do not strictly stand the test of being taught science, but instead may deliver a mix of observational knowledge, cultural lore, myth, mysticism and animism or vitalism. Most of us support the inclusion of such content in history, sociology or anthropology courses, but not in the Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) area. This situation comes into closer focus if such courses are intended to replace pre-existing science courses, as appears to be the case.

As one colleague at the University of Auckland said, “It’s quite extraordinary that we are launching a course called “Epistemological justice: indigenising STEM” while at the same time we’re being forced to cut science courses.”  

There is a clear logical fallacy in any university course that seeks to indigenise STEM:

• As regards STEM subjects, when European colonists arrived in the late 18^th and into the 19^th century, Māori scientific/technical knowledge was approximately at the stage of other developing societies at or pre-3,000 BC, acknowledging that the spiritual/vitalist/animist parts of matauranga Māori would have been differentiated form those of other societies by the names for, and qualities ascribed to, flora, fauna and inanimate objects, and also to gods such as Ranginui/sky father.  This was a society without the wheel, and without mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, but which had extensive phenomenological understandings of food sources, that fire cooks and can cause burns, that clean water is necessary for life, that some plants have medicinal properties, weather patterns, and navigation by the sun and stars, etc. Such knowledge is of very considerable interest from a historical point of view, clearly desirable to preserve for cultural reasons, but of current relevance to STEM courses only if it complements modern science in a functional way, as unpalatable as that is to those who would include it.
• STEM rests heavily on knowledge discovered during the liberal enlightenment from the 17^th century up to today, and modern science (not “Western” science, as many non-Western societies Asia, the Middle and the far East contributed, for example) went through similar earlier processes of knowledge development through observation of nature and phenomenological discovery, as did matauranga Māori.  It then developed through new discovery to the present day.
• Unless it adds science content to a STEM degree programme, to insert matauranga Māori or other indigenous knowledge back into modern STEM education means excluding something else that had been deemed important in any one course, with older knowledge and belief that has long been superseded in the same way in which Mechanical Engineering students no longer study the steam engine – as I confess we did when I was a student!  STEM course content is continually updated to reflect the latest scientific discoveries, computational techniques, and the advent of AI, for example.  When I was a student, we were learning about how transistors worked, as they were then a recent development. By contrast, we spent little time on obsolescent radio valve technology. Why should we be obliging students to study something in the sciences that should be sitting in a course outside modern science (e.g. history, history of science, anthropology). Abbot et al., in “In Defense of Merit in Science” compare liberal epistemology, under which the scientific method falls, versus critical social justice theory, where indigenous and traditional knowledge find a more comfortable home. To “indigenise” STEM can only mean to re-introduce older knowledge and belief into courses where it is no longer relevant. This in my view can only be for ideological or political purposes, as otherwise it defies logic.

My foregoing remarks are not intended to diminish or disrespect traditional knowledge. However, curricula in STEM degree programmes are constantly under pressure to introduce new content and drop material that can be let go.  Even this is problematic, and past considerations have been given to increasing the Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) from four to five years to avoid dropping essential content.  In our modern world we cannot afford to impose traditional knowledge content in science programmes for purely ideological reasons (or to determine academic staff career progression based on their acceptance or adoption of this ideological position).  Apart from the potential diminishment of the overall scientific content of the degree, doing so will inevitably reduce the standing of these degree programmes internationally.

Photo by Ram Kishor on Unsplash

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Any edifice that rests on the shifting sands of contemporary academic fashion is bound sooner or later to fall. The university of the future will, paradoxically, need to offer its students an education with deeper historical roots

Ferguson and Howland

Compulsory Courses at the University of Auckland

The University of Auckland is set to deliver courses entitled ‘Waipapa Taumata Rau’. All students must complete a Waipapa Taumata Rau core course in their first year of study. 

The university website informs us that ‘Waipapa Taumata Rau’ is the Māori name gifted to the University of Auckland and that the relevant courses are called by this name to symbolize students’ aspirations as they seek to be a part of the University and to succeed in their studies. 

 “Designed to transition you into University life, your Waipapa Taumata Rau course provides knowledge vital to your studies and essential skills (like critical and ethical thinking, effective communication, and the ability to work well with others).

Each faculty course teaches you why place matters, introducing you to knowledge associated with the University, the wider city, this country, and its people and history, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

You’ll learn about different knowledge systems that underpin your area of study to provide a foundation for your future learning. Your Waipapa Taumata Rau core course will play a key role in shaping your first year of study with us.

Completion is required to progress into your second year of study where you will have opportunities to build on what you have learned.”

Some of the material does seem very relevant, especially critical and ethical thinking, effective communication and the ability to work well with others. Also positive is the discussion of knowledge associated with the University, the wider city, this country and its people and history, provided that a balanced picture of New Zealand’s history is encouraged.

However, we ask why all students must take such a course in order to progress into second year at a time when STEM courses are being cut. Why is Te Tiriti an enforced part of these courses but apparently not the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852? Will the Constitution Act of 1986 be discussed, or other recent legislation?  

Knowledge Systems?

What exactly are the ‘knowledge systems’ that underpin students’ areas of study and that will provide a foundation for their future learning? How will these knowledge systems support electrical, civil and mechanical engineering, theoretical and experimental physics, pure mathematics, theoretical and applied statistics, organic and inorganic chemistry, evolutionary biology and cancer research? How will they assist in combatting malnutrition and infant and child mortality, clean energy technologies, efficient transportation and many other fields of endeavour?

Will students of forestry science at New Zealand universities be introduced to traditional medicine for restoration of kauri forests? One account of such medicine asserts  the “need to tune into the vibrations of the forest” and recommends burial of mauri stones within the affected areas, along with appropriate rituals? Will students be taught that sperm whale oil embodies healing properties for kauri? Will they be encouraged to “send out a call to the world, asking communities to hold special ceremony on behalf of kauri” and “invite the world to Aotearoa to join us in prayer and ceremony in the initiation of our future Rongoā interventions.”? In that account we are told:

“Through listening and traditional meditation in the forest, will assist those to align to the cellular frequency of the forest and to become more enlightened in the work of looking after the forest.”  

Will students of agriculture learn that farmers should manage their farms on the basis of the phases of the moon, when in reality the lunar cycle has no effect whatsoever on plant growth or physiology?

If the thinking behind such traditional knowledge is taken as an allegory for loving and caring for the natural world and its living environments, then something wonderful has indeed been gifted to us. But if such beliefs are accorded the status of literal truth then we have the makings of a very serious problem in tertiary education.

In New Zealand, what about the approximately 25% of tertiary students who are non-Māori/non-European? Will their knowledge systems be presented too? Will the international students who are forced to take these courses consider their fees to be money well spent?

Today in various countries we hear demands for decolonization of mathematics. For example, Rowena Ball claims that mathematics has been gate-kept by the West, defined to exclude entire cultures and that almost all mathematics that students have ever come across is European-based. Among others, she wants to enrich the discipline through the inclusion of cross-cultural mathematics. However, Sergiu Klainerman responds as follows:

“If mathematics was in fact a cultural artifact, like music, literature or the arts, it would be impossible to explain its extraordinary effectiveness in the physical sciences, weather prediction, engineering or artificial intelligence.“

We agree with Professor Klainerman. Further, we believe that both science and mathematics transcend all political, cultural, ethnic and religious frontiers.

A Core Curriculum?

Today, readings at many universities in the Western world cover “progressive preoccupations” that include anti-colonialism, sex and gender, antiracism and climate. Surely, there is great merit in dialogue and action on such issues but it is critical that students’ readings are diverse rather than comprising only the perspectives of the contemporary left.

Ferguson and Howland tell us that if students are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities – an always unfinished tapestry of both admirable and shameful lives and both noble and base deeds. They must develop an ear for the English language and the language of ancestral wisdom, as well as the various languages of intellectual inquiry, including mathematics. They need a good grasp of modern statistical methods and they must also allow themselves to be inwardly-formed and cultivated by the classics.

They suggest that a sound foundation would also require an introduction to the modes of cognition, including intellectual and moral intuition and scientific demonstration. Aristotle, informal logic and Karl Popper would introduce students to the “preeminently learnable and knowable things.”

Will Students Vote with their Feet?

The perceptions of international students that New Zealand is indigenizing its degrees could lead to a significant loss of international enrolments and reduced credibility of our universities. The motive of preparing students to be effective learners is laudable, but is it strictly necessary to demand of them to assimilate these systems in order to progress in their other studies?

If the academic and political initiatives relating to these courses were truly about preparing students for university studies, then perhaps they should take the form of preparatory courses, possibly available online, before students begin their degrees. In the United States, for example, many universities provide future students access to “Cornerstone” courses in order to prepare them for assessment on writing, reasoning, research and literacy.  

Any mandatory belief-based curriculum amounts to indoctrination and should have no place in our universities. In a competition amongst the universities for fee-paying students and Government funding, will universities that insist on such courses see their enrolments fall, as students go to wherever they are not forced to pay for indoctrination?

Dr David Lillis trained in physics and mathematics at Victoria University and Curtin University in Perth, working as a teacher, researcher, statistician and lecturer for most of his career. He has published many articles and scientific papers, as well as a book on graphing and statistics. 

An earlier version of this article was first published at Breaking Views

Cover image by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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These may be necessary, if painful, adjustments. Universities need to stay relevant and efficient. But what exactly is being prioritised in these restructuring and rationalisation moves? Academic merit, research excellence and ability to teach the content that students will need? Or is it part of an effort to fundamentally rewire the university to serve different agendas? Could this even be a way to silence staff who have spoken out in support of science, academic freedom and free expression? The procedures and criteria set out in recent staffing reviews raise questions.

Look at the Faculty of Education and Social Work document at the bottom of this post. For some reason they don’t seem keen for the world to see it. We’re interested in the criteria for deciding whether an individual academic is safe – getting a green light on their traffic light system. For example, getting a “green” rating on research requires an output far beyond what is usual for even high performing social scientists (20 scholarly articles in two and a half years). What this means is that research performance effectively drops out of the criteria – almost no staff will be “green” on research. So other criteria will come into play. Such as “Contribution to the faculty’s expertise in Mātauranga Māori “. Take a look at appendices E and G.

Professor Elizabeth Rata, who has spoken and written publicly in defence of science, was among many staff in the old Faculty of Education and Social Work who recently received notice that their positions were “in scope” in a staffing review. We reproduce the letter sent by the Free Speech Union to the Dean of her faculty in response:

30 July 2024

Prof. Mark Barrow

Dean of the Faculty of Education and Social Work

m.barrow@auckland.ac.nz

Academic Staffing Review – Prof. Elizabeth Rata

Good morning, 

1. The Free Speech Union is a registered trade union with a mission to fight for, protect, and expand New Zealanders’ rights to freedom of speech, conscience, and intellectual inquiry. We believe that freedom of speech is not only a legal principle, but a social good that allows for people in modern liberal democracies to peacefully, freely advocate for the causes they care about without risking unjust retribution.
2. The Free Speech Union represents Prof. Elizabeth Rata, a sociologist of education and a professor in the School of Critical Studies within the Faculty of Education and Social Work (“the faculty”) at the University of Auckland (“UoA”).
3. It has been brought to our attention that the faculty is currently undergoing a restructure, more specifically, an ‘Academic Staffing Review’ (“the review”). Following the faculty’s release of the outcomes of Phase One of the review, Prof. Rata was informed that her position is ‘in-scope’ and may be disestablished. 
4. Of concern to us is how data relating to ‘strategic contributions’ will be used by the Selection Committee to recommend whether positions be disestablished or not. One of these ‘strategic contributions’ is contribution to the faculty’s expertise in mātauranga Māori. As you will be aware, there is significant public debate as to whether mātauranga Māori constitutes science – a debate sparked by a letter signed by seven UoA professors (including Prof. Rata) to the New Zealand Listener in July 2021.
5. Under section 267(4) of the Education and Training Act, UoA staff have the right to academic freedom which includes freedom “within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions stipulates academic freedom in relation to a university.” In performing its functions, the UoA must give effect to this by preserving and enhancing academic freedom and autonomy. Underpinning this is the requirement for institutional neutrality.
6. The role of mātauranga Māori in our education institutions is a controversial political issue. Considering an employee’s contribution in this area as part of a restructure process discriminates against employees who do not share the UoA’s institutional view of the role and status of mātauranga Māori in education. Setting aside the fact universities should remain apolitical and neutral, the UoA is in clear breach of its obligations under the Education and Training Act as it is requiring its staff to adopt a specific view on mātauranga Māori. 
7. Further, the Selection Committee’s consideration of ‘strategic contributions’, specifically, contribution to the faculty’s expertise in mātauranga Māori, may be in breach of the Employment Relations Act, namely:
   1. Section 4 (Good Faith)
   1. Section 104 (Discrimination)
8. To be clear, this letter is not notice of a Personal Grievance. Rather, we wish to bring to your attention our concerns with the unlawful nature of the ‘strategic contributions’ and invite your comment on whether the consideration of contribution to expertise in mātauranga Māori will be withdrawn in light of the above.
9. We look forward to hearing from you.

And here’s the Faculty document:

Cover Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash

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Kendall Clements is the corresponding author of the letter.

The post Teaching science ‘alongside’ indigenous knowledge? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

“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.

The post A racial predisposition towards science? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

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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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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Co-authors are Emeritus Professor Robert Nola, Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, and Professor Garth Cooper

Many New Zealanders were startled to hear of the government’s He Puapua plan for iwi co-governance of the nation by 2040. The July 2021 publication of the document, ‘Te Pūtahitangi, A Tiriti-led Science-Policy approach for Aotearoa New Zealand’ reveals one of the strategies for He Puapua’s implementation.  Stating that “the call for a Tiriti-led science-policy approach is timely”, Te Pūtahitangi, supported by the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, will insert mātauranga Maori into all areas of science, including the school and university currricula, research funding and science policy. With the same speed as the other He Puapua ‘reforms’ the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment is already proceeding with the Future Pathways Te Ara Paerangi Green Paper to establish the “tiriti-led system” advocated by Te Pūtahitangi .

According to Te Pūtahitanga “Mātauranga Māori is the Māori knowledge ecosystem underpinned by kaupapa and tikanga Māori”. Tikanga is defined as “the customary system of values and practices that have developed over time and continue to evolve and are deeply embedded in the social context”. The document distinguishes mātauranga Māori from science in its reference to “Aotearoa’s rich knowledge systems – Western science and Mātauranga Māori”.

Te Pūtahitangi contains two foundational errors. The first is the premise of an ‘equivalence’, or ‘ōrite’ between the traditional beliefs and practices and modern science. While traditional beliefs and practices are valued for many reasons, such understandings – as many leading Māori intellectuals insist – are not science.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. In contrast traditional thought employs supernatural explanations for such phenomena with the proto-science (or pre-scientific) knowledge acquired from observation and experience providing ways to live in the environment. This includes the knowledge which enables ocean navigation by the stars and currents, efficacious medicines from plants, and social structures based on kinship relations and birth status.

Methods differ too. Science requires doubt, challenge and critique, forever truth-seeking but with truth never fully settled. In contrast traditional understandings require respect, even reverence from adherents. Change to tikanga comes from changes to the social context within which, as Te Pūtahitangi notes, tikanga is “deeply embedded”. Indeed it is that context which ties the beliefs and practices to a specific people and their ancestral traditions. Science is not constrained in these ways. It develops from the systematic criticism and refutation of its ideas. 

A second error in the Te Pūtahitanga document follows from the knowledge ‘equivalence’ error. This is the false characterisation of science as ‘Western’. But science rejects the authority of culture, and accepts only argument and evidence. It is universal, a fact shown by its rich history. ‘Zero’[MU1] , for example, was used first in Mesopotamia and India and discovered independently by the Mayans. Science belongs neither to the ‘West’ nor to any ethnic group.

As educators we are committed to the success of our Māori students. As scientists we know that equating mātauranga Māori with science will not produce this success. The academic education which does prepare young people for university is the study of mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, languages, literature, history, geography, and the arts. In acquiring understanding of the knowledge which belongs to all humanity young people also acquire the critical thinking required for democratic citizenship.

The aim of Pūtahitanga is to connect mātauranga Māori and science for use in policy. Science can inform policy as we see with Covid-19 and global warming. But policy informing science is a recipe for misinformation and the loss of scientific integrity, something seen in Stalinist biology, Nazi physics and Christian creationism.

Just as He Puapua proposes radical changes to New Zealand’s constitutional governance, so do Te Pūtahitangi’s proposals signal radical change to the relationship of science and policy along with all areas of education. This is a matter requiring robust discussion without fear or favour.

The header image for this article was taken from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/Bt9y47d1e6k).

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