Whare Wananga Gave Its Graduates Great Education: Rigid Memory Training

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 38, 16 April 1948, Page 5

Whare Wananga Gave Its Graduates Great Education: Rigid Memory Training

In the course of a short talk to the Rotary Club on Tuesday night in which he dealt with Maori education, past and present, Mr H. Hauesler said the old-time Maori had a great education at the Whare Wananga. Only those with a high standard of intelligence and retentive memory could pass the preliminary tests, and by the time they graduated their teachers had seen to it that they were word-perfect in their work. {

Incidentally, the “three baskets of knowledge” of the Whare Wananga system had its counterpart in Hfndu Culture. First was the knowledge of celestial things, second the knowledge of all ritual and ceremony designed to benefit mankind, and third, knowledge of all things evil to mankind.

As all knowledge in pre-pakeha days was preserved by memory and handed down through the generations by word of mouth, the Maori developed a high degree of memory training, and even today was easier to teach some things , than was the pakeha, though perhaps harder to handle in some ways. When the pakeha missionaries first started to teach the Maori to write and preserve records in writing, the old Tohunga would have nothing to do with it, and even now Maori children found their greatest trouble the mastery of written English.