EDUCATING THE MAORI GIRL.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3778, 7 December 1907, Page 2

EDUCATING THE MAORI GIRL.

Some very suggestive remarks by Mr Hill, Inspector of Schools for Hawke’s Bay, appear in the Poverty Bay Herald. He holds that all efforts to elevate the Maori will fail until we pay more sympathetic attention to the training of their girls, who ought to be educated in the public schools under the same conditions and with the same scholarship privileges as their white sisters. He mentions specially two Maori girls at Waipiro, one a “ brilliant ” j seventh standard girl, not to be j surpassed in the district. “ I am j sorry we cannot bring her out. J Such girls are thrown back among the natives, and we can do nothing for them. These girls should be sent to the hospital to be trained as nurses, or taken into the tele*

phone bureau to show the Maoris the benefits to be derived irora education among Europeans. Nothing is done for them, and the poor girls are left to themselves. You see women sitting about in a garden with a spade and hoe, digging, while the men are lolling about doing nothing—the old system of savagery, when the women always bad to do the hard work. A civilised community ? How can you call it civilised when the woman has no hope ? The only place where they are getting real improvement is at Nuhaka, where the Mormons take an interest in them. The missionaries have brought their wives out. Their method is simple. The women meet on Mondays, and talk about the week’s work, aud what each is going to do amongst them. One is going to scrub and do housecleaning, another would perhaps make clothes, another would bake, another would iron. I said, ‘ You have got the secret.’ ” The testimony of the teachers at such institutions as Hukarere is that there is splendid material among the native pupils. The New Plymouth News, commenting on the above says;—We have the same material in Taranaki, To raise the race aud to put its members on the pakeha social footing, we must do what Mr Hill suggests, and what we always contended, namely, give sympathetic attention to the training of Maori girls. We would, like to see some practical move made in this direction in Taranaki, particularly as Te Whiti-ism, the curse of the past, is aow practically dead. It is expecting too much to expect the Maoris to improve their condition, mental or physical, without outside assistance. Will this assistance, urgently needed as it is, be forthcoming ? Will our religious organisations and philanthropic people extend a hand and show the way ?