EDUCATING THE MAORI.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 December 1921, Page 7

EDUCATING THE MAORI.

NEW VIEWPOINT NECESSARY. ADVANCEMENT OF RACF INFLUENCE OF AN IDEAL. The education of the Maori was the subject of general emarks by Mr. C. T. McFarlane, president of the Native School Teachers’ Association, during the course of his opening address at the association’s annual conference in Auckland. He referred to the recently noticed increase in the Maori population, and said it was now necessary to approach the education of the Maori with a new point of view. The Maoris could no longer be considered a dying people. He spoke of what the native schools had contributed to the Maoris and the lessons the race had learned from the war. Of these there were loyalty and patriotism, and it was interesting to note that those districts in which the majority of native schools had been established for many years had responded loyally to the call the war made.

There had been adverse criticism of the work done in the past. Critics said they could not see what education had done far the Maori, and it had been recently written that “whether we like it or not, the weary Willies, the ne’er-do-wells, the social misfits, the billiardroom loungers, the pah loafers are educational failures.” This, said Mr. McFarlane, was only true in part, and the coditions referred to were not so common as was supposed. Conditions of life were changing, necessitating industry, and it needed money to play billiards. Were the Maori delinquents any worse than their pakeha prototypes, whose example they followed? The answer to such criticism was to be found in the difference in the people in districts where schools had been established and in districts without schools. The critics could apply the same test to the Pakeha. The great problem of education was to ensure that the time spent in school was going to have a definite influence upon the life of the individual. Education of the Maori was largely a matter of inculcating an ideal. It was necessary to impose an ideal which would assist in the improvement and sure establishment of the native race ‘-Children of to-day,” said the speaker, ‘do not benefit so much from any great progress in biological evolution as to the fact that they are born to a great inheritance —an inheritance of literature, of art, and of music—an inheritance of history, the development of the buma|n race in its evolution toward the Divine —an inheritance of science—an inheritance of spiritual life. But we fail if we try to give directly to the child ufi this great inheritance. Our duty is to train each child so that he may himself gain his inheritance. Our duty, further, is to spend more time iu the careful study of the child, to lead him to learn to love the true, the good, the beautiful; then we shall have done something toward setting the cornerstone of character.” Mr. G. M. Henderson, inspector of native schools, said that education meant something more than teaching eight or ten subjects in the school curriculum. He endorsed what the president had said regarding the need for an ideal, bo much had to do with social environment. The emotional influences of teaching were very important—especially in connection with the Maori Self-expression was a characteristic that should be developed.