A Mutual Ignorance

Te Ao Hou, December 1963, Page 16

A Mutual Ignorance At least part of the problem of race relations in the school is the teachers themselves. The child does not know what the teacher wants or doesn't much value it, and the teacher is ignorant of what the child has been taught to value. Teachers are recruited from the middle class on the whole, and their models of good behaviour and the good society are middle class ones. Their pupils, however, may have quite different models. Maori teachers are recruited from almost the equivalent stratum of Maori society. Each may be faced with a similar dilemma in understanding Maori pupils, with the Maori teacher perhaps a little worse off since he or she will be expected by some magic to be hip to what Maori children think, want, and do. Although I have no programme in race relations I think that at this point at least something can be done by the simple expedient of ensuring that teaching trainees have a really tough course in race relations with special reference to New Zealand. This approach could be extended, I think, to secondary school students as part of their social studies work. There are other reasons for suggesting this. Consider, for a moment, the ways in which ethnocentricity can express itself in New Zealand thinking. In an infant classroom I have heard children singing ‘Ten Little Nigger Boys’, there is a popular book called ‘Little Black Sambo’ and another reader on sale in Auckland called ‘Nigger My Dog’, or some such title. A child hears phrases like to work like a nigger, the nigger in the woodpile, to Jew someone out of something, to be as black as a nigger. Or hears a parking meter called a Jewish juke box, a certain kind of beetle called a Maori-bug, and he may even go to see such a thing as the ‘Black and White Minstrel Show’.