Here’s a rather startling headline from 1News: Maori students are twice as badly behaved as white students. Oops, no, that wasn’t it.
How about: Statistics show that the vast majority of NZ students, Maori and white alike, are reasonably well-behaved? Nope. Wrong again.
Maori students are stood down from school as a punishment for bad behaviour almost twice as much as Pakeha students.
Official figures show the rate for Maori is almost 5%, compared to 2.5% for Pakeha.
In other words, 95% of Maori and 97.5% of white students are well-behaved enough not to merit being stood down.
But, note the subtle denigration, using the pejorative “Pakeha”. Note also that the headline tries to shift the goalposts from one of bad behaviour among a group of students, to an insinuation of discrimination.
A stand-down allows a school to send someone home for up to five days for a total of 10 days in a year.
Some of the reasons include physical or verbal attacks on students and staff, along with continued disobedience and smoking.
So… schools are supposed to tolerate physical and verbal attacks, and other serious misbehaviours, if the offenders are Maori?
Now stand by for some splendid activist gibberish.
Some experts say the only way to bring that down is for an education system that’s based on Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Do they mean, a system that’s based in the sovereignty of the state of New Zealand? Because that’s what they already have.
But that academic sophistry is only the opening salvo in a battery of bullshit.
Rawiri Wright, from Te Runanganui o Nga Kura Kaupapa, said mainstream education hasn’t caught up with current times.
“Epistemology that underpins that system is exactly the same today as it was in 1860”
Really? So, New Zealand schools are still teaching special creation (On the Origin of Species had barely been published), the Steady State Universe (Lemaitre and Hubble wouldn’t coin the expanding universe for another 60 years) and the luminiferous aether (Michaelson and Morely wouldn’t disprove that one for nearly 30 years)?
But, to be fair, what this “expert” idiot is promoting is the spurious notion of “Matauranga Maori” as the “equal” of “Western science” (or “Tikanga Pakeha”).
As Richard Dawkins so bluntly put it: bollocks.
Rawiri Wright said elements of te ao Maori would only go so far in a system that’s broken.
“It’s only window dressing because the underlying philosophies of those schools remain the same. Until it is more indigenised until it is more a New Zealand framework rather than one which has come from overseas, it’s never going to serve Maori or Pacific students very well,” Wright said.
1News
Sure: go back to teaching Creationism-in-a-grass skirt.
Just ditch your mobile phone, your car, your heated house, your antibiotics, complex surgery, shoes, even… everything else that’s come to you courtesy of “Tikanga Pakeha”.
Fair’s fair.
