My article on Māori Science – see HERE – is important for you to read, not just for itself but because it raises two further significant questions that are definitely worth pondering. The first of these concerns the role of elites today in defining a culture on behalf of all its members. The second question is much wider, focusing on what is at stake for all of us in this country.
Turning to the first question, the role of the neo-tribal Māori elite in promoting Māori Science has been crucial to the subject’s success. In this particular case a relatively small, carefully selected grouping of those deemed to be “in the know” came to define what Māori Science was to be about and what it should include. Arguably, they were able to achieve this apparently with minimal input from the community they claimed to represent.
During the first half of the 1990s, this neo-tribal elite was able to gain official recognition for Māori Science as a key part of Matauranga Māori (literally Māori ways of knowing). Matauranga Māori is in fact, derived from a worldwide ideology known as Culturalism, which has it that all cultures have legitimate and equal claims and hence can act in ways the culture is said to legitimate whatever that may involve. For Māori Science advocates in this era this meant that they could claim equal partnership under the Treaty with what advocates disparagingly labelled “Western” Science.
Consequently, what most of us have come to know as simply “science” is now devalued by many New Zealand educators, bureaucrats and politicians. For some people even, science has become a true Ghost at the Feast whenever debates over place of knowledge in the curriculum take place. These people demonize science as being the very embodiment of Western selfishness, individualism, imperialism and colonisation they have been taught to despise. In consequence, until fairly recently, science achievement amongst our students has been rapidly falling away – hence the concern of the present National-led coalition to reverse this trend.
One source citing the justification for dethroning “Western” Science and adding Māori science goes like this, though there are many variations. Prior to the 17th century Europeans were said to hold a holistic view of nature as being God’s plan. If we consider here the alleged medieval debate about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, for example, it was supposedly claimed that the angels represented the metaphysical and the pinpoint, the physical. Hence the relationship between the spiritual and the secular is a central issue to be understood. When this view was replaced by rational scientific thought, or so some advocates claim, the resulting disinterest in religion meant that, instead of religion, morality and ethics, economic power became the primary scientific objective. This alleged shift supposedly resulted in social, cultural, spiritual and environmental knowledge being downplayed. In turn this cultural shift led to European colonisation, notions of racial superiority, colonialism and economic rationalism.
By contrast, advocates praise Matauranga Māori for incorporating a so-called holistic view, which means it does not delineate between the physical and spiritual forms of knowledge. It is further claimed that it is this holistic way of knowing has endured over time precisely because its central philosophy is based on creation stories and on whakapapa: concepts that Western-trained scientists fail to understand. The result is that Matauranga Māori, through its embracement of the concept of mauri, is asserted to be more in tune with contemporary global views regarding conservation, human dependence on the environment, providing both balance and harmony. Thus, there is an intrinsic connection to the land, grounded in traditional genealogical relationships that are intrinsically linked to creation beliefs.
If you accept this argument, then Māori ways of knowing are a progressive and collaborative way forward for all New Zealanders, simply because it is better able to address contemporary world-wide challenges such as global warming, race relations, inequality, and sustainability. Conversely, Western or Pakeha ways of knowing can be castigated as selfish, male-dominated, and colonialist, as well as historically exploitive of both natural resources and human capital.
The irony of such claims, however, is that a similar rationale underpins contemporary attempts in the United States to justify the inclusion of Creation Science in the curriculum as an equal partner for so-called “Secular” Science. Only the terms employed are different. The aim of Māori Scientists and Creation Scientists alike is to restore the spiritual component (as defined by themselves), of our existence remain the same. In both instances the effect is to bolster the claims of a comparatively small group to be society’s natural leaders whilst also furnishing members of that group with a cultural and ideological compass pointing the way to a new national identity.
In New Zealand’s case, the national future is envisaged as being one freed from the shackles of imperialism and colonialism. This is where our state education system comes in – ECE, primary, secondary and tertiary. The entire sector from the early 1990s was envisaged as playing a central role in bringing this ambitious goal about. It therefore follows that formal and informal curricula alike must be permeated by Matauranga Māori ideology from which there can be no appeal and from which no one in the sector should be exempt.
Those who challenge these changes can find themselves professionally ostracised, even in the universities. In July 2021, the New Zealand Listener published a letter signed by a number of University of Auckland academics that took issue with current proposals to incorporate Māori science directly into the science curriculum. The tone of the letter was respectful, but subsequently, a letter to all staff under the signature of then Auckland University Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater claimed that the letter had caused “untold harm and hurt.” Neither was this an isolated incident. A recent report on New Zealand’s universities suggests that the assault on informed free speech is now well under way.
That assault is particularly noticeable regarding history in the New Zealand curriculum, where culturalist ideology has recently been masquerading as legitimate history. In the new history curriculum proposed under the Labour-led Coalition, an essentially binary view of New Zealand’s history came to dominate views of our colonial past. In effect, students, teachers, and parents were presented with a simplistic morality play where the forces of evil i.e. imperial powers, subdued and victimised innocent “indigenous” peoples. Pre-European Māori were portrayed as rural, communal, caring, cooperative, spiritual, and non-materialistic; whilst the European colonisers and their descendants were urban, individualistic, selfish, materialistic and aggressive
It is worthwhile mentioning that, beyond New Zealand, many historians have questioned such overly simplistic dualities For example, in response to the horrific ethnic cleansing that occurred in both Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, academics working under the auspices of the Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley warned that the teaching of history could easily become an unwitting focal point of political conflict and even manipulation as contending groups sought to promote their political agendas of praise and blame via the school curriculum. Unfortunately, this timely caution, incorporating as it does the absolute necessity of a more balanced approach to colonialism, was disregarded by New Zealand’s strongly culturalist curriculum designers.
One teaching resource to accompany the new curriculum entitled “A struggle for land and sovereignty,” makes it abundantly clear that the heroes of this morality play are Māori. All Māori, regardless of status, hapu or region are portrayed as having tried to resist colonialism, retain their ancestral lands and defend their culture against aggressive land acquisition and Crown hostility. No shades of grey here! Referring to the conclusions students were expected to arrive at, one first-hand observer quipped that whilst none present at the discussion meetings actually termed this exercised “black armband history”, you could sense that some might well have.
The influence of Matauranga Māori has also come to threaten the longstanding consensus whereby religion and schooling are kept strictly separate. Given the ambivalent stance of the Ministry of Education, backed by the previous Labour-led Coalition, karakia has now become an integral aspect of state education as evidenced by the imposition of the practice in many classrooms today. Actually, the perception amongst some New Zealand secondary educators that European society lacked spirituality can be detected as early as the 1940s when J.H. Murdoch, then in charge of secondary graduate teacher trainees at Auckland Teachers’ College, bemoaned the fact that in his view, spirituality was a quality we had lost, adding that a sense of sacredness of certain historical spots was surely a trait that the pakeha could develop to compensate.
Murdoch need not have worried, because the practice of beginning the day, and even in some schools, permeating the entire day, has become relatively common. In 2009 for example, the Human Rights Commission conceded that schools, whilst supposedly secular were now being officially encouraged to actively support Māori spirituality in schools.
As with Māori Science in the early 1990s and the formal curriculum today, the strict division between victims [Māori] and oppressors [Pakeha], provides a convenient if farcical justification. Worse, a problem arises when karakia (incidentally defined as “culture” rather than religion), is uncritically imposed on a religiously and culturally diverse population. This is despite the fact that Section 13 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, 1990 expressly permits freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
It is certainly the case that this gradual erosion of distinctions between secular and religious in education was discernible in the New Zealand curriculum as early as the 1970s. The Johnson Report, 1978 mentioned a new concept they termed “spirituality.” The intention seems to have been to foster amongst students a pride in heritage whilst also assisting them in developing a sense of self-identity and purpose. In addition, it was regarded as helping them to confront the “big” questions such as “the meaning of life. The Johnson Report also introduced a bicultural dimension that was to have significant implications for both moral education and religious instruction in state schools.
The place of spirituality in state education, post-Johnson Report, was to steadily gain currency amongst New Zealand’s educators, encouraged by the growing influence of a number of influential global and indigenous intellectual trends that gained strength during the 1970s and 1980s. The growing popularity of postmodernism among academics and educators helped to legitimate the presence of spirituality in education via its critique of science, providing a vantage point from which to effectively attack the various institutions that in their view clung to a monolithic, secularised, hence strictly differentiated education system.
The adherence of increasing numbers of educators to the so-called bi-cultural project, with its appeals to the Treaty of Waitangi and First Nation rights provided a further context for those who sought radical changes to the relationship between the secular and the spiritual within public education, especially from the 1980s onwards. A booklet for schools authored by Race Relations Conciliator, Hiwi Tauroa contended that, interwoven with each aspect of Maoritanga, was the aspect of wairua, which embraced a spiritual element that influenced thought and action. Hence the determination that all State schools may not teach spiritual or religious issues was a direct contradiction for all Polynesian people brought up in a cultural system that promoted and emphasised the leadership of humans by forces beyond themselves.
Once again, we should ask where this leaves those who for various reasons may not wish to take part in the collective effort to reclaim “our” spirituality? Teachers who chose to object to participating in karakia have often found themselves professionally isolated. This was evident in the controversy and aftermath that erupted over karakia use at Kelston Intermediate School, Auckland, in 2013, leading to official intervention to resolve the matter.
In fact, official responses from the Ministry of Education to the growing use of karakia in schools as an integral part of the school day have tended to reflect a desire to be seen both preserving the secular nature of education [apparently upholding the principle of differentiated education], but at the same time acknowledging a legal obligation to incorporate Treaty principles in state schools. Hence, a briefing paper to the Education and Science Select Committee in July 2007 asserted that all BoTs were now compelled by education legislation to develop policies and practices that reflected New Zealand’s cultural diversity in general, but also the unique position of Māori culture in particular. This juxtaposition creates a problem in itself, and the briefing paper went on to concede that there was also an obligation to protect the legal rights of parents, teachers and students to religious freedom.
Readers may discern that maintaining both these positions at once becomes rather difficult when the essentially “closed beliefs” of Kaupapa Māori come into direct conflict with the “modernist” values of individual autonomy, and the freedom to engage with the critical reasoning that underpins democratic societies. For Māori students, it could be argued that all this might well have the effect of at least partially excluding them from the accepted knowledge bases that underpin modern economies and hence, employment. And there is a definite spiritual bias in encouraging schools to perform karakia whilst disallowing any other religion to practice its own spiritual rituals in the classroom. In this case the alleged spirituality that is claimed to be characteristic of Matauranga Māori becomes by default the sole expression of the concept whilst also taking its place as the legitimate alternative to scientific understandings of the world.
The increased presence of Matauranga Māori at all levels of New Zealand’s state education system is also signified in the assumptions teachers make concerning their students and the content they deliver to them. Some researchers have suggested that the type of knowledge a given student has access to is often determined by how they are ethnically identified by their teachers. In this case academic learning for all takes a back seat compared to an individual’s perceived cultural needs.
It is likely that the success of Māori Science in gaining political and bureaucratic support in the early 1990s has furnished much of the initial inspiration for educational changes across the curriculum during the first decades of the 21st Century. It is also apparent that the adoption of Matauranga Māori values, not just within the state education sector, but also by many other sectors of the economy including health, social welfare, and even the Financial Markets Authority (FMA), are but manifestations of a developing nation-wide debate that pits ethno-nationalism against liberal democracy. An ethno-nationalist position entails the acceptance of the proposition that political categories based on racial classification determine an individual’s identity (personal, social, political), which in turn is fixed irrevocably in our ancestry. Unfortunately, this also encourages, not just rejection, but also downright hostility to those advancing different viewpoints. What is abundantly clear though, is that how all this is eventually resolved will have far-reaching consequences, not only for our own personal identities and our collective national identity, but ultimately for what we as individuals should value, and why
Finally, New Zealand’s own experience with ethno-nationalism has its parallels elsewhere in the world. Meera Nanda has critically examined the impact of Hindu nationalism on the future political and educational direction of India. Nanda cautions that, when the insights provided by postmodernism and social constructivism become transformed into a dogma, the result can be dangerous for democracy itself. In their recent book, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott argue that in contemporary America, what has become widely described as Cancel Culture, (inspired by Culturalist ideology), has now severely compromised once trusted institutions, and even threatened free speech itself. In the United Kingdom too, Doug Stokes has described how a wave of moral panic saw mobs demanding atonement for alleged racism, leading to statues being torn down and symbols of British national identity being attacked. A recent example here was the difficulty a secondary school student encountered when she wore clothing featuring a prominent Union Jack. Clearly, in all four countries, those who value democracy will have much at stake in the coming decades.
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NB: References have been deliberately deleted from this link to “Separate but Equal?” The author can, however, supply these on request.
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The direct link to Professor Openshaw’s research paper “Separate but Equal? Or Dominant Discourse? Negotiating a Place for Māori Science within a State -Mandated Science Regime, 1986-93” is here: https://www.nzcpr.com/separate-but-equal/