Field of Dreams

Build It and They Will Come

The attempt to revive the Maori language, making New Zealand a genuinely bi-lingual nation was the stuff of dreams.  But, the protagonists of the dream made a fatal tactical mistake.  Substituting appearance and image for reality, they turned to the State.  By accessing taxpayer funding, Maori language instruction from pre-school onwards would ensure the survival and prospering of the Te Reo--or so all parties believed. 

But "top down" in such matters never works.  If a culture is to survive, if a language is to continue, it needs to be inculcated in hearth and home from parents to children.  No amount of state funded schooling is going to make up for parental neglect.  The old adage, "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world" still holds. 

The state funded initiative to revive the Maori language through government schools has been running for forty years--almost half a century.  The results?  Dr Timoti Karetu is described as one of the leading experts on the Maori language.  He has issued a report card on how the language is progressing.

"There is an apathy and a torpor pervading the whole of the Māori world, and the language is its victim," Dr Karetu told the Herald.

Dr Timoti Karetu: "There is an apathy and a torpor pervading the whole of the Maori world, and the language is its victim."

"The Māori world has got to realise that if they want the language to survive, then it is the responsibility of every individual Māori person to do something about it. Don't stand in the wings bleating away until the Māori world wakes up to the fact that unless it does something, the language is going to die."

Apathy and torpor in the tent.  And the solution?  Yes, not hard to guess.

One of our foremost Māori language experts will warn this week that the language will die unless the nation makes a renewed commitment to save it. [Emphasis, ours]

In other words, more government money is required.  But this, we believe, is the biggest issue.  The kohanga reo movement started from volunteers.  It was its greatest strength.

In the early 1980s, the native-speaking elders of that time created the kōhanga reo movement, in which mostly untrained parents and grandparents volunteered to raise their children and grandchildren in Māori-speaking settings mostly on marae and in private homes. Ninety per cent were unpaid.  The movement grew "explosively" from the first kōhanga in Wainuiomata in April 1982 to 512 kōhanga with more than 8000 children by December 1987. By 1993, when the rolls peaked at 14,500, half of all Māori children in preschool education were in Māori-speaking kōhanga.

But since then the rolls have fallen, dropping below 9000 last year for the first time since 1989. Only 18.5 per cent of Māori children in preschool education nationally, and just 11.3 per cent in Auckland, are now in kōhanga.

But once the state was enlisted to fund and support the initiative, it began to die.  The volunteers were replaced by experts.  The new (state funded) administrators sensed a life-term career was in the offing.  Power, prestige, influence and command--without the hard yards of local voluteerism and effort--was beckoning. The state's money was a poison chalice, killing off the devotion and cultural life force of the language.

In a 2012 report, the Waitangi Tribunal blamed early childhood education policies which have tightened up both on building standards, forcing many kōhanga out of marae, and on staffing, paying more to centres with paid and trained teachers.

And, then, the inevitable graft and corruption emerged from the culture of rangitira-ism, rather than leadership through service and devotion.

More recently, ministers have lost confidence in Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust because of alleged misuse of credit cards, although an Internal Affairs Department inquiry found no wrongdoing. This year the trust was criticised again for a $110,000 koha to its patron, the Māori king.

The Christian faith is inculcated from parent to child.  It is one of its greatest strengths.  How blessed we are to live in a country where State and Church are separate--at least to the point of not being offered state funding.  The day that the state starts to fund Christians to fulfill their duties to our Lord is the day the faith begins to die.  The animus of the secular state towards the faith is one of our greatest tactical advantages.  Long may it abide.