By Rodney Hide
Last week my 13-year-old at Wakatipu High studied in English “An introduction to culture and identity in literature”.
The class guide was as follows:
Below are some links to helpful clips that may be useful for understanding ‘The Why’ when it comes to teaching and learning about all things culture and identity through a Te Ao Māori lens. Take some time to view one or two of these.
One of the links to study was the YouTube clip, “How colonisers went from learning te reo Māori to trying to exterminate it”.
Ironically, the clip for her English class is in Maori with subtitles.
The five-minute clip is also a bit stronger than the title implies. University of Victoria sociolinguist Dr Vini Olsen-Reeder states:
Once the pakeha government was established here, from there the desire grew to exterminate the Maori people.
It wasn’t just the Maori language that the government wanted to exterminate but the Maori people themselves. Dr Olsen-Reeder claims that the New Zealand government was genocidal: that it wanted to kill-off all Maori. He offers not one shred of evidence in support of his extraordinary claim.
Remember, this is in English class.
It might be expected that students would have the opportunity to question such a claim.
But you would be wrong.
The purpose was to see the world through a Te Ao Māori lens. The genocidal claims must be accepted. To do otherwise would be to see the world through the coloniser’s lens. Beep. Wrong!
The task instead is to analyse the mood and tone of the video:
Mood and tone are crucial aspects of text and we must understand their role in creating meaning for readers.
What is mood in film and literature and who does it affect when examining a text?
What is ‘tone’ in literature and who creates it?
How does an author create mood and tone in a text?
The propaganda achievement is extraordinary. History is upended and inverted. Maori are holocaust victims. Pakeha are violent Nazi oppressors. And don’t dare question the narrative.
The narrative can’t be questioned because not to question is the very point of the exercise. Students are to see the world through the Te Ao Maori lens.
Brilliant. And all the more so that this is achieved in English. The purpose is not to teach but to indoctrinate.
No more the learning of grammar, punctuation, syntax or great literature.
Our children don’t know Wuthering Heights or Shakespeare but they know Western Bad, Indigenous Good.
They are helped along in the video with MP Rawiri Waititi weighing in:
”We were taught everything we were doing was bad and everything they were doing was good. That white was right.”
Any great piece of literature or great movie clip could be used to study mood and tone. But the Critical Theorists at the Ministry of Education take every opportunity to indoctrinate our children.
No subject is safe.
The teacher involved is excellent. But this is what she must do.
The fault lies with the Ministry of Education prescribing such rubbish and with Hon Erica Stanford and Prime Minister Chris Luxon for overseeing it.
We have a supposedly conservative-led government that sees nothing wrong with Critical Theorists tearing down our Judeo-Christian heritage from within the education system. Indeed, the Minister is steeped in Critical Theory. She can’t argue it or defend it. But she doesn’t need to. She has power. That is all that counts. And so death to the oppressors. And up with the oppressed.
Ms Stanford has a BA with honours from Auckland University. She majored in Political Science. And minored in Maori Studies.
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