The place of Cultural Standards in Indigenous Education

MAI Review, 2008, 1, Article 1

Summary of important points from this article.

- This article explores the development of cultural standards in Aotearoa New Zealand as a basis for enhancing the learning pathways of Māori children through the infusion of indigenous history, language and culture in the curriculum and milieu of primary schools.

- The cultural standards plan offers a unique opportunity for schools, Māori tribes and communities to develop a truly inclusive education for all children. It provides a way of consolidating an identity as Māori and/or New Zealander within the context of Aotearoa New Zealand.

- Furthermore, the development of a cultural standards plan brings into sharp focus the gaps in education where so many children are educated without knowing the history of the land, language, environment, flora and fauna specific to Aotearoa/ New Zealand. This paper highlights the issues and concerns that are highly topical, but which have received little attention in the literature.

- The development of cultural standards in indigenous education in North America and in New Zealand has evolved largely as a response to nation-state education systems that, for the most part, are culturally and epistemologically disconnected from indigenous communities. The cumulative effect of this disjunction between the school habitus and that of the communities they serve is a system of schooling that continues to generate consistently high levels of poor achievement rates and deficient educational outcomes for indigenous students when compared with all other students.

- Despite these (interventions) measures, indigenous communities view state sponsored interventions as adhoc, top-down, one-size-fits all attempts, while schools typically subject indigenous children to mainstream values, ideals, and interpretations of reality.

- Furthermore, indigenous education outcomes are inevitably compared with, and measured against national and international norms, benchmarking tests and surveys embedded in western hegemonic values and ideals.

- Indigenous outcomes are analysed and recorded in statistical fields which forecast the distribution of social indices across nations that result in pathologising indigenous education including health, social, and economic status.

- These are among reasons why state education is perceived by indigenous communities as alienating systems, over reliant on a uniform provision of education services that are bureaucratic, hierarchical and unresponsive to the need.

New Zealand's state education in the past has been culturally and epistemologically disconnected from Maori communities. As education has evolved the New Zealand education system has had to take notice of the discord in Maori achievement because the issues that surrounded Maori achievement have not made consistent improvements. Inventions that have been used by educators have made some small steps towards changing teacher pedagogy but there are still issues that exist that need to be discussed and changed.

Educational outcomes such as standardized testing which measure against international norms that were set in 18th Century, the fact that testing is narrowed to only report on reading, writing and maths on a nationwide scale and lastly how Maori learners are maginalised by the content presented in the literature used within the testing perimeters that do not use cultural diverse topics.