Maori education and society 1867-1940

Abstract

Full Government responsibility for Maori education began in 1867 with the passing of the Native School Act which provided for the development of a national system of Maori schools controlled and administered by the Department of Native Affairs. A thesis by Dr Beaglehole has systematically covered the period of missionary and Government-aided control of Maori education before the Maori Wars of the 1860's, and has also dealt briefly with the period after the Wars until 1879 when control of the Maori schools passed to the Department of Education T. Beaglehole, The Maori Schools 1816-1880. (Unpublished M.A. thesis, History Department, Victoria University, 1955.) The period between the end of the Maori Wars and 1940 has been dealt with rather sketchily by most writers on Maori education Chapters on Maori education appeared in A.G. Butcher's Young New Zealand. (Dunedin : Coulls, Somerville and Wilkie, 1929) and in A E. Campbell and G. Parkyn, Compulsory Education in New Zealand. (Paris : UNESCO, 1952), There was a chapter (by D.G. Ball) in I.L.G. Sutherland(ed) The Maori People Today. (Wellington : Whitcombe and Tombs, 1940), and an article by W. Parsonage appeared in the J.P.S. Vol 65, No. I March 1956. Also a thesis by J.W. Bird, Government Administration of Maori Education. (Unpublished M.A. thesis, Education Department, Auckland University, 1951.). The aim of this essay is to examine this period more closely with particular reference to the interdependence between the life of the Maori primary schools and Maori society, the thesis advanced being that at each stage of their history these schools have reflected something of the changes which have taken place in Maori society as a whole, and in the general development of New Zealand's primary sohools. The important stages in Maori history in the period discussed include - the complex racial situation existing after the Maori Wars of the 1860's accompanied by a severe decline in population; the advent of the "Young Maori Party" in the 1890's and the recovery of the Maori population; and in the 1920's and 1930's plans for the revival of Maori arts and crafts and the development of Maori lands and farming.