this is not my assignment

I have written my assignment several times, and I always degenerate into a rant and a list of questions. So I am writing this so I can feel that it is written and I can focus on answering the brief! Please excuse the bad writing, I write to sound like myself, and I prefer Oratory to cold academic writing. I suspect this will be a rant, but I can’t lose marks…

“Decolonisation includes the revaluation of the political, social, economic and judicial structures themselves, and the development, if appropriate, of new structures which can hold and house the values and aspirations of the colonised people.” Laenui ‘Process of Decolonisation’ page 155   Oh yes, bring it on… although we have lost control of capitalism as the TPPA says companies can sue if they loose revenue due to government policies, including health related policies.

I have read lots of words, and some of them make me punch the air with joy. That wonderful venn diagram that gave me hope that we could honour te tiriti. Where I could be pleased that the dominant culture (that I reject) will not subsume everything in its path. I envisioned those playcentre meetings where we all would talk until there was a consensus, beliefs, rationality, and intellectual thought were considered. Consensus and go-governance are possible. What about the evolution of the Green party and their co-leader decision that is now seen as totally normal.. I could imagine that perhaps the country would make decisions that I would not like but yet could understand the logic of and could respect because they included and thought about people, researchers could have a voice, I could imagine that Māori could make Māori decisions over Māori. Then I hear the radio and my wee balloon pops, David Seymour is once again peddling his racist, ignorant trope, and I know people are listening and thinking he is reasonable (they voted for him and his vision). How do we insulate people against people like him? Is it not pakeha that we should be teaching to recognise their privilege? How do we teach this while making sure that all people feel okay? Not go down the path where the guilt makes people not listen, as to listen makes them feel terrible, possibly even to strike out? (David – sample size of one?) How do we get people to hear what is being meant, rather than what they think something means? How do we deal with the awful history of this country? I feel complicit in genocide.

I read more. Another punch of joy followed by not seeing how we can do this? I know I have been living in a self chosen bubble. I recognised after my breakdown that I did not want to be in a position of power over other people, and that IS what conventional teaching is. It is someone deciding what you should learn, deciding for you what is important. It isn’t ‘opt in’, but forces ‘opt out’… I don’t see how people think that children can not be responsible for their own learning, that they will not see the world as it is and want to participate – kids play the roles that we model for them all the time. I have heard teachers say, “they (students) come to school not wanting to learn.” This is fundamentally untrue. We are learning machines, it’s what our bodies tell us to do.. they just don’t care about the functions of the liver right at this second.

I so agree that education is a collective (Te Hurihanganui), and it is from life to death, and furthermore that we need different ways of thinking. Like in ecology, we need a diversity of species to maintain a balanced environment. In our current education model, I do not think this concept is possible. We put children into classes of the same age band, is this so we can think of them as the same?? All it does is instill the idea of individual competitive education, fail, or pass within your cohort. How can you practice ako? How can the kids help each other. How can kids show if they have the soft skills of concern for those younger than them, a respect for them? I am not just meaning primary school. Adults realising the need to upskill should be both allowed and encouraged to attend high school. How can the community be reflected in a school when schools have the function of enableing parents to work and contribute to GDP? We need the parents to be the teachers?

Our schools are so large they are forced to fake community with houses/colours etc. Still, with the competitive idea of belonging being in opposition to the others that belong elsewhere.

The education model that we are part of was handed down by some long dead industrialists – its what our parents, their parents, had forced upon them. Despite all the research on its failure, we still just tutu with the edges. It was designed to provide labour and still is. I know that people will react to this, say that it is to give power to the children over their lives. But how can you give someone power over their lives by taking it away – telling them that learning to read at 5 is the standard? FAIL.. How can you say we increase agency but only as long as you have filled my brief, ticked this box…. NO NO NO.

I work in outdoor education. I am so fortunate I spend all day outside. I can not do justice with words the difference in even reading for pleasure outside versus reading inside.

I am pakeha, and I was privileged to attend playcentre with Apirana Mahuika’s kids. I went to marae as a child. As a child, I had adult Māori friends. I was lucky (this was luck as I relieved there) to work at a school trying to work to honor te tiriti. Otari school has an Immersion strand, Montessori strand, and an Original strand working together within the one school. All this has left me quite unused to the ideas that Māori would be anything other than intellectual equals. There are aspects of Māori culture that I want for my child. The only teacher at Otari who expressed an opinion on me homeschooling my child was the junior immersion teacher who said “that is how it should be.” Her class was run like a family. But of course, there were Māori parents who had trouble with not seeing the structured reading groups, etc, and too much emphasis on play. Kapa haka was taught by the Immersion strand in a kaupapa Māori way. You could watch the children I taught who were in the process of becoming Pakeha, being a little lost, looking for what they understood as the education process.

I remember at teachers college the different attitudes of the student teachers over the “ownership” of the children. Some were parents asserting their rights to advocate for their children – one was there solely to advocate for structured literacy as her children were dyslexic. Then there were those who didn’t have children and were more likely to see parents as just a side show to their job. Very different to me as an ex-nanny where that was where a large part of my job lay – smoothing the boundary, advocating for the kids, making sure no one was hurt, family culture maintained. It is not rational to not include parents.

When I applied for the DPB, I was told that I should not have had a child, as my job was not permanent and ended with my child’s birth. I had opted to be a solo parent by using a sperm donor. I had worked for years so had money in the bank, I was well educated and my baby was so very very wanted and even then another woman told me my life choices were bad and I still feel it like a slap. I reacted with all my privilege and did not get sanctioned, and went home to my below market rate house that I rented off a family friend, accepted all the lovely hand me downs from my middle class friends. Still there was not enough money, so I did what Metiria Turei did and got student borders. I nominated her for New Zealander of the year. She is one of my heros. I have her photo up on my wall. I know my privilege, and it comes at the cost of knowing that others can not have it and there is nothing I can do. The poet Hira Lindsay Bird wrote a tweet at that time that I feel often sums up my feelings about New Zealand.

godDAMN this stupid milkloving piece of shit dumbass mean spirited sale at briscoes racist sexist 40% off deck furniture piss country

Reflecting on all my reading over the course of these past few weeks has led me to question a part of the story I tell my-self about what it means to be Pakeha. I have become complacent (aparently, it is called Pakeha paralysis). I can not just listen to Mapuna. I was greatly affected as a teenager by Donna Awatere-Huata saying “pakeha go home.” It came at a time when I was already questioning if I wanted to be a New Zelander. I was in a family that had values that were different from mainstream NZ. I had, as a child, been attending the springbock tour protests. I was also affected by the Falklands war, which showed the Colonial British making war over an island where all the links were to Argentina- it is a little closer, by thousands of km. And throw in the fear of Nuclear War with the 1983 false alarm incident.

I do not remember being proud to be a New Zealander (briefly during COVID). It has always felt like a fight – TPPA, mining, a culture that scantioned violence (rugby), esteemed the aquission of money and stuff (gave Ruth Richarson an honorary degree, knighted Roger Douglas, Fay Richwhite… John Key) and allows the murder of women to continue (not taking a woman’s call of stalking seriously)… I could turn this into a litany of the statz – over 50% of people in jail are Maori, Maori life expectancy is nearly 10 years lower than pakeha. How can I feel proud to be a member of something that causes this.

Hope is so very hard.. especially with this current government taking a massive step back wards. The only way is to give true freedom in education and hope that the next generation will do better – of course, they only will if they are taught to value the old people, te taiao, top question more than adults (who continue not to question – things like kiwisaver, economic growth..)

Let’s just do it – decolonise.

There is hope; my Pakeha neighbor openly voted te pati Maori, is learning Te Reo because she works in the public service in local government and really believes in Maori wards and co-governance.

I always come back to, We made it up. We made up listening to some long dead religious nutter about discovery doctorine, so why can’t we unmake it. It is all smoke and mirrors. Just like what we do to children. Have you ever taught that kid who works out that the power you have over them is made up and they don’t recognise it and will learn what they want? They see through the smoke and mirrors… I want all children to be like that, then they can look at the rules we made up and say NO and make better ones. I want to “teach” children to make up their own world, and I think it will be different to this one. Our job is to do what Tipene O’Regan reminded us of in one of my conservation courses – to learn from mistakes, Māori learned the hard way about conservation through the extinction of an important species.

Sometimes, when I lie awake thinking about how I had a child even though I know about climate change, I remember how insignificant we are in a geological timescale. We maybe on the brink of massive extinctions of species, probable loss of many of us humans but the world will be ‘invented’ again and hopefully better, no longer ruled by money, stuff and ‘good’ jobs. This is the end of the end of the anthropocene.

Back to hope again – the mataaho collective just won an award in the venice biennale .. up goes my proud pakeha bubble and the Nelson library has Hina Toa by Ngahuia te Awekotuku..(she just said we are living in moral and political squallor, go her). I wonder if those parochial, doctrine of discovery, arrived on the Fifeshire (the who’s who of Nelson) people will read it. It is Whakat to me.