GUEST BLOG: John Tamihere – Education
I’ve been thinking:
Teachers and our kids deserve better. Next to being a parent, teaching is the toughest and most undervalued societal role. Teachers deserve more. They nurture the mind’s which become our nations future.
The NZ primary and secondary education system isn’t preparing our babies for life. It needs to be over hauled. Life skills like financial literacy, budgeting, healthy lifestyles, questioning and curiousity need to be included.
Skills like woodwork, metalwork, and cooking need to be reinforced all the way to at least year 11 and beyond. If need be, drop a maths and or and English class each week to accommodate life skills.
The purpose of Maori in the education system will do two things, to induce a maori-renaissance and to produce employment, and to produce a statement that focuses not just simply on a transition to modernity but underlines the long term bases of the New Zealand economy.
For this next phase we need many of our own to be more enterprising or more innovative and willing to strike out on there own. To create small to medium sized enterprises and so to create jobs and wealth. This is a period of rapid technological change and many start ups are going to succeed. And many will fail.
We can’t make entrepreneurs out of everybody. There’re those who are not adventurous and would rather not take the risk. Having said that I think there is a kind of social ambience. A kind of attitude and values which a society cultivates and admires and in encourages. I’m in favour of changing the educations system so Māori children think different so many will strike out on there own.
What will effect Māori children in schools is the increasing technological and scientific change. There lives will become longer and healthier because the human genome has been mapped. There will be a flowering of discoveries as Māori make new discoveries in biotechnologies over the next few decades. With out the education system we will be in very severe trouble. And if we depend only on Māori talent then I say Māori/Aotearoa can not be sustained. It’s as simple as that.
If we do not not except our own intelligencer, and make talent feel comfortable in Iwi-Māori areas then we will not be global citizens. And if we are not global citizens then we will not count for much.
So the future of Māori depends on producing talented people realising that we always have to be different – cleaner, more transparent, more efficient, always better. Then we will survive the competition with those with bigger girth in oil and gas, industrial capacity or what ever. And in the next 40 years if we maintain our principles we will do better than the last 40 years.