Paul Little: Students viewed unequally

A study has revealed teachers can have racist attitudes towards their students. Photo / Greg Bowker.

Researcher Hana Turner's reports of racist attitudes among her fellow teachers show prejudice is as deeply woven into our school system as ever.

For some teachers, the Auckland masters student's thesis reveals little has changed since the days when Maori pupils were "encouraged" into down-market technical and domestic subjects where it suited a Pakeha-run educational establishment to keep them.

She found teachers had the highest expectations of Asian students, followed, in descending order of enthusiasm, by Pakeha, Pasifika and, several waka lengths behind, Maori.

And of course those teachers in particular are right, because their attitudes almost certainly guarantee that the Maori children for whose education they are responsible will do poorly.

Their belief sets the children up for failure. Who, after all, is going to spend valuable class time on this bunch of losers when you could be attending to the kids whose results are going to make you look good?

This is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. The assumption of failure is a guarantee of failure.

The teachers blamed the students, their families and their apparently genetically transmitted inability to refrain from criminal activity for their failure to do well at school.

They did not, apparently, see these children as an opportunity to show how fit they are for their vocation by taking on the challenge of lifting them out of this mire and doing what they could to get them up there with those Asian kids.

The Mr Chips syndrome is no more. They apparently no longer breed teachers who are driven by a desire to effect change, to lift kids up and help them make something of themselves, rather than shovel them through the system.

One told Turner: "I watch this Police 10/7. The suspects will always be Maori."

And that is also correct. Police 10/7 has frequently been criticised for favouring Maori as its stars, one of the few programmes outside Maori TV in which brown faces get more than their fair share of screen time.

The few Maori students with a bit upstairs, says one teacher, were likely to use their intelligence to mastermind nefarious criminal schemes.

The survey results are a powerful and saddening reminder of how much harm some teachers can do to the minds left in their care.

It's unlikely that many of the teachers, chatting amiably to Turner, would have picked her Ngati Ranginui descent, nor that her grandfather, Maharaia Winiata, was, among many other achievements, the first Maori to earn a PhD outside New Zealand.

However, going by her blonde, blue-eyed appearance, they almost certainly would have judged her likely to ace her exams.

Cabinet members have denied that people who join electorate-based Cabinet Clubs (great name - would love to see the badge and the card you get on your birthday) are buying access and influence.

The only problem with that denial is that it requires us to believe there are people who will pay money merely to spend time in ministers' company.

The possibility that a 17-year-old foreign student at Tauranga Boys' College who has been expelled for smoking marijuana outside school and outside school hours may be deported for the offence seems hypocritical.

At a time when the evils of synthetic cannabis are the scourge of the nation, surely this child should only be rewarded for setting an example and sticking to the natural alternative.

An announcement this week brought a strong early contender for ironic Book Title of the Year: Personal Minders Division. There will obviously be world-beating excuse-making going on in: Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days.