I recently ran into an engineering teacher I know from a local secondary school. He mentioned in passing that his counterpart at the school across town had left six months earlier and the school couldn’t find a replacement. The upshot was that the subject would no longer be offered.
This school has a high Māori and Polynesian population, which means a career path in many industries is being cut off or at least jeopardised for these kids.
This is not an isolated incident. I’ve been told by those who know the numbers that lower-decile schools tend to have less qualified teachers. Or the teachers assume brown kids aren’t capable of some subjects.
There was a time when it was education policy to confine Māori kids to low-skilled jobs. Now it just happens by default.
The government is constantly making big noises about economic growth (don’t they all?). But the plan, such as it is, is about tourism and mining and overseas investment, ie, low-wage and commodity-based industries and overseas ownership. How original. It’s the race-to-the-bottom strategy that has been sending us downwards for decades and this government wants more of the same.
Like its predecessors, the government also talks a lot about STEM careers (science, technology, engineering, maths), but doesn’t back it up. How is a Māori or Polynesian kid in a lower socioeconomic area supposed to pursue a career in those fields if he or she can’t even find a teacher to get them to the starting line?
There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this or any other form of print media, you’re a white Boomer. Politicians and the media have been relying on your votes or business for decades, which is one of the reasons we’ve got the government we have and a media industry that’s imploding.
Successive governments recognised the significance of the Boomer cohort economically, as did other countries, and this generation was blessed with policies designed to support their health, education and success. They now think that was the norm and expect the same in retirement.
Māori born during the same era were the generation that urbanised, and they did so more rapidly than any other group in history.
The Pākehā baby boom was an anomaly, a spike on the graph. The Māori population, on the other hand, has continued to steadily grow. Māori and Polynesians have a birthrate that is above replacement and about 40% of their populations are under 18. By 2043, about half of children under 15 will be Māori or Pasifika. In contrast, about a third of the Pākehā population is over 55 and not being replaced – it is heading for decline.
If you’re a Pākehā Boomer, don’t you think the kind of support and resources you enjoyed earlier in your lifetime should be offered in a similar way to the growing generation of New Zealanders who are brown? They will be the bedrock of our future workforce.
Don’t you want that workforce to be highly educated, bringing hard currency into the country, rather than providing a cheap labour source for overseas investors? If you want a gold-plated retirement and a decent healthcare system to look after you in your final years, who do you think will pay for it?
If you think commodities and low-wage industries are a pathway to national success, you’re delusional. We simply don’t have the capacity to produce anything at the scale of powerhouses in Asia, unless you’re talking about dairy and logs, and we’ve hit our limits on those.
Christopher Luxon and David Seymour have talked about punishing parents for their kids not being in school. But the Child Poverty Action Group has estimated that up to 15,000 kids are working 20-50 hours a week on top of study to help their families pay the bills. Even many of the ram-raid kids are following some kind of misguided logic that their crime is the only way to earn money, possibly because they don’t see a lot of other options.
Memo to Wellington – our greatest economic asset and potential as a country is Māori and Polynesian kids. We’re at risk of squandering that potential because we’re not recognising it, let alone nurturing and supporting it.
