"Each day, there seems to be something eroded or taken away." Photo: RNZ/Vinay Ranchhod
Teachers and principals warn the government is scrubbing Māori words and ideas from education documents.
At an urgently convened conference in Wellington this week, educators said mention of the Treaty of Waitangi and Māori words were being dropped from new English and maths curriculums, and from key documents that provided guidelines for schools.
They warned the government was erasing decades of progress.
Education Minister Erica Stanford refused to comment due to what her office described as unbalanced reporting by RNZ.
The Ministry of Education said it could not comment on behalf of the government.
Te Akatea president Bruce Jepsen said there was growing unhappiness with the government's actions.
"Over the past year-and-a-half, we've seen a constant attack on the positionality of te Tiriti o Waitangi," he said. "In various policies and various documents, it's either not being talked about or it's simply not present.
"Each day, there seems to be something eroded or taken away."
Jepsen said including the treaty in key education documents had real-world effects in children's classrooms.
"We see and hear waiata, we read kupu Māori and we read kupu English, we have all students represented in the curriculum. They can see themselves in the curriculum, they can hear their culture in the curriculum and they can feel a part of a classroom environment as being special, everyone being special - tangata tiriti and tangata whenua."
Tauranga's Te Akau ki Papamoa school principal Dorothea Collier said the amount of te reo being removed from education documents was noticeable.
She said she had worked on the refresh of the maths curriculum until the change of government.
"When the new document came out, the first thing I noticed was the removal of the majority of the te reo Māori," she said. "The te ao Māori concepts had been removed that we had put into the document."
Collier said that was disappointing and worrying, because the inclusion of Māori words and concepts was good for Māori children.
"For Māori, it normalises being Māori having those references, having te reo Māori," she said. "It makes Māori feel proud in who they are and it strengthens their identity."
Trident High School principal Mikaere October said the treaty should be at the centre of education changes, but it was not.
"I feel we moved to a place where we have genuine treaty collaboration, and that was really evident in action and in policy," he said.
"What we're seeing now is that it's 'in addition to', so it's an add-on, something tacked on to the end or not mentioned at all in the proposed documents, and that's really concerning. It's clearly not a priority."
Tauranga's Maungatapu School principal Tane Bennett said the government was taking the school system back in time.
"Taking away someone's language and identity is a loss of a people and of a culture," he said. "I don't think it will ever get to that stage, but we seem to have gone backwards."
He worried effective ways of teaching that recognised children's cultures would be lost.
"A lot of principals have seen the benefits of what we can do, if we meet the needs of learners, which - for Māori learners - is their cultural needs," he said. "If we let all that go overnight and move into another paradigm, we're letting a lot of things go that were actually successful."
Bennett said the government's approach was divisive.
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