In the lead-up to last year’s election, the Green Party announced that it was their policy to make it compulsory to learn te reo Maori in all primary schools by 2030. Not to be outdone, the Labour Government has announced that it is their policy that all early childhood, primary and intermediate schools will be teaching Maori by 2025. The Principals Federation is supporting that aim.
Well fair enough, you might say. After all, Maori is one of our two official languages. Surely therefore, there should be strong pressure on everybody to learn it as they go through school.
Moreover, New Zealand is the only country in the world where Maori is spoken, and it is important to the cultural identity of a significant minority of our people. If the Maori language dies in New Zealand, it dies.
But the argument that learning Maori should be compulsory because it is an official language doesn’t wash – sign language is also an official language, and to the best of my knowledge nobody is suggesting that learning sign language should be compulsory. (Astonishingly, English has never been formally made one of our official languages.)
And the fact that the Maori language would die completely if it is allowed to die in New Zealand argues for taxpayer funding for teaching Maori to those children whose parents want that for their children, and for funding Maori-language radio and television stations (there are 21 taxpayer-funded Maori language radio stations as well as Maori language TV) – not for making it compulsory for all children to learn it.
For the vast majority of New Zealanders – including a very large of New Zealanders with Maori ancestry – learning Maori has no practical value at all.
Making it compulsory to learn the language runs a serious risk of turning people off the language, and indeed turning them off all things Maori.
A few years back, I was one member of a six-person panel discussing this question on a programme for Maori TV. I was the only non-Maori on the panel, but despite that the panel voted four votes to two against making it compulsory to learn Maori, at least in part because of the backlash against the language that making it compulsory would risk creating.
A recent book by Paul Moon, Professor of History at AUT, argues that te reo Maori is almost certainly doomed to die out, and making it compulsory is not going to change that outlook. He cites several other languages, such as Gaelic, where making it compulsory to learn the language has utterly failed to prevent their demise. He concludes that “the most compelling reason to avoid compulsion in schools is that it has a consistent record of failure when it comes to reviving indigenous languages”.[1]
But surely it is well established that learning a second language helps brain development in young children? Yes, probably, but if we as a country are going to invest many millions of dollars in trying to enable our children to learn another language, why would it be a language which would have absolutely no practical value for the great majority of those learning it? Surely better for them to learn a language which would be of practical value to them outside New Zealand, such as Mandarin or Spanish?
People trained in economics can’t help thinking in terms of opportunity cost. What would we have to drop from the school curriculum if we added Maori to it? Would our children get taught less English, or less Mathematics, or less Science, or less Cooking – or would they have to spend less time on the sports field? Something would have to be removed from the curriculum if Maori were to be added to it, and I find it hard to think of anything else which would be of less value to most of our children than learning Maori. Those who argue for adding Maori to the curriculum should be obliged to say what they want to drop from the curriculum.
People who were born in New Zealand have an enormous advantage in that they speak English by the simple fact of being born here. Across the whole planet, more people speak Mandarin or Spanish than speak English, but English is unquestionably the only international language, and most New Zealanders are lucky to speak it by the accident of birth.
When I was at the Reserve Bank, each year I used to attend a meeting of the central banks of almost all the countries in the greater Asian region – from Mongolia in the north, to New Zealand in the south, and to Iran in the west. Even though New Zealand and Australia were the only countries represented at those meetings whose native language was English, every meeting was conducted in English, with no translation provided. It was just assumed that everybody attending could speak English. During my time as Governor of the New Zealand Reserve Bank, only one Governor did not speak English, and he brought his own interpreter.
The European Central Bank has its offices in Frankfurt, Germany. Only one member country of the Euro zone – Ireland – has English as its predominant language, yet every meeting of the ECB board is conducted in English.
When a Lufthansa plane with a German pilot lands in Frankfurt, the pilot communicates with ground control in English, not German.
All over the world, especially in Asia, people are learning English because they know it is the most reliable way into the modern, increasingly international, world.
Most New Zealanders speak it by the sheer good luck of being born here, and it is the most important language for all New Zealanders, including those with some Maori ancestry, to learn to read, write, and speak fluently.
Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.