The Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Davoy has called for Te Reo Māori to be compulsory in New Zealand schools. She said being bilingual would be “a real added advantage” to young Kiwis and more people knowing Te reo Māori would help race relations.
Learning another language is not a priority for the Pākehā children or Māori mokupuna when you consider the poor literacy rates among Māori, Pasifika and Pākehā. The priority for children in an English speaking country is to master English. Too many children leave school with inadequate reading and writing skills.
Figure 1: Prose literacy by ethnicity, 2011
Source: Literacy skills of young adult New Zealanders | Education Counts.
Lower levels of literacy and numerously are much higher among Māori and Pasifika children. Pākehā consistently having a larger proportion in the higher levels of prose literacy.
Figure 2: Prose literacy rates by ethnicity, 1996 and 2006
Source: Indicator 9: Literacy rates — Office of the Auditor-General New Zealand.
60%of Pākehā are above the minimum level of competence to meet the prose literacy requirements of a knowledge society. This contrasts with the majority of Māori and Pasifika who are below the minimum level of competence.
Furthermore, requiring children who do not have an aptitude for language or school in general to learn a language will reinforce in those who are not doing well that they are not very smart. This will give them more reasons to hate school and leave as soon as possible and never go back.
The key to helping children who do not have an aptitude to succeed greatly at school is to find the subjects where they do do well so they can get a good start to life. If students are not good at academic subjects, requiring them to do more academic studies such as study language is fool-hardy.
Taking resources, and more importantly, students learning time away from basic literacy skills will do little for a Māori economic development and race relations. This is because this taking resources and student learning time away from literacy and basic education will slow the closing of income gaps between Māori and others.
Language is a network good. It pays to join the largest network so you can communicate and do business with more people. The wage premium for immigrants learning English in English-speaking’s countries is about 15%.
Learning Te reo Māori will not help children in their other subjects. The psychology of the transfer of learning was founded 100 years ago to explore the hypothesis that learning Latin gave the student muscle to learn other subjects, both other languages and generally learn faster.
Educational psychologists found that Latin does not help much in studying other languages and other subjects. No significant differences were found in deductive and inductive reasoning or text comprehension among students with 4 years of Latin, 2 years of Latin or no Latin at all.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Dec 02, 2015 @ 09:40:16
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