The Green’s new policy of making Te Reo Māori a core subject forgets that not everyone is good at languages.
I got a lower pass in High School English. I never scored a single mark in a phonetics test – zip every time. I was hopeless at learning Japanese.
I was wise enough to resist the encouragement for my dear departed mother to enrol in high school French. I had no wish to be the class dunce in French too.
The only reason I went to university was Mr. Carney in the first week of grade 7 noticed that I was in the level II classes for English and social science. As my six brothers and three sisters topped the school or near enough, he suspected that I was hiding my light under a bushel. He promoted me to the level III classes, which put me in the stream to matriculation college and therefore university.
Imagine how much I would have hated study if I was required to learn a 2nd language when I was struggling terribly with English. I am still a bad speller. I leave it to the reader to judge my grammar.
Learning another language is not a priority when you consider the poor literacy rates among Māori, Pasifika and some Pākehā. 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 prose literacy competence.
Requiring children who do not have an aptitude for language or school in general to learn a 2nd 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 at school is to find subjects where they 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 a 2nd language is fool-hardy.
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 at all 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.
Precious school resources and class time is better spent learning the basics needed to get a good start in life.
PS. I am good at maths so I do not understand why people are not. People who are good at languages are even more arrogant about how easy it is to learn a language and even more lacking in insight about the difficulties in language acquisition.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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