Abstract:
Maori have since European settlement displayed a remarkahle ability to adapt
introduced systems and knowledge to their own purposes. The imposition of a system
of education and schooling, clearly designed to manipulate and control, to assimilate
and to restrict, may have succeeded in submerging this adaptability, but did not, I
contend, manage to subsume it.
From its inception, the Maori Trade Training, MTT, or Maori Pre-apprenticeship,
MPA, programme has affected most whanau. Initially, only limited numbers of
young Maori men were selected for the schemes, but whole communities were
involved in celebrating with -and outfitting- the chosen ones.
The MTT programmes were developed by three Government Departments.
Maori Affairs was responsible for: pre selection, liaison with whanau, provision and
supervision of hostel accommodation, holiday placement for work experience under
actual trade conditions, ongoing pastoral care, tool and accommodation payments, the
cost of fares to and from the training centre and help with securing apprenticeships at
the end of the full time year at the Technical Institute or their outposts. Carpentry,
bricklaying and plastering were sited off campus at special training centres and
painter decorators and electrical wiring trainees worked on the houses built for the
Department to 'pepper pot' in the new urban sub-divisions.
