Maori education : trade training, pre-apprenticeship and pre-vocational training 1959-1995

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.