The Treaty and ideology – the Kiwi way of thinking that is corroding our democracy and debasing our science

As ministerial announcements on the Beehive website make ominously plain, Covid is still with us.    The government’s programme of fusing science with matauranga Maori is still with us, too, although that’s not something you will learn from recent announcements.

Mind you, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Science Minister Megan Woods, Associate Science Minister Ayesha Verrall and their colleagues might be quietly back-pedalling on their concept of a Treaty-based system of science and the way it should be taught.  But this is highly unlikely.

And as long as the Great Science Experiment continues in the ethnocentric crucible of Kiwi biculturalism , the debate it fuels will keep burning brightly.

In this country in recent days, Newsroom has published an article by Professor Elizabeth Rata who writes:

No matter how intense or heated the discussion may be, NZ universities need to address the difference between ideology and science… 

In the United States, Professor Jerry Coyne has maintained a keen interest in the way science is evolving – is that the right word? – in this country.

His examination of specific claims about matauranga Maori and how it can tell us stuff that modern science can’t, or can somehow supplement modern science, has resulted in the past week in these items being published on his Evolution is True website:

• How “indigenous medicine” differs from “medicine”; and
• More from New Zealand, a nation whose science is circling the drain.

The second of those articles has the merit of describing Point of Order as a reputable website and references a post by Graham Adams (described, of course,  as a reputable journalist).

Adams’ post, headed Follow the money:  matauranga Maori and the millions at stake,  examined how a lot of funding and influence is riding on the successful casting of indigenous knowledge as equal to science.

He harked back to the “incendiary stoush” which was sparked last July by seven eminent professors stating in a letter to the Listener that indigenous knowledge is not science and does not warrant inclusion in the NCEA syllabus as being equal to science.

One of the seven eminent professors was Elizabeth Rata, Director of the Knowledge in Education Research Unit in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland.

In her article for Newsroom, she says New Zealand’s universities are at a defining crossroads and asks:

Do we remain a universitas, a community of scholars developing knowledge according to the universal principles and methods of science or do we continue down the path of a racialised ideology?

The science-ideology battle is nothing new to universities, Rata points out.

Dialectical materialism was the ruling ideology in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Christianity was the ideology in the pre-Darwinian centuries of English universities, and…

In post-1980s’ New Zealand it is the racial ideology of two political categories of people defined by their ancestry.

Rata laments how unfounded accusations of racism or other silencing strategies muzzle discussion about what is happening in our universities and schools.

There are many layers needing discussion – the difference between science and culture, between cultural safety and intellectual risk-taking, between universalism and parochialism. However intense and heated the discussion may be it must take place. Too much is at stake to pretend that all is well.

Rata suggests a useful contribution can be made by considering the role of the 2020 Education and Training Act in the shift from science to ideology.

The basic contradiction between universal science and the parochialism of the treaty ideology is found in that legislation.

It has several clauses supporting science. They include the academic freedom clause which gives academic staff and students, freedom “within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions”. Another clause recognises that the university’s “principal aim is to develop intellectual independence”. These aims are to be achieved by “people who are active in advancing knowledge, who meet international standards of research and teaching, who are a repository of knowledge and expertise and who accept a role as critic and conscience of society”.

The Treaty of Waitangi and its interpretation and reinterpretation by judges and politicians for ideological purposes then comes into Rata’s considerations:

The main Treaty principles clause requires the university’s council “to acknowledge the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi”. ‘Acknowledge’ can be weak or strong. Since the term first appeared in the 1990 Education Act it has morphed into the strongest interpretation as obligation and commitment. It is now very difficult for academics to question the ideological intensity which has swept through the university as ‘obligation’ is embedded. Prayers in the secular university go unchallenged. Treaty requirements in teaching courses are fulfilled. Funding applications without mātauranga Māori adherence are declined. Language is self-monitored for ideological lapses.

The legislation helps to explain the seemingly widespread support from academics for the Treaty ideology.

Section 281 encourages the greatest possible student participation by under-represented groups – such as Māori.

The assumption is made that adherence to treaty principles will provide this encouragement. That is unlikely. The educational underachievement of a section of the Māori population happens well before students reach tertiary education.

University students from all racial and cultural groups tend to come from knowledge-rich schools which provide a solid foundation for university study. These are often the children of the professional class who have benefited from such knowledge in their own lives and insist that schools provide it for their children.

It is access to the abstract quality of academic knowledge and language, its very remoteness from everyday experience, and its formality – science in other words – that is necessary for success. Tragically this knowledge is miscast as ‘euro-centric’. The aim of the decolonisation and re-indigenisation of New Zealand education is to replace this knowledge with the cultural knowledge of experience.

But science is neither euro-centric nor western, as Rata points out:

It is universal. This is recognised in the International Science Council’s definition of science as “rationally explicable, tested against reality, logic, and the scrutiny of peers this is a special form of knowledge”. It includes the arts, humanities and social sciences as human endeavours which may, along with the physical and natural sciences, use such a formalised approach. The very children who need this knowledge the most, now receive less.

Rata concludes:

The science-ideology discussion matters for many reasons – the university’s future, the country’s reputation for science and education, and the quality of education in primary and secondary schools. But at its heart it is about democracy. Science can only thrive when democracy thrives.

A thriving democracy?

Oh dear.  The awful reality for New Zealanders is that the government not only is debasing science by mingling (or mangling) it with matauranga Maori.  It is also creating something we might call a Tiritocracy.

This is being done through an insidious process which gradually corrodes our democracy and democratic institutions and speciously promotes co-governance and “partnership” as constitutional arrangements demanded by the terms of a document signed in 1840.