Kaupapa Maori Education in New Zealand

Abstract

In the past two decades an indigenous form of education, from early childhood to tertiary, known as kaupapa Maori, has been developed in New Zealand. It is an approach that has been celebrated internationally as an innovative and emancipatory response to Maori educational underachievement and as an important contribution to indigenous self-determination. The explanation and justification for kaupapa Maori education that is codified in a body of writing referred to as kaupapa Maori theory relies substantially on the writings of Graham Hingangaroa Smith (1995, 1996, 1997) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1994, 1995, 1996, 1999). This explanatory writing has become the orthodox academic approach for the teaching of Maori issues in New Zealand social science programmes and provides the academic justification and the discourse for the development of a kaupapa Maori pedagogy and a specific indigenous research approach. My purpose in this chapter is to provide a critique of the ideas of kaupapa Maori education by explaining its emergence and strength within the local — global dialectic of the anti-modernism that characterized late capitalism.