71 Human Rights Commission Chapter 4: Mātauranga The impact of colonisation and racism on education Chapters 4 to 6 provide an overview of the impact of colonial white supremacist racism on Māori education, health, and the historical over-policing of Māori and the institutional racism of the criminal justice system. The colonial impact on education Western Eurocentric education was central to the colonisation of Māori. The consequences and impacts of colonisation, racism and white supremacy upon Māori in education affected hundreds of thousands of Māori across multiple generations for more than 182 years. The colonial education system has been fundamental in undermining Māori self-determination, dismantling Māori culture and society, and eroding the mental health and wellbeing of Māori. Mission schools Thomas Kendall opened the first mission school in New Zealand in 1816 (Calman, 2012a). Mission schools were explicitly designed to civilise and decouple Māori from their culture, beginning with conversion to Christianity (ACORD, 1986, p. 1). Colonial racism and white supremacy were the bedrock of this ‘civilising mission’ ostensibly to uplift Māori from ‘barbarism to civilisation’, based on notions of European superiority and Māori inferiority (Walker, 2016, p. 20), to exploit their goodwill and labour, seize their lands, and exploit their natural resources for the benefit of a privileged white-settler society. Māori granted missionaries land, who then set up small farms and taught basic farming skills to young Māori. Boys were taught to make fences and cultivate the land, while girls received instruction on clothes making (Barrington and Beaglehole, 1974, p. 14). This early emphasis on manual skills for Māori boys and domestic skills for Māori girls were precursory to the racist education that would follow. Pākehā were to be the leaders of industry and Māori the manual labourers and domestic workers (Ngata, 2021). The failings of this system were clear. Literacy instruction was in te reo Māori but without a tikanga or kaupapa Māori practice of teaching. Essentially, therefore, the aim was to assimilate Māori into a Christian-British schooling system favouring white people. However, unbeknown to the P��kehā, increasing literacy would lay the seeds for the emergence many generations later of the Kaupapa Māori Advancement and Mātauranga Māori Movement which would push back against racism and assimilation. Early on, many Māori, both adults and children, wanted to attend school to become literate. In 1838, perhaps they foresaw the future. Read also the section on Assimilation. [on p50.] Their intellectual prowess was noted in the House of Lords in 1838 by Minister John Tawell who noted that Māori pupils were ‘as intelligent as any children’ with a “power of acquisition… greater than our own” (Tawell in Barrington and Beaglehole, 1974, p. 22).