Ka Mate, Ka Ora: On Truth, Lies, and Knowing the Difference

Abstract

In Aotearoa New Zealand, education has long been seen as a force for good in people’s lives, including in communities whose educational achievement statistics consistently fall below national norms, as is the case for Māori school students. Regardless of other changes, public belief in the benefit of ‘a good education’ is stronger than ever. This ‘totally beneficial’ image of education conceals its real nature and what drives it. The ideologies driving education, hidden beneath its shiny surface, are of particular interest to a Māori scholar studying how education operates as a form of structural violence against Māori people. To analyse how power operates unseen in Māori education entails attention to the larger power relations that link education to violence and the subjugation of personal autonomy, ultimately to war, in our contemporary ‘democratic’ globalised nation-states. Hence the Māori part of the chapter title, taken from the words of the famous hakai (war dance), means ‘life or death’. There is a lie that weakens current education theory and reinforces the larger lie concealed deep in the heart of economic theory - both inherently Western knowledge bases. This chapter is interested in how these lies work as agnoses, or forms of managed social ignorance, to deliver human beings via education to the global war/profit machine in the 21st century. Māori scholars, and those of other non-dominant identities, have more reason and therefore may be more likely to study these linkages than Pākehā/White researchers; better positioned, perhaps, to identify with the interests of the planet against the deathly endgames of uber-wealthy global owners.