UPDATE: Notice that one of the debate participants, David Lillis, has left a comment below.
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The NewsHub article below, reproduced on MSN, contains a short (10-minute debate) about whether and how Mātauranga Māori (Māori “ways of knowing) should be taught in public schools. The participants are Sir Ian Taylor (a half-Māori businessman and a proponent of teaching MM as science), and David Lillis. a statistician and physicist who’s been an opponent of teaching MM as equivalent to science, though he thinks it has a place in classes like sociology or history. I’ve written frequently about this debate, and you can see my many post here.
I’m in general on Lillis’s side, as Taylor seems to think that MM, which is really a mélange of practical (observational) knowledge, myth, morality, tradition, and superstition, is in effect “science”, with all the other supernatural or moral bits really being science in disguise. You’ll see how he uses slippery language when implying that early Polynesians, who found their way across the Pacific via trial and error (eventually using guidelines), were really quite accomplished physicists. (How many voyagers died when they didn’t reach land?) Taylor:
“It was that indigenous knowledge that brought our Polynesian voyages, starting 3500 years out of Asia across the greatest expanse of open water on the planet. Now you do not cross the greatest stead of ocean water on the planet without science, technology, engineering and math.”
No, Sir Ian, you’re wrong. The Polynesians were not scientists, engineers, or mathematicians: they were observant people and built good boats. But how much purchase do you get in math or physics class by pointing this out? True, it was a great accomplishment, but it wasn’t achieved via the toolkit we call “modern science.” Taylor sees MM as “indigenous knowledge,” which isn’t exactly like modern science, but fits in alongside it. And a lot of MM isn’t knowledge at all.
Lillis advocates a modern “first rate” curriculum for NZ, and that includes a bit of MM; but notes that MM shouldn’t “saturate the curriculum,” which many Kiwis really think should happen. He says that MM can be part of classes in “languages social studies, and history”, but not science. The biased moderator (or maybe she’s just ignorant) interrupts Lillis twice, asking why indigenous knowledge isn’t science, and Lillis points out that indigenous knowledge is largely “observation, careful observation, and trial and error, and passing down of knowledge by word of mouth, which is necessarily limited, but I hear that there are scientific elements in traditional knowledge, including Mātauranga Māori.”
Again, Sir Ian claims that MM is science, although he denied that earlier. His goal of teaching MM as science is to excite (mostly Māori) students about STEM. He then lapses into what I see as virtue-flaunting gibberish.
Sir Ian avers that what he learned about science in school was “really boring.” But seems to me that the best way to overcome that is to teach modern science, including perhaps a bit of traditional knowledge, but also jazz up the science teaching in general. The fact is, however, that some people will never be turned on by science, so you the goal of inspiring everyone is largely futile.
Finally, Lillis notes that mythology and religion should not be taught as science. He uses the example of the Māori myth of “snaring the sun,” which would confuse students if taught as science. But Sir Ian, slippery as ever, manages to claim that “snaring the sun” is really part of physics and that Māori mythology can be turned into the “Big Bang” found by modern physics. But why not just teach the Big Bang and the evidence for it rather than extract it from Māori myth?
Click either the headline below or the screenshot to go to the short debate. The moderator clearly seems to be on the side of Taylor, as she more or less must be in woke New Zealand.
Or click here to watch:
Here’s a transcript of part of the debate that shows how Taylor a rhetorical alchemist, miraculously transmutes MM into modern science:
Advocate for mātauranga Māori, Sir Ian Taylor joined AM on Tuesday morning and told the show he believes there are certainly lessons that can be learned.
“It was that indigenous knowledge that brought our Polynesian voyages, starting 3500 years out of Asia across the greatest expanse of open water on the planet. Now you do not cross the greatest stead of ocean water on the planet without science, technology, engineering and math,” Sir Ian told AM co-host Melissa Chan-Green.
Sir Ian said mātauranga falls into the category of science and pointed to a couple of examples. [JAC: I find these funny although bogus.]
“One of the examples we give is the apple always fell from the tree, that’s mātauranga, that’s indigenous knowledge. It became gravity when it landed on Isaac Newton’s head,” he said.
“The other example I’d give for the way kids are learning physics and maths from these stories, [is] the waka holder of the Tahitian sailors who went out and met Captain Cook as he arrived, kept going back because they thought his boat was broken because it was so slow.
“Well, actually it was Archimedes principle. The boat was slow because it had a big area in the water. It’s the displacement of water.”
We have a new and more moderate government in NZ now, in contrast to the Leftist one—mainly under Ardern and Hipkens—that inserted MM into all the schools. It remains to be seen whether the new Luxon government can stop the colonization of science by MM, and restore New Zealand’s slipping reputation for quality education.
h/t: Michael
“rhetorical alchemist”
Oh, wow – such an expressive .. expression – I love it! 🙂
Thank you. I lived in NZ as a kid and follow this terrible trend closely thanks to WEIT.
I’ll watch the debate tonight.
D.A.
NYC
I don’t see how the falling apple analogy could possibly be described as indigenous knowledge – there were simply no apples in New Zealand until European settlers introduced them.
Plus all pre science folk knowledge and pre-education children’s knowledge, even the knowledge of intelligent animals and six month old babies, includes the expectation that things fall down, not up or sideways, unless in a storm. It’s empirical knowledge that is universal and intuitive. The mathematical model of gravity is anything but.
The other example I didn’t get at all.
I just saw a YouTube video of an elephant shaking a tree to get the marula fruits down (they’re a favorite of elephants!). That means that elephants know about gravity!
Would this count as proboscidean indigenous knowledge?
The second example, if a true story, refers to the principle of ship design that drag in the water impeding a moving ship is related to the wetted surface area of the hull, both from friction and from the weight of the water that has to be pushed up and away from the bow as the ship moves through it, making a wake. (Hence the appeal of aquaplaning.) This is, I think, where Taylor might be, correctly, invoking the Archimedes principle which more simply is what makes any boat float. I can’t open either link to check.)
Beamy, “tubby” ships are slower for an applied power than narrow, pointy ones. But the beamy ships are more seaworthy in open water for long ocean voyages and can carry far more provisions, cargo, and cannons than a canoe or rowed galley. If Cook was being teased by the Tahitian headman he could have replied, “And how far from your home are you, Sir?”
The Royal Navy was familiar with the sailing qualities of fast, sail-assisted rowed galleys during coastal operations against Ottoman pirates in the Mediterranean. It’s not as if meeting more-or-less similar but much smaller vessels off Tahiti would have been a mystery to Cook as to how they worked.
James Cook had great respect for the practical navigational prowess of the Pacific Islanders he met. The fashionable modern snideness about the supposed failure of the British to recognize this is unfair. I also think that a professional Tahitian sailor would have been reciprocally impressed by the sheer size and complexity of a sailing ship that had come all that way, even though Endeavour was only a little bark, a minor command suitable for a lieutenant on his way up in the Service. If the people Cook met were not impressed, it was only because they were utterly unable to comprehend the magnitude of the accomplishment done without magic (other than that provided by the Church of England.)
I like to imagine that I understand these things from reading all those Patrick O’Brian novels. But he was a bit of a fabulist so I probably don’t understand a darned thing.
Shel Silverstein wrote (and sang!) a song, “Killed by a Coconut” in which a succession of hapless travelers are killed increasingly absurdly by falling coconuts.
Isn’t this like medieval cathedrals in Europe? They built great structures and there may have been some engineering involved but it is not the same as modern structural engineering. It can be of historical interest and it is interesting to apply modern structural analysis to old designs to see how they work. It does not take away from the achievement to say that it is not modern structural engineering.
“great structures and there may have been some engineering involved”
Agreed and Not that much.
Quite a few of them failed catastrophically because there was not full understanding of load paths and stress in materials but god helped of course!
Note that sleight of hand very common in Maori activism: Our “3,500” year.. blah blah… well NO actually. That winds the clock back into Polynesia all the way to Taiwan/Philippines.
The Maori didn’t arrive in NZ until about 7-800 years ago. Not being picky here as growing up there the zeitgeist (then) was that Maoris had inhabited NZ since “time immemorial, like the Australian Aborigines.” Which is utter nonsense.
We see this in Palestine also. Palestinians, whose families often don’t go back further in the area than the 1920s and 30s (they moved en mass from surrounding countries to work on British and French projects)* were also there for “time immemorial.”
I despise this massaging of history.
D.A.
NYC
*ask a Palestinian his full family name: you’ll frequently hear lots of place names of Egypt/Syria/Leb in that family name. Of course there were Arab/Jews and Christians before the 1920s but not many (of ANY of them).
Medical schools need to bring back phlebotomy, and Texas A&M should introduce a major in rain dancing.
Phlebotomy is still a thing – my doc prescribes it for me as part of my annual physical. Maybe you meant phrenology? 😀
Oh man yes. I feel very dumb.
I guess the passengers of the S. S. Minnow also used science, technology, engineering and math to discover Gilligan’s Island.
Growing up, most of my friends liked Ginger, but my favorite scientist was Mary Ann !
No, indeed. The assertion ignores the possibility that many Polynesians died doing their feats of navigation. It also ignores the fact that you can be a good navigator without having a grasp of the science. Christopher Columbus completely ignored the science that said the Earth was much bigger than he thought (that’s why he had trouble getting backing for his expedition – everybody else knew the Earth was bigger than he said and he would have died if the Americas weren’t in the way) but he was still a good navigator.
The other thing is this trope that nobody thought of gravity before Newton and it was only when he saw an apple fall that he thought of gravity is bullshit. The apple (if it is not apocryphal) merely inspired Newton to connect the force that keeps planets orbiting the Sun with the force that pulls apples to the centre of the Earth. Even then, that would not have been enough to assure his greatness. He also created a single mathematical framework that could predict the motions of the planets and the fall of an apple. That’s the science.
Observing apples fall is not science (or at least is nothing but the first step). Creating a model that predicts the behaviour of falling apples and can be extended to other phenomena is science.
Yes – and the next step is to test the model. This has been done several (millions of) times, and Newton’s model works pretty well on Earth-size scales.
What models of the natural world has MM ever formulated in a hypothesis that can be tested? And what would happen if any such model was formulated, tested, and failed? My guess is that the cheerleaders of MM would reject both the test and its outcome, rather than discard their model.
“One of the examples we give is the apple always fell from the tree, that’s mātauranga, that’s indigenous knowledge. It became gravity when it landed on Isaac Newton’s head,”
Ignoring for a minute that apples are not native to NZ and were imported and cultivated by Europeans, how does this story constitute “science”. The understanding of gravity doesn’t begin or end with the apocryphal apple story, but the formulation of the inverse-square law. I’m sure everyone, everywhere, since the origin of humans noticed that objects fall downwards…
It’s useful to think not only of science but of sciences. The developments in astronomy and physics involving Galileo and then Newton constitute one interrelated group of scientific insights, but we should think also of the work of Vesalius, and the development of the capacity to question Galen’s ideas. The Renaissance was a period of enormous developments in the sciences, utterly incomparable with anything in any body of indigenous knowledge.
I’ve always like Jerry’s definition of “science broadly construed” to include empirical reasoning like what a plumber or an auto mechanic uses to apply data and reasoning to a model of a problem in order to solve the problem and find out what’s going on (in the toilet or the carburetor or whatever). That definition includes MM under the umbrella of science already.
What it doesn’t include is the spiritual nonsense in which most indigenous knowledge is embedded. I think a major reason why advocates don’t already include MM and other indigenous knowledge with science is that doing so would necessarily expose MM to the same scrutiny that other scientific claims must suffer. And then one risks not just rejecting some indigenous claims about nature but also rejecting the spiritual or religious claims. In the world view of advocates, that amounts to rejecting the indigenous people themselves (or “erasing” them or whatever catastrophic verb one likes).
The other comical aspect of all this is the liberal sprinkling of Maori words and phrases into the conversation and writing about MM and science. Again this makes the conversation (and the knowledge and the education) embarrassingly parochial. Imagine being a NZ student applying to graduate school with a cover letter, transcript, and research description full of “wakapapa” and “wairuatanga”. It’s ridiculous, unreadable outside of New Zealand, and likely to end up in the round file. Why would they do this to their own kids?
Unreadable in much of NZ as well even amongst the Maori.
We are in theory meant to be secular, but no more.
Robert, Michael that’s really a bummer. Even Canada hasn’t gone so far down this road. I think what holds us back is that we have hundreds of indigenous languages & cultures so we haven’t picked one to teach alongside our science courses and to sprinkle like croutons in our discourse.
Further to your second paragraph, political scientist Frances Widdowson elaborated on this in a 2019 video interview. (And gosh have things got worse since then!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFuOA4ecJRY Relevant bit starts at 57:08
If you invite an elder to give a lecture on indigenous botany knowledge (as her now ex-university was proposing to do), you then have a quandary:
-Do you allow the (mostly indigenous) students exposed to this programming to come away believing that the university science faculty themselves believe that the leaves come out in the spring because the trees hear the birds singing to them? How does this obeisance help indigenous graduates engage more effectively with modern society? (Especially those students who already know it’s B.S. After all, they had to get to Grade 12, which the elder likely did not.)
-Or is their enrolment in the university (nearly always on an affirmative-action basis to fill empty spots in the class and to attract federal Indian industry dollars) merely to make them feel better about themselves?
-Or at some point do you have to tell the students that, no we don’t really believe what the elder taught you. That’s just a quaint myth. Here’s the real scientific knowledge. But the elder didn’t think he was brought to teach as a foil for debunking. He took the invitation to mean that you were respecting his knowledge, not mocking him behind his back as a fool or a liar. This will only lead to bad feeling when it gets back to him.
New Zealand will have to confront this as well: Eventually someone is going to ask, In one lecture you said a piece of MM was true. And now you (and the rest of the world) are saying it isn’t really. Which is it? In cultural anthro you can teach religious myths as myth. But in science class you have correct error, to say what’s provable and what is falsified.
“How does this obeisance help indigenous graduates engage more effectively with modern society?”
Agreed. Or as Freddie deBoer put it in his newsletter a couple days ago, “Who is all of this shit for?”
With the caveat that I had trouble with the recording and had to rely on the linked news report, as usual:
1) Polynesian navigation – marvellously skilled as it was and relying on extensive memorised knowledge and accurate observation – is used in support of Matauranga Maori, though Maori appear to have lost the ability to sail throughout the Pacific, despite the abundance of traditional canoe building materials in NZ.
2) Observational navigation is extolled as wonderfully Polynesian, yet it was also practised in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
3) The superior sailing ability of Tahitian canoes in light winds is praised, but not the capability of the Endeavour to endure and protect its crew from high latitude weather, provision for long distance voyages, and protect the hull with a copper bottom – a bit like judging a modern America’s Cup catamaran as superior to a container ship.
4) Cook arrived in the Pacific – Pasifikans did not arrive in the North Atlantic – with compass, sextant, telescope, a chronometer on later voyages, Admiralty Tables, lines of longitude and latitude, and the enormous advantage of writing.
There’s a lot of selective cultural chest-beating in support of MM, not a lot of dispassionate thought about the nature of science and its contributions to both powerful, explanatory, universal knowledge and our modern standards of life expectancy.
It’s called wayfinding and if done from a set starting point and aligning with the right starts and the Sun in a certain way with the current you can stay on a set course. The weakness is storms and the limited ability to alter course. Despite it all, it is the most advanced natural wayfinding system humanity has produced.
The Indian Ocean people probably had some common ancestry and at the very least the same needs.
The Mediterranean is smaller and predictable regardless of anything with plenty of landmarks.
I have no issue saying Polynesian wayfinding was probably the most capable and certainly the longest distance capable but even Māori friends have no issue saying it gets romanticized.
I wouldn’t exactly call our new government moderate Jerry. Then that is by our tame standards, by US standards we’ve always been moderate and just swing a little this way and that.
I’m glad you reported on this though.
Hi Jerry et al.
In going live yesterday I had to take the risk of public criticism, but others survive! I thought that I had 6 – 8 minutes, but we had limited time and I had much more to say. To be fair, I feel that Ian Taylor presented his case well and I agree that some matauranga Māori will inspire Māori kids etc. Ian’s opinions may resonate with the New Zealand public more than mine, though I disagree philosophically with placing of Indigenous knowledge in science, except in a few cases where Indigenous knowledge has a clear basis in science.
With limited time in a live TV interview, I did not wish to get caught up on whether early navigation did or did not constitute science. I do feel that applauding the skills of early societies in navigation, astronomy and other pursuits is entirely legitimate and can lift the self-respect of minority schoolkids – though I see such knowledge as not yet science unless tested through the means of science – falsification, in other words. And, unfortunately, we see little or no falsification in Indigenous knowledge.
If I had had more time, I would have made the point that New Zealand is a multicultural society where non-Māori/non-European constitute 25% of the total population. The curriculum pays scant attention to them and offers few or no examples of their knowledges or world views.
The main differences between Indigenous knowledge and science include the difference between Observation and Trial and Error of Indigenous knowledge and the much deeper How and Why of science – and, of course, the testing of scientific ideas through experiment and quantitative analysis.
Also – that science transcends geographic, political, ethnic, cultural and religious frontiers, while Indigenous knowledge is tied to particular locations and to specific communities. Science requires contest, confrontation and challenge to the status quo, whereas some indigenous knowledges are closed and not available for criticism.
With more time I would have outlined diverse problems with the draft curriculum (e.g. lack of specificity). Possibly, strict definitions of what it is that constitutes science could be relaxed for the purposes of early-stage education and motivating minority students. Ian’s examples relating to Māori navigation are helpful and are fully worthy of discussion in class but should not be treated as science.
David Lillis
I just wanted to congratulate and thank you for your willingness to speak about this publicly. It would be much easier – and very tempting no doubt – to excuse yourself from the debate, but you clearly value doing the right thing more than having an easy life. That takes guts and integrity and while I don’t want to come across as patronising, I do want to say you should be very proud of your contribution.
Thank you!
Re: the story of Maui and the Sun, check out this Level 1 NCEA Maths & Statistics Assessment in the curriculum…
(NZ translation:
NCEA = national high school student assessments/exams for qualifications in various subjects
Level 1 = ages ~15-16; typically taken by students heading for vocational training; Levels 2 & 3 are more for college entrance)
Assessment = NZ term for tests/exams
)
MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS / ASSESSMENT
Mathematics and Statistics 1.2
Use mathematical methods to explore problems that relate to life in Aotearoa New Zealand or the Pacific
CREDITS: 5
Level: NCEA level 1
Status: Registered
Date published: 12 Dec 2023
Assessment Activities 1.2
Activity A
Ko Māui me te Rā
Ākonga will use mathematics to explore the pūrākau of how Māui and his brothers slowed down Tama-nui-te-rā.
(Translation: Students will use mathematics to explore the story of how Māui and his brothers slowed down the Sun.)
https://ncea.education.govt.nz/mathematics-and-statistics/mathematics-and-statistics/1/2?view=activities
“… explore problems that relate to life in Aotearoa New Zealand…”
But of course – slowing down the sun (rather than the earth’s rotation) is directly relevant to life in NZ, what with global warming and our skin cancer rate.
Meanwhile, valorising indigenous knowledge elsewhere, the Greek curriculum requires students to calculate the additional hourly calorific requirement for Icarus to fly x kilometres closer to the sun than Daedalus, assuming they are the same weight, and calculate what would be the maximum safe height for Icarus to fly before proximity to the sun softened beeswax sufficiently for a 20 cm goose feather to detach at 30 strokes per minute.
Good grief. NZ distance from suppliers and markets puts us at a significant disadvantage, without adding avoidable human stupidity to our problems. Or is this a cunning plan to undermine Maori mythology?
I was wondering the same thing. It’s almost like a math staffer at the Ministry of Education said, “Boss, there’s really no way to genuinely incorporate mātauranga Māori into algebra and trigonometry, these subjects boil down to basic concepts”, and the boss said, “Think of something, it’s a mandate from the top!”, and the staffer said “OK LOL” and came up with this. And everyone else was too scared of this topic to object.
Imagine what would happen if you did a math exercise on how many animals were on Noah’s Ark in the public schools in the USA.
* If everyone, students and teachers, agrees it is fiction and a bit silly, then you can do the exercise given some starting assumptions, and it’s perhaps 1% more interesting and 99% less practical than numerous other word problems you can think of.
* If anyone takes it seriously, then the exercise ends up disproving the legend in an extremely thorough way, embarassing anyone who believes it.
But if the cultural/governmental rule is Thou Shalt Take All Ways of Knowing Seriously In All Aspects Or Else, then you’re stuck in a huge dilemma.
I suspect assessments/exams based on this kind of question will just be systematically avoided by any teacher with brains, but if so, why is the NZ government spending money/time/website space/their own credibility putting this on the NCEA website??
(In either the NZ or the USA case, you could of course have a good, rational, interesting discussion about legends and their meanings and interpretation over time, about literalist and nonliteralist readings of legends, etc., but that’s a discussion for a literature class or some such, not Maths.)
Polynesian navigation cannot be compared to Old World navigation. If I wanted to tell a Polynesian how to get to the Amish campsites, it would go something like this-
Turn right after you go through the gate, in the direction of the North Star.
At the first “T”. turn right again, towards the sunrise.
After you cross the river, turn left.
After you pass the big cliff, start looking for a gate on your left.
Through the gate, bear left until you get to the river. You are there.
It is formulaic, like a recipe. Except on the ocean, there are fewer landmarks. Also, my terrestrial instructions could be used in reverse to get back to the main gate. In ocean navigation, currents make useful reversing less likely. Traveling east for a measure of time with a northbound current to an island, then trying to get back by traveling west for the same amount of time will get you lost.
If you compose your directions using transitory measure, like turning right where those horses are grazing, they might not be there next time.
Additionally, when using formulaic navigation, when you miss one point in the process, you are probably lost.
And the directions are only useful if you start at the stated origin, unless you have a different set of directions to get to the origin or destination.
What the Polynesians where very good at, was seeing evidence in the waves, currents, birds, and other signs that land was likely close, and in that direction. That was a very useful skill when the navigation system was imprecise. They also had a complicated system of recording their observations to enable others to follow the same route.
The Polynesians did not undertake long voyages like those to NZ on a whim, as safe return was not assured. It may be that the ancestors of the Maori may have been the only survivors of several groups that left Taiwan(?) at the same time. There is no reason to believe that they could have returned if they desired to do so. Of course some Polynesian cultures established routes between lots of different island groups, but doing so came at a relatively high cost, with the risk of failure increasing with distance.
The Endeavor, on the other hand, could reliably be expected to return to England eventually, unless some disaster befell the ship. And those following later could absolutely find each island group charted by Cook’s men, even if they started from a different destination, or via Good Hope rather than Cape Horn.
I do not know why people seem to obsess over the size or speed of one vessel over another. What matters is whether it is suitable for the purpose it is being used for.
Hi Nick et al.
I made a rapid-fire decision to mention the Maui Snaring the Sun fable as an example. Better to have mentioned the notion of “life force” (Mauri). As I understand it, this concept can mean both “life force” and “health”, as in the health of an ecosystem. Most kids will understand the Mauri of their local ecosystems under pressure from pollutants from nearby towns and cities, agricultural runoffs and emissions and, of course, climate change.
The problem is that the draft curriculum presented Mauri as real:
“The vital essence, life force of everything: be it a physical object, living thing or ecosystem. In Chemistry and Biology, mauri refers to the health and life-sustaining capacity of the taiao, on biological, physical, and chemical levels. NCEA Chemistry & Biology Glossary (2022)”.
Pushback did result in backdown on much of the conversation on Mauri, though it may remain in part within the subject of Geography.
When it comes to the often-repeated notion that Indigenous knowledges will harmonize with “Western Science” in combatting challenges such as pandemics and climate change, and even lead the way, do we not over-promise on the contribution of Indigenous knowledge? Challenges such as pandemics, malnutrition, climate change, loss of biodiversity, ocean and atmospheric health are global and in truth will be addressed through mainstream science and technology.
Indigenous knowledge will play a part – but a relatively minor part. Aside from a renewed will to live more simply, climate change will be addressed through green science and green technology – atmospheric and marine biology, chemistry and physics, hydrology, and research into cleaner agriculture and forestry and research into cleaner and sustainable energy.
David Lillis
As I have said before, the Discovery Institute must be kicking themselves that they didn’t use this approach for their creationist myths and pseudoscience two decades ago.
Karl Popper of the “falsifiable” fame wrote to tackle claims that Marxism was a “scientific” socialism.
I’m just in a mood right now where I’m like “screw it. Let em adopt the alternative ‘ways of knowing’ and just let it play out…”
It gets so tiring after a while…
As a Māori and a former nursing and midwifery lecturer, I hang my head in shame when I read these completely ridiculous attempts to justify the inclusion of MM in the NZ science syllabus. however, I have tried to work on other approaches that I think will wake up idiots to this extreme silliness. Firstly, I like to suggest that aspects of MM are indeed science but only have the lowest level of anecdotal as well as some historical evidence to support it. Therefore, it can in no way compete with knowledge gained from well designed scientific studies. However, a major sticking point for me is teaching two contradictory systems of science and expecting students to be able to tell the difference between the two and not get confused. In my experience, many students struggle to fully understand one system, without the complication of adding another, opposing system.
A recent example, involving gauging water quality, of trying to reconcile MM and science is here:
https://www.waikatotimes.co.nz/nz-news/350187411/working-together-identify-waterway-health
They report that “We found the two approaches largely agreed where streams are in poor health”. However they go on to mention areas of disagreement, particularly strikingly this: “The location with the most favourable Wai Ora assessment score had a strong historical and spiritual connection because it was close to a marae but had a relatively poor science score.” but completely fail to dicuss which assessment should be preferred in the case of such contradiction, instead rather lamely concluding with the unwarranted assertion “By using both together, we can reveal a detailed, nuanced, and holistic picture of the health of our waterways.”
It goes on:
Conversely, the location with the best science score did not hold a special connection with the iwi, having been under crown or private ownership for generations. [Well, then! But I wonder why that should be?]
Overall, whether judged by the mātauranga Māori app or the western science measurements, stream health is poor throughout the catchment, and probably [sic*] declining. This aligns with kaumatua stories of the declining state of mahinga kai areas in the rohe, compared with when they were younger. A sentiment with which we all can agree, I’m sure, even if there is some unacknowledged expectation bias here.
————–
* even the science-y part isn’t expressed with much scientific veritas.
As an another Māori woman, I thank you for speaking up. The MM activists embarrass us all. The Pakeha (Caucasian for you non NZ readers) who promote this nonsense are being condescending – it’s like they’re saying Māori are too dumb to grasp actual science OR that we’re a charity case that needs head pats to compensate us for our dismal social stats and prospects.
According to Wikipedia Sir Ian started his career as a TV presenter and went on to get a law degree. Does he have any scientific credentials? I’m also not aware of him having particular expertise in MM – I suspect this is just an appealing project for a well to do retiree with time on his hands and a gullible audience.
So it’s inaccurate reporting to describe him as an “expert” in relation to this topic.
I agree. My respect for him due to his pushback against the actions of Government during the Covid mess has dissipated. I noted in the presenter’s opening remarks that he was described as half Maori, very unlikely as the last fullblood Maori died in 1933.
Many years ago I did a Philosophy of Science paper at university. The textbook for the course was called “What is this thing called Science.”
Different people have different understanding of the meaning of the word, science.
For most people, science is a collection of facts because that is how it is presented in the science class at school. If you start with this understanding it seems reasonable to believe the false idea that MM is just another collection of facts and that it can be of equal value.
I think of science as being a process of inquiry. The information that this process produces is what is taught to children in school. The information itself, is not science.
This process has rules of logic and procedure, the scientific method, which when done properly allow the detection of error and bias.
Anyone who claims MM is just another way of knowing is a person who doesn’t understand science.
Hi Jerry.
My own write-up of that debate is below.
David Lillis
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/03/david-lillis-debating-education-on-tv.html#more
And now, a perspective on the issue from Australia.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1041056
“Silence is not an option for First Nations’ content in Australian schools”
A university statement, not an official government response. Does a fairly good job of threading the needle.