Free pass to university for Maori – Doing it Wrong

Saturday 4 July 2009 - Filed under opinion

One-line takeaway: How about a free pass back to school, which might actually fix the problem?

NOTE: I’m not going to get into the preferential treatment side of this, beyond saying that I’m sick and tired of being a productive, contributing member of our society and yet feeling like a second-class citizen in my own country, simply because “they were here first”.

Whether or not there is any truth to the characterization of Maori as lazy, uneducated, more interested in watching their satellite TV than getting out and doing something with their life – irrelevant here. Indulging my own bigotry doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

So.

Let’s pretend this offer – free pass to university without the necessary entrance qualifications – is available to everyone. Or pretend I’m Maori, or whatever.

So apparently we’ve got a disadvantaged sector of society, who are struggling for some reason (which they want to tie to oppression) at meeting the basic numeracy and literacy requirements set out by NQZA.

Then, seeing as this sector is having so much difficulty with the basics – and this is 5th and 6th form mathematics and English, not rocket science – then the *obvious* thing to do *must* be to say “Oh well, you didn’t pass the easy stuff, but go ahead and try something far more difficult”

Yeah right.

I’ve been a university student in this age of bridging courses and lax entry requirements. If you can’t handle the basics, which pretty much means you don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to learning, then you don’t make it.

I don’t think I know anyone who’s done one of these “bridging courses” and gone on to finish a real qualification. I do know dozens of people who went to university, took these papers, and bombed out after half a year, or a year if they were lucky.

Want to know why that happened? They were here to have fun. The proportion of them who habitually drank themselves half to death, and the proportion who regularly used all manner of banned substances is alarmingly high, as well.

Right.

So, by all means, if you can’t do basic arithmetic, and you can’t read or write worth a damn, you should go to university and they’ll hand you a big loan and let you have a big party. Six months later, you can go home disgraced, having learned nothing but new techniques for pickling  your internal organs, and enjoy paying off your loan at a snail’s pace while working a checkout.

Oh, that’s not actually how they phrase it, but close enough.

Apparently, I hold a somewhat extreme point of view, saying this is insane. Maybe it’s the privilege talking, and I just don’t know what I’m talking about.

So, enough ranting. Either I made my point or I didn’t.

Two final things:

(1) This mechanism for the self-destruction of “students” who have no business going to university already exists. It’s already in place, making the universities buckets of cash, while completely not working for the students involved. If I had the power to change this, I’d scrap this system.

(2) If we want to be handing out free passes to anything, then perhaps getting these students back into school would be a good idea, where they can hopefully pick up the basic numeracy and literacy skills that hold them back from getting their ticket to university in the first place. Then, and only then, encourage them to advance to higher education.

2009-07-04  »  admin