Summary

Values in the curriculum implicitly and directly affect all members of Aotearoa New Zealand schooling communities. Aotearoa remains, for the most part, bonded to key Western values. However, what values in the curriculum mean for the diverse groups of peoples within Māori, Pākehā, Pacific, Asian and other schooling communities in Aotearoa is also important if the often expressed educational values of equity and equality of opportunity, and bicultural and multicultural attentiveness are to be given substance.

The complexity of values in relation to culture and ethnicity in Aotearoa New Zealand is well illustrated by Webster (2001). Work on the values of people in the Aotearoa New Zealand population over a number of years has been recorded and examined by the New Zealand Values Study operating under the auspices of the World Values Study and summarised by Webster in his book Spiral of Values. Webster’s analysis of the New Zealand data suggests that there are seven distinct values groupings in New Zealand. He describes these as: Māori-Māori; Māori-New Zealander; Pākehā; New Zealander; European; Pacific Islander and Asian.

This review examines literature on values in four of the most significant ethnic and cultural contexts of the New Zealand population. It begins by considering the Pākehā, or New Zealand European, context and in three further sub-sections reviews Māori, Pacific and Asian values perspectives and contexts. The second to fourth subsections raise questions about the Western values that tend to saturate curricula in Aotearoa and probes the extent to which the values perspectives of non-Western communities in Aotearoa New Zealand might be addressed in a mainstream school curriculum.

We need to qualify what follows by pointing out that this is a vast and complex field and the time and resources available to our team limit the scope of what we have been able to cover. Further, while two of the authors of this report are of Pākehā/European ethnicity and one of Māori ethnicity, none of the authors are of Pacific, Asian or other ethnicities discussed in the report. What follows, then, is a summary of the literature on values that is already written down by Aotearoa New Zealand writers of Pākehā, Māori, Pacific and Asian descent we were able to access. We have attempted to identify key points important for the main issue addressed in this report – what should be said about values in the New Zealand school curriculum. It is acknowledged that much about values in the curriculum from different perspectives is yet to be written down, and it is probable that much of the work that Māori, Pacific, Asian and other peoples do with and for schools in Aotearoa is informed by culturally specific educational values that are not fully addressed in this report.