The following reflections present the participants’ insights of their high school experiences. The examination processes from the 1940s to 1991 required high school students to pass School Certificate at the end of the third year of high school (fifth form) followed by Six Form Certificate as well as University Entrance at the end of the fourth year (sixth form). Successful progression to the next certification level was contingent on passing the end of year external examinations. However, consistent with the educational statistics drawn from student achievement data of the 1960s and 1970s that show many Māori students left high school without qualifications, five of the six participants in this study left high school in the 1970s and 1980s without School Certificate and/or Six Form Certificate and/or University Entrance (Else, 1997; New Zealand Commission on Education, 1962; Sharp, 1990).
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“You’re never going to get anywhere”
As a teenager, Rose attended high school during the 1970s. English-medium was the only choice for Māori students at that time in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Rose reflects on a conversation she had with her high school guidance counsellor who advised her to leave school instead of sitting her school certificate examination near the end of the fifth form year.
I got called in by the principal or was it the guidance counsellor, might have been the guidance counsellor and she said to me, ‘you’re 15, you’re old enough to leave school, you’re never going to get anywhere and I advise you to leave school, there’s lots of trades going on out there, don’t sit your school cert’. You had to have university entrance to get to university. So, I went home and told my parents, they were down at the school ‘my daughter’s sitting School Cert’ and they [school] said ‘she’ll never pass’ blah blah blah and I did sit school cert and then I left school. I did find that there were plenty of jobs. I worked in offices and I waitressed…thought it was great. I never knew anything different. I actually believed that I’d never ever make it professionally, it was up there and way out of my reach and I already knew that I had to have university entrance to get there anyway (May, 2012).
“Thought we were failures”
Hugh perceived university to be beyond his academic abilities because he did not achieve his School Certificate and University Entrance qualification at high school. His self-description as a ‘failure’ connects to an educational history whereby monocultural education contexts systematically positioned Māori as ‘under-achievers’ because of Māori cultural, personality and/or economic deficiencies (Hirsh, 1990; Simon & Smith, 2001). Relatively few Māori students achieved high school qualifications compared to non-Māori students during the 1970s and 1980s (Sharp, 1990).
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All of my crew in my third year of fifth form thought we were failures because we were still doing fifth form classes and our peer group were doing seventh form. So we thought we could go forward into Watties, or Affco or Horotiu you know, go back to [name] freezing works in [name of city] and there's still some of my cohort that still think that they are failures (June, 2012).
“I wanted to get some kind of qualification”
Mere also left high school without any formal qualifications. Because she lacked high school qualifications, she did not think it was even possible to attend university. Instead, Mere returned to high school as an adult with young children to complete her School Certificate and, continued to participate with te kōhanga reo (Māori-medium early childhood language nest) until her youngest child was ready to begin primary school.
I actually went back to high school, I went to go and resit my 5th form cert because I wanted to pass. I wanted to get some kind of qualification to do something, get somewhere in my life. I never thought teaching would be a possibility because I had it set that I wasn't travelling on 'those roads' to university and I wasn't going to be away from my kids while they were still babies. Going back to college I thought, that's it, I want to get a good job…got pregnant with [son’s name] didn't I and didn't complete my exams but was supposed to be given a credit through all my paper work that I had presented that year, like an aegrotat pass. I don't know what happened but they didn't come back to me. I went through kōhanga [Māori-medium early childhood language nest] with [my son] and when he was moving on I thought ‘what am I going to do now? Am I going to stay in this kōhanga all my life?’ Which was ok but it wasn’t enough (May, 2012).
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“I hated school”
Terina reflects on the negative attitude she had towards her high school experience. Having passed two School Certificate subjects8, Terina left school and initially worked in a factory with her mother.
When I got to high school, I felt as if my whole world had been pulled out from under me and then I became really introverted and it was a big blackness for me. I hated school, I hated everything actually…luckily I passed English and Typing and so I left and went to work at my mum’s job, a factory job. It wasn’t what I had aspired to, it wasn’t what she had aspired me to do (June, 2012).
“I only went to eat my lunch”
Similar to Rose, Hugh, Mere and Terina, Deb also left high school without achieving her high school certification and began secretarial work.
I left school because I only went to eat my lunch. I left with little qualifications so I just went straight into secretarial work, office work (June, 2012).