Informing them on Samoa

One of the positive developments in modern educational technique is the social studies syllabus which aims to help students look dispassionately at issues which may, if left un examined, lead to a great deal of passion when they crop up in later experience.

In Sione Comes to New Zealand, Anthony Haas, Susan Kedgley and Tom Newnham have sought to present, as a school text, a picture of the meeting of cultures in the person of a Samoan boy who comes to New Zealand. What happens to him and what he thinks, are recorded simply, with the idea of his being a person with whom other children can identify themselves.

The authors, with the aid of Maori cartoonist Harry Dansey who brings a great deal of realism into his numerous sketches, aim to help specifically New Zealand secondary students to understand the processes of social control and social change.

By allowing the student to “sit in” on the hypothetical adventures of Sione, when he leaves the pre dominantly rural and family oriented society of Samoa to live in the individually oriented society with its money economy in New Zealand, the authors offer the opportunity of ap preciating both. Not only can there be something to admire, in each of two life styles that come into apparent conflict but even more important is to discern where and why changes must take place in both, so that the best choices may be made.

For all that, I feel that the New

Zealand school student may not enjoy his dip into the social education pot as much as this book hopes he will.

The authors have not extended them selves over-much to make Sione’s chronicle a really gripping story. The episodes are contrived to include as many incidents with a tolerable verisimilitude as possible within the confines of a few pages.

When you add to this a heavy list of questions to be answered or dis cussed, which are interspersed throughout and as captions to most of the cartoons, one wonders whether the didactic function may not be a trifle overdone.

Would middle secondary children really be the worse off if the treatment of Sione were to be in similar terms to Noel Hilliard’s Maori Girl? In this novel, the same kind of cultural problem, only between Maori and pakeha, is described in sympathetic vein, but with a realism that goes beyond a mere approximation to life.

Perhaps that is the problem. One of our Western cultural values has been the shielding of children from what we fondly call the harsh realities of life until a certain (or uncertain) age.

The authors claim their book can be used successfully at most ability levels. I think they are right, if the bright ones don’t object too strongly

to being talked down to.

Rex

Matthews.

(Sione Comes To New Zealand.

By Anthony Haas, Susan Kedgley and Tom Newnham. Whitcombe and Tombs. $NZ1.50.)