ABSTRACT
The attitude of white New Zealanders to their brown-skinned fellow-settlers has undergone a number of changes during the century which has elapsed since the end of the Pakeha-Maori Wars of the 1860s. For the first fifty years the Pakehas believed that the Maoris were, as a clergyman remarked in 1907, 'a people sick unto death'. Statistically in the post-war census returns, visibly in the streets of the cities, the growing proportion of Maoris in the total population became apparent. The numbers of Maori children attending North Island city schools soared, especially in Auckland, rapidly becoming what it is, the largest Polynesian city in the world. Maori school children, just entering school as five- or six-year-olds from homes where an indifferent mixture of English and Maori is spoken, have weaknesses in verbal fluency which in many cases they never overcome and which adversely affect their whole school career.
