Teaching kids fairy tales

Why Māori star myths don’t belong in science class

Something popped up in my Feedly this weekend from Waatea News, the Māori-supremacist “news” outlet that spends half its time pushing co-governance and Māori-only entitlements, and the other half pumping out cost-of-living crisis sob stories disguised as journalism. Here’s an example of them using an AI-generated picture, where they probably used the prompt:

”Hey Grok, can you create an image of an overweight Māori single mother with her children, standing outside a supermarket with an empty trolley, looking sad?”

Anyways moving on.The headline I read was: “Māori navigators and tohunga were reading the stars to guide their waka.”

And right there “whanau’ we have the problem. This constant, almost obsessive need to tell us that Māori once looked at the sky and somehow that should make us all swoon.

Humans have been looking up at the stars for hundreds of thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids in alignment with celestial bodies. The Babylonians mapped the heavens. The Mayans and Greeks developed entire scientific frameworks for astronomy. Somehow, here in New Zealand, we are expected to treat Polynesian star lore as if it was the pinnacle of human achievement.

This is the thing, they didn’t know where they were going. They did not have charts, satellites, compasses, or even a written language. They stumbled upon New Zealand by chance. Calling it “reading the stars” is not science. It is romanticised marketing for a culture that is currently being elevated beyond reason. Shit, they didn’t even know what a wheel was.

Now our schools are integrating “Māori astronomy” into the curriculum. Children are being taught star names, myths, and navigation tales as though they hold equal weight to real astronomy. The problem is obvious. Without a written record, everything has been passed down orally. And anyone who has played Chinese Whispers knows that oral history changes rapidly. Add centuries of retelling and you end up with heavily altered, sometimes completely invented stories.

Why exactly should a child spend classroom time learning mythical explanations for the universe when we have the actual science at our fingertips? We have telescopes peering deep into galaxies billions of light years away. We have mapped the positions of planets, moons, and stars with incredible accuracy. We can send probes beyond the solar system. Yet we are prioritising teaching that Māui fished up the North Island and that ocean crossings were achieved by “reading the stars” without proof beyond word-of-mouth legends.

This is not just an academic issue. It is ideological. It is part of a broader trend of replacing objective truth with politically fashionable myth-making. Matariki is now a public holiday, and while there is no harm in cultural celebration, there is a real danger when cultural stories are treated as equal to scientific fact. Once that line is blurred, we are not educating children. We are indoctrinating them.

Three hundred years ago, many Māori believed the world was shaped by gods, demi-gods, and magic. That is perfectly fine to acknowledge in history or cultural studies. But putting it alongside Newton, Galileo, and Einstein in a science classroom is absurd.

Our children deserve a curriculum grounded in evidence, not oral traditions that cannot be verified. Teach Māori star lore in the same way we teach Greek mythology or Norse legends, as interesting cultural history, not as science. Otherwise, we are not just failing our children. We are lying to them

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