Dallas – Auckland
“My name’s Dallas, also known as Kingi, and my home is Auckland. My God, what don’t I learn from them?
When it comes to children, I’m really passionate about children and what they’ve learned, how they perceive the world to be. I work with many different groups of children, interact with them. I have five of my own. So learning from them as an adult, what needs they need, how they perceive things to be.
My son for instance; I asked him just the other day what he’s learning from school, and due to them changing the teacher all the time he’s getting confused on how the teacher’s teaching them. So, I had an interview with the teacher about how my son likes to learn, and my son actually likes to learn through computer programs [and] interaction with toys. Dinosaurs is one of his favourite things.
But because of the way they teach their curriculums at school my son’s below average in their standings. Not in mine, but in their standings, and what I’ve learned from my son and my daughter, my youngest two anyway, is that their teaching skills or how they learn is totally different to how the education teaches them.
My daughter is 11 years old and she’s a high achiever. So I’m very proud of her because she brings home merit awards. She does those extra little bits. She’s very confident in herself, but my son on the other hand is very shy in speaking in front of other people, but give him something like cars, dinosaurs and my son can go on for days about learning about them, and using them for his teaching. So that’s what I do with my son, I teach him with cars, with dinosaurs on computers, and his ability to pick up things is so much [more] amazing than sitting him in front of a classroom.
What can’t they teach us? They can teach us how to be more kind to each other for starters. I know that a lot of children these days can be cruel, but I also know that a lot of children have a lot of kindness in their hearts, and their thinking is so simple. You give them a question and they will just give you the simplest of answers, whereas adults confuse everything and they make it more technical and more difficult than what a child does. They’re very simple-minded, and they have such easy answers when you ask them a question.
Oh, that’s hard. That’s a big a question. I grew up South Auckland. Both my parents were fulltime workers, and my mum is still working at the age of 68. My dad had a back operation so he no longer works, even though he’s very entrepreneurial and he still owns his own company, or starting to get his company rolling.
My background didn’t start off very well. I didn’t like the education system. So I didn’t want to be in the classroom, or was hardly ever there. I didn’t pass my School C, however growing up and learning different things for myself or what I was interested in, I’m now learning to become a managing director of a company, which is going to help people along the way. I up-skilled myself in administration, computering. I did a home-based business for two and a half years on the internet.
I’ve also learn[ed] common law, which is a big thing for myself. That’s more or less just to help myself as a Màori, and other Màori. I also learned management. I went and sat my Levels 4 and 5 in freight forwarding. That was to help myself start [my] own company in import/export business. So a lot of things I’ve actually self-taught since leaving schooling.
A lot of times these days our children are being left out. We say that our future lies in our children, but yet we don’t ask them what they want for their future. We just assume as adults that what we’re saying is the right thing, and that’s all you need to know. I spend a lot of time asking children a lot of questions as to what they want out of life, or where they see themselves going. My children are always changing their mind on what they want to become. My son wanted to be a soccer player the other day, and last year he wanted to be a fireman. So, giving them options for the future to become whatever they want to be is very important to me and actually listening to our children should be the utmost important thing that any adult should ever do.
I know that we as adults have to make the decision for our children whether it’s right or wrong, but actually listening to my children in what they want to become, and where they want to go, is my first priority and then I help them along the way to see how we can make steps towards that.
Children to me have amazing, amazing answers, and their imagination to be whatever they want to be is something that we just don’t cuddle anymore. We tell them what they should be, and where they should go, and we don’t listen enough. Have a school like the Waldorf Steiner. I know we’ve got a lot of schools. At the moment there’s about three or four different Waldorf Steiner schools here in New Zealand, but they’re not Government-funded, because they’re alternative education.
They actually nourish the individual child and their ability, and they do more [of a] hands-on approach to everything so that the child can learn in their own abilities, instead of pushing them to be something that they’re not. So yeah, educating our children to be whatever they want to be, in who they are, not in what we want them to be, yeah.”
