Abstract

This original essay is an attempt to contribute to the thematic concerns of the inaugural conference, which involved a critique of long-standing yet largely unexplored problematics inherent in Pasifika education in the university, focusing on both teaching and learning by Pasifika peoples. Given that Pasifika education on all levels, including university education, is strictly but enforcedly Western-constituted in form, content and function, I set out here to examine critically many of the associated problems, critiquing them in the immediate context of the Tongan theory of education, as well as other closely-related theories, in the broader context of my newly-developed tä-vä (time-space) theory of reality. In doing so, such connected problems are critiqued at the interface of Pasifika and Western cultures, where the underlying formal, substantial and functional conflicts within and between them are symmetrically mediated in the name of both harmony and beauty in the curriculum, i.e., a spatio-temporal, substantial-formal movement from a mode of imposition to a state of mediation.