There is no excuse for Indigenous education in Australia to be in such a terrible and shameful state.
Given the billions of dollars that are allocated to primary and secondary schooling Australia-wide, the basis of the problem must be deeply rooted ideologically and educationally.
The question of racism in the current curriculum must therefore be exposed.
We need an indigenous curriculum that will cater to the needs of aboriginal students and help strengthen their communities.
A progressive curriculum
Indigenous communities around the world have long offered the principles by which they recommend an specialised curriculum should be built.
These principles include learning from the land, beginning from community interest, incorporating community culture, history and language, the centrality of practical experience and the respectful participation of Elders.
This is a democratic curriculum.
Why have non-Indigenous schools and systems found these ideas so difficult if not impossible to implement?
Even a cursory inspection would reveal that principles such as these are very close to those of democratic inquiry learning supported strongly over the past century by progressive educators everywhere.
The contradiction between an inquiry curriculum and what currently exists must be too difficult to contemplate.
Building on knowledge
The Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget pointed out that children are very active, indeed practical and concrete learners – a concept that may still be misunderstood today.
He suggested that children tinker with their environment and intellectual tools, building on what they know to understand what they do not.
Similar to the findings of the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, this can be seen as a “science of the concrete”, where children explore the relationship between natural objects and establish a conceptual vocabulary for their own scientific and narrative thinking. When the relationship between the known and the unknown is out of balance, then learning becomes disjointed, confusing and counterproductive.
For Indigenous peoples, connection with the land, trees, rivers and animals is vital for learning and meaning and, if broken, places life itself at risk.
Conversely, if these connections are strengthened then the local environment becomes the springboard for all learning, the construction of explanation and the process of theorising.
This is essential for non-Indigenous children as well.
Practical learning
Many schools do not pay enough attention to the concrete and move too quickly to abstract thinking.
Of course, humans have a tendency to use both processes together and cross between them as necessary to solve problems.
But a denial of the experiential too early will result in an inadequate practical base for thinking about cause and effect. Going for a walk by the creek is a good basis for all learning.
In commenting on issues such as these, the American psychiatrist, Jerome Bruner, noted that there are two modes of learning – the scientific and the narrative.
The scientific mode is more empirical, where there is a conscious process of working with the definite properties of objects.
On the other hand, the narrative is more descriptive and communicative, where we proceed more intuitively and informally with the relationship between ourselves and the objects under consideration.
Again, it appears obvious that as young people move to the middle and senior years of schooling, they begin to view knowledge in more abstract and scientific terms, rather than the concrete and narrative.
Child-centred learning
Educators sometimes view this knowledge as having the internal coherence of formal logic. This can be intimidating, when students experience knowledge in uncertain and changing ways.
Based on this argument, the problems faced by Indigenous children in school are problems faced by all children, only more so.
There is an alienation from the knowledge of personal experience, from social identity as a capable learner and the ability to develop local understanding to embrace more global ideas.
These processes need to be incorporated across the curriculum for all children.
What this means is a curriculum that begins with the knowledge and understanding of the child, rather than that of the school.
It means learning that is project-based, where children negotiate the main topics they wish to pursue and where teachers provide a framework of ideas and practices as the work unfolds.
It probably means less subject content and a greater emphasis on discussion and communication of progress between parents, teachers and students.
The curriculum after all is a form of social life.
An inclusive curriculum
There is no reason why the principles of learning supported by Indigenous peoples cannot be incorporated across the curriculum for all children.
There is a remarkable overlap of intent between these principles and those that underpin inquiry learning and which have been acted upon with integrity by progressive educators over the past one hundred years.
To not do so for Indigenous interest is inherently racist.
There may be anxiety from some parents and opposition from some teachers when the implications of a truly democratic and inquiry curriculum are confronted.
It is, however, time for Australia to make this transition, to benefit the learning of all children, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.
A curriculum which shamefully and knowingly disadvantages Indigenous children cannot be tolerated any longer.
Join the conversation
Comments (14)
Gideon Polya
(Cessional Lecturer in Biochemistry for Agricultural Science at La Trobe University)
Excellent article. I agree that Australia is grossly failing in the education of Indigenous children and Indigenous Australians in general. This educational failure has appalling downstream effects on aboriginal mortality and aboriginal avoidable mortality. Thus the annual death rate is 2.2% for Indigenous Australians and 2.4% for Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory as compared to 2.4% for sheep in Australian paddocks The avoidable death rate (the rate of deaths that should not occur…
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Gary MacLennan
(Senior Researcher Indigenous Educaiton)
The article actually was quite an inoffensive plea for progressive education for every child, but especially Indigenous children. Jim of course charges again once he sees anyone pleading the case for Indigenous Australians.. Yet once more he objects to Australia being labeled racist. I have asked him to explain the White Australia policy for me, if Australia was not racist. He chose of course to ignore that.
Generally I think we should avoid terms like "reacist" because they raise the temperature and that inhibits dialogue, but Jim is not interested in dialogue at all. So let me say it straight out - to claim as Jim does that Indigenous Australians have low IQs is ignorant racist rubbish. The word stupid also comes to mind.
Gary
John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
A core part of the problem is that education systems across Australia focus on standardisation rather than linking to the needs of individual students, or local cultures. Aboriginal kids, being further from the mainstream, (as interpreted by curriculum developers, their supervising bureacrats and largely ignorant Ministers) suffer more than most other kids do.
The core systemic problem is an unwillingness to fund school-level education adequately. High-quality exploratory learning curricula are…
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Andy King
Physics teacher (logged in via email @bigpond.com)
'Core racist technique' - what a load of crap. How do you 'jig' ability tests to favour one culture over another. What world asre you living in? What is your evidence that aboriginal kids are missing out 'as a group'? What are 'their specific needs' that you speak of? YOU are indulging in racial profiling yourself by these very statements.
Sue Chapman
Citizen (logged in via email @gmail.com)
I'm kinda average smart, white, aussie for a few gens, strong education, managed to get into a grad program, but I've failed an IQ type test for AU public service. I consistently do badly on IQ tests. I don't come from a culture of playing with geometric, numeric and letter games. Ability tests are almost always culture specific.
Good point John, Indigenous kids are a measurable group...how can the system learn from the small successes there, ramp that up to big success, and implement wherever kids are zoning out.
Andy King
Physics teacher (logged in via email @bigpond.com)
The article's focus on racism through the shift from concrete to abstract knowledge in later years of education completely ignores the point that it is necessary to learn and understand complex, abstract ideas in order to describe and interact with the concrete world more effectively. It is not possible to live in our society with its myriad benefits (over, say, a subsistence or nomadic society) without the abstract knowledge that has led to the development of our modern technologies. Higher order mathematics is an extremely abstract area of study yet it allows us to accurately describe and predict the motion of heavenly bodies and simultaneouly employ the quantum mechanics that has led to the existence of modern electronics. Try achieving that with a walk by the creek!
jim morris
(logged in via email @yahoo.com)
So once again our nation and the education system are being vilified as racist. Why does The Conversation entertain this nonsense. Our education system may have its faults but it is certainly not racist and to continue to accuse our dedicated educators and the citizenry in general of being racist will not have long term benefits for anyone.
My elder daughter's mother is from Papua New Guinea and many ignorant people mistake her fo being part-aborigine. She grew up with me as a sole-parent so obviously…
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Eddy Schmid
Retired (logged in via email @westnet.com.au)
WOW, here we go again, from the lofty heights of academica we once again have the pontification from so called experts proclaiming what should and shouldn't be.
However, as always, such pontification can't see the wood for the trees, so wrapped up are they in their way of thinking.
White civilisation has been in Australia for 200 years, during that time, very little advancement has been made by indigenous people's to fit into our society.
They hold their hands out continuosly for everything they…
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BRENDAN O'NEILL
READER (logged in via email @hotmail.com)
Could not have put it better Jim !!!.Time to rid our media of people like Neil Hooley.
BRENDAN O'NEILL
READER (logged in via email @hotmail.com)
Gary
You can deny all you like ,but the simple facts are that the mean IQ of the Australian aboriginal people are very low (third lowest on the planet).Also,they have the smallest brains of any group of people on this earth.This fact is accepted by all reasonable thinking people outside Australia.It is only here where people choose to stay ignorant of these facts and hide behind the rascism banner.
Trevor S
Jack of all Trades (logged in via email @hotmail.com)
Wait... your solution to racism in education policy is to have more racism in education policy ?
That you even need to discuss the colour of the skin of the children being educated speaks volumes. All Children that fall through the education cracks should be treated as children that have fallen through the cracks and policy decentralised to allow teaches and principals to deal with that issue as they think best and networking encouraged to allow them to pollinate the ideas of others. We go to all this effort to train teachers and then try some sort of nonsense centralised planning one size fits no one approach ?
A novel idea might be for Government to treat all people equally (education, welfare etc) for until that happens, we have the very problem you will not solve with your separatist approach, inequality and all that entails.
John Harland
bicycle technician (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Eddy, I am not sure that your take on it isn't the worst example I have ever read of a "them and us" mentality.
Disempowering parents and grouping them all as inadequate is probably the worst way to try to bring any group of people out of a culture of dependence. It might be seen as the core of the present problems.
And Brendan, claims of the sort you make should really be backed up with peer-reviewed data and clear exposition of the methodologies, if you can find that. In my memory, one of your claims was made in the Nineteenth Century specifically about the Tasmanian aborigines but the data was not necessarily robust by modern standards.
jim morris
(logged in via email @yahoo.com)
Without wanting to sound mean I would suggest a reading of what Gideon Polya Phd has to say on the subject. To me it perfectly encapsulates the very highly educated but irredeemeably stupid type of people who have engineered and support the system that simply does not work and costs way too much.
Sue Chapman
Citizen (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Taking that to mean Gideon is outlining things that work, but aren't being implemented right now? Right on.
I know in my (white) community a group of kids who home school, by a very empiric, walk along the creek method. They are all streets ahead of others who go to regular school. That's physically, intellectually, and emotionally.
Alternate methods of schooling are hard work but rewarding. What Gideon outlined seems to be similar. Let's support any of our cultures that have that need. Let's listen to how we can help.