This article first appeared in The Australian, 30 May 2006

Aboriginal education in remote communities

Hon. Gary Johns

'Those who leave school early, die early.' The principal of a remote school made this statement recently for Aboriginal children. It is vital that Aboriginal children in remote areas get to school. Unfortunately, getting them there and keeping them there is difficult. It usually means dealing with parents who believe it is the job of the school to make them attend, or who are powerless to make them attend.

The difficulty in teaching Aboriginal children from remote communities is immense, and the solutions lie mostly outside education policy. The investment in education is often wasted because there are limits to the extent to which schooling can compensate for a poor home environment.

There are solutions, however, and they lie in recognising that some Aboriginal people use the 'cultural curtain' as an excuse to avoid participation in schooling and in the economy. Further, they lie in recognising that there is no real economy in many remote communities, and in the few where an economy does exist, welfare and other incentives lead people to not work. In short, it is time to draw back the cultural curtain in Aboriginal policy and bring back economics. Incentives to work must change if education is to save lives. If the changes are too slow, children will have to attend schools where they have an experience sufficiently intense to overcome their environment. That may mean leaving home at a very early age.

Consider this from another principal, 'It requires two years of preparation for an indigenous child to be ready for school.' Children have to be taken into the system almost from the beginning of their lives. Add the fact that increasingly teachers are also running parenting courses means that, in effect, teachers are taking the child from the parent. After three decades of ignoring economics, and privileging 'culture' the chickens have come home to roost. As well as socialising children, teachers have to reach back a generation to teach parents how to parent.

Culture has been used as a curtain, drawn by those who seek to avoid responsibility for their actions. It is used as an excuse by parents to take children from school, by children to leave school, and by teachers to teach to a lower standard. As another principal said of Aboriginal people in his remote community, 'People are not land or culture oriented, they are self-focussed. It's about money and cars.' Too many think that 'access' and 'social justice' mean being given things---money, services, houses and so on. They do not. They mean gaining the knowledge of how goods and services are produced. Getting this knowledge of the modern world requires at least 10 years of schooling. Where children cannot gain access to 10 years of schooling, because they live in an environment where the importance of schooling is not well understood, then government has an obligation to intervene. Compulsory schooling is well known and has been accepted in the wider community, especially among the poor and non-English speakers. It should be equally accepted in remote Aboriginal communities.

If that smacks of paternalism, then so be it. But there are two types of paternalism Ð enabling and disabling. Although done with the best of intentions privileging culture, land rights and passive welfare have provided a deadly mix of disabling paternalism. The troubles of the last week in Wadeye and the revelations of child sexual abuse have been brewing for a long time. The ideologues who pursued the deadly mix of disabling paternalism will argue that theirs was an incomplete and interrupted experiment Ð if only they had the apology, a treaty, and another bucket of money!

The correct policy response to failure at school will be determined not simply by additional programs at school, but by how various issues of transition to the real economy---work, individual obligation, mobility---are managed. The transition will be better managed if educators and governments understand that education is essentially an instrument in economic integration, and that many remote communities are not viable and schools should not be used as pawns to keep them afloat. Moreover, teachers and governments should understand that western education cannot and should not preserve Aboriginal culture. Most importantly, parents' behaviour needs to change and where incentives to send children to school fail, compulsion must be used. Remember, in remote Australia 'Those who leave school early, die early.'