Workshop 2000: Aboriginal Policy: Failure, Reappraisal and Reform

Changing The Mindset

Peter Harris

Preamble

In Dostoevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment, Katarina, evicted from her home on the very day of her husband's funeral, exclaims in desperation,

There is law and justice on earth, there is, and I will find it.

And in a frenzy that is a prelude to madness, she runs into the street with the intention of going at once somewhere, she knows not where, to find justice.

Dostoevsky's message is not reassuring or comfortable.

Katarina's frantic search for justice does not succeed and such coherence as her world possesses disintegrates into insanity.

In the Charter of the United Nations it states,

The peoples of the UN affirm their faith in the apparent dignity and worth of the human person and are certain that the recognition of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

It is easy for us to discuss justice in the abstract, to detach our minds from the immediate intentions of life.

Key issue

Many Aboriginal people continue to live in degrading and hopeless conditions and the evidence is clear that educational opportunity is not equal.

Indigenous people participate in and obtain significantly less from education than the rest of the Australian population and this impacts adversely on their economic and social well-being.

The Federal Minister for Education & Training, Dr Kemp in 'School Insight' stated:

The Commonwealth Government believes that the principal educational challenge facing Australia today is the achievement of educational equality for indigenous Australians.

Although a great deal of progress has been made in the education levels of indigenous Australians over the past 30 years, Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander students still experience an unacceptable level of educational disadvantage.

It is clear that more needs to be done to improve indigenous peoples' educational opportunities. It is also clear that we need to ensure the indigenous Australian children succeed in schooling and have the skills to enjoy a more secure economic, social and cultural future.

I believe we can only achieve this outcome if all stakeholders work together. This includes governments---both state and federal; education providers, particularly principals and teachers in mainstream schools; and indigenous students, their parents and their communities.

This is the challenge for our new century. How do we ensure that the indigenous members of our community are treated in a fair and just way to ensure that their educational outcomes are the same as the rest of the community.

I am not so sure we all believe that it should be so.

Much has been achieved and we should acknowledge that.

Personal History

To outline a short personal history of my educational journey which has created the values I hold, and shape the institution which I have managed.

This is my story:

I am a white, Protestant, migrant who attended Box Hill Technical College, eventually Melbourne University and thanks to a teaching studentship commenced teaching in the outer suburbs of Melbourne.

No involvement in indigenous education.

The schools in which I worked affirmed the western model whether it be at Doveton High School in a housing commission area or at Haileybury College in a more affluent area.

My own educational culture was affirmed by those experiences.

People in Australian schools represent much the same sets of experiences as me.

Change, if it is to take place, will require a more significant intervention in school education.

Over the period of the last 27 years in which I have been a School Principal I, and the schools with which I have been involved, have been shaped by:

1. the vocational educational movement in the post-war period,
2. the ecumenical movement in the mid-1960s,
3. the shift from assimilationist to self-determination in Aboriginal communities,
4. the growth of multiculturalism,

and as I see it now the need to operate within an international context using information technology.

I still believe that there is a grass-roots interest in community and values and beliefs which provides a sense of caring to children and their families irrespective of their cultural setting.

Having been shaped in my view by the Uniting Church on the issues of social justice and being party to some discussion on the establishment of the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Congress within our Church, I became more aware of the need to participate in education reform for indigenous Australia.

Case Study

I decided to accept an appointment to Kormilda College.

Kormilda College was in a process of change, I suspect driven by economic rationalism more than anything else.

Kormilda College which had 80 post-primary students costing approximately $28,000 per annum with minimal secondary outcomes was in a period of serious change.

It was caught between being established during the last years of assimilation and yet hadn't picked up a new future in terms of self determination.

What did I have to learn?

• Indigenous students did not speak the same language---ie., Komilda College had 7 major languages, 27 dialects and English was the second language for communication.
• The tradition and culture of each community was quite separate.
• Indigenous communities were more collective and community minded in their response to each other compared to the more individual and self-motivated western model.

What was the educational setting?

The outcomes were an advance on the past but still assumed that indigenous students could only enter more vocational pathways.

Pastoral care was dominated by welfare.

(Students were required to wear a different coloured uniform each day as a means of control of cleanliness. Pocket money, books and living materials were handed out on a daily rationed basis.)

The school itself was a large institution and would have been quite overwhelming for young people who had come many hundreds of kilometres from isolated traditional communities.

They suddenly had to face beds and dormitories, dining rooms and all the other school conventions.

Over the period of time, using staff brought in from interstate, there was a shift to mainstream the curriculum so that a full range of programs would be offered.

The governing board at the time had 50% indigenous members but there were difficulties of attendance and our models of discussion were quite different.

Whilst there was an acknowledged policy to develop and establish indigenous culture, very little in fact occurred.

Was the school successful?

It is hard to assess.

A large number of young people who had access to secondary education previously would not have received it.

The cost of loss of culture and perhaps training people for jobs which were not in existence remain.

There was certainly an attempt to improve health through regular diet---as some 60% of students would have some eye or ear infections.

That is now some time ago.

The school has now 850 students (including 350 indigenous students) and is more multicultural in its concept.

Sometimes I wonder whether we may have gone full circle.

Whilst we use the rhetoric of self determination and independence as expressed in improved participation, retention and completion, have we done no more than Hasluck would have suggested in his policy of assimilation?

It is a policy of opportunity. It gives to the aboriginal and the person of mixed blood the chance to shape his own life. If he succeeds it places no limit on his success but opens the door fully. Segregation of any kind opens the door into a peculiar and separate world for coloured people only [Hasluck, Shades of Darkness]

The Northern Territory has undertaken a significant review of indigenous education called The Collins Report.

The issue of delivering secondary education in communities and the adequacy of training of the indigenous and non indigenous teachers remain.

More recently I have been involved in assisting in writing the strategies of two indigenous schools.

Some principles to consider:

Education is one of the most potent forces for change or for individual development.

It is right that people should control their own destiny as far as possible and most people want to feel that they do, even if at times that control seems to be a myth.

It is appropriate that people should control the education that moulds them.

In the case of children this means parents have control over the raising of their children and hence should also be able to exercise a high degree of control over their children's education.

In schools and perhaps tertiary institutions this control is internal with some external structures that ensure quality. It is the level of the external control that is part of the current debate.

People are very much a product of their culture and that was the point of my personal history. It is important to personality, well-being and to self-esteem to be proud of, or at least satisfied with, what is distinctive in yourself and hence what is distinctive in what makes you what you are ie., with your cultural identity.

One's culture is affected by one's education as well as one's education affecting your culture. To feel that someone else other than with people whom you identify controls these effects causes unrest and often resentment. The other person is trying to make you something you are not---even if that is not their intention.

People want to be able to control what makes them and what they are.

In Australia, at present, indigenous people do not identify with the mainstream, they want to be able to exercise some control over what creates them and their distinctiveness. Part of this is the education that moulds them.

At this point I have had to consider whether I am in favour of indigenous control of tertiary institutions or schools and I have to say 'yes'. Indigenous control of Batchelor College is no different from middle-class mainstream controlling mainstream institutions.

It is appropriate that the UAICC sets up and controls the Shalom community provided they have the structures, policies and practices that demonstrate openly responsibility for public money. This is the current big tension.

If this is a threat to the well-being of society, it is only so if society wants it to be a threat.

In my paper I have talked about Australia being a multicultural nation.

People can be different and those differences are intrinsically valuable. It should not be a threat but something to be valued.

Occasionally the differences rub against each other.

At a political level people want to be able to control what governs and affects them. It is fundamental to democracy. In many areas, that control is limited and indirect. But does it have to be? Can we give people maximum control over what is appropriate?

In a heterogeneous society such as ours, there may be difficulties, but it should be possible. After all, we do have a Catholic university and Greek schools.

I have recently heard it argued, and I can understand why, that not until indigenous people have a direct say in government, ie., parliamentary seats, can they achieve some form of parity.

In the workshop paper I have prepared, I have talked about changing the mindset and I have tried to recognise that both indigenous and non-indigenous training institutions need to look at things slightly differently and I believe that to be so.

At this stage, I do support a separate university for indigenous people, because whether we like it or not, at present a minority group in a mainstream context is continually having to compromise in a way that members of mainstream do not have to. The chances of Batchelor College of being peculiarly indigenous are much better than the chances of an enclave in a mainstream university where there is rarely anything distinctly indigenous in either its courses or operations.

It is often no more than lecturers verbalising what they see as indigenous versus mainstream.

So if an indigenous institution has an opportunity to bring an indigenous perspective to issues, to rework knowledge from an indigenous perspective, then it must enrich the opportunities for indigenous people.

My workshop paper talks about culturally controlled knowledge. Here is an opportunity which establishes and reworks new knowledge and gives new insight to the universe from an indigenous perspective.

Having made that claim and having heard that reinforced more recently by the indigenous people of Hawaii, there still remains some issues which could be tackled within the education framework and these are:

1. The selection and training of teachers who would be prepared to stay on the job for a reasonable amount of time.
2. To ensure that training provides cross-cultural awareness which includes such matters as protocols, history, language and culture, kinship knowledge. This teaching needs to be completed in situ.
3. The adequate training of School Principals in management and giving appropriate leadership in cross-cultural awareness.
4. To upskill indigenous teachers so that their qualifications are perceived of equal standing to others within the community and that they are able to deliver appropriate curriculum in mainstream schools.
5. To seek a variety of ways to engage parents in the education of their children, particularly to ensure that they attend school and work towards the completion of their courses. This may not be easy because of the isolation and the lack of background but there are cases where this is being tackled in places such as Alice Springs where all the indigenous people are taking part in consultations.
6. To continue to develop literacy strategies such as those of the Scaffolding Program which assists young people in literacy outcomes using contemporary material.
7. To provide adequate training for councils of indigenous schools so they are able to respond more adequately to increased accountability guidelines and requirements of government.
8. To bring indigenous culture into the mainstream curriculum.

I come to this forum as a person wanting to affect some change, feeling that as an educator there are a range of demands in a school which compete knowing that the teaching staff are not able to respond to that quickly.

Within the indigenous setting, I get concerned that the non-indigenous standards are adequately dealt with.

In the non indigenous schools we are not serious enough about cultural understanding.

So where do we go from here?

Forums such as this are useful and the more that we can engage the wider community into these issues the better and the more we can work genuinely in partnership with indigenous communities in terms of providing appropriate education is also for the better.

It is our young people whose lives are at stake.

It is up to us to look to their needs.

Intervention comes in the selection, training and professional development of Principals and in the training of young men and women who are dedicating themselves to the teaching profession.

Teachers or schools play a pre-eminent role and it is through them that change can take place.

Over the past 40 years schools have had to manage significant changes in attitudes on a range of social matters.

Change is not achieved easily.

Government must genuinely recognise the needs of all.

The culture of the school assists in its delivery.

Changing the Mindset is the key to our success.

When the great American Humorist, Robert Benchley, was at Harvard, he took a course in International Law.

The final exam consisted of one essay question:

Discuss the arbitration of the international fisheries problem with respect to the catcheries protocol and dragnet and trawl procedures as it effects: the point of view of the USA, the point of view of Great Britain.

Benchley who had not spent a great deal of time studying for the exam desperately wrote:

I know nothing about the point of view of Great Britain or the arbitration of the International Fisheries problem and nothing about the point of view of the USA therefore I shall discuss the question from the point of view of the fish.'

Justice demands that we look at things from the perspective of the fish.

Note

For the more extensive and more formal Workshop Paper referred to by Dr Harrisin this address, please click here for the PDF file [150K]: Harris PDF