History & its impacts on Aboriginal Education

The following is an abridged essay I wrote for the Master’s of Teaching, which was awarded 94%.

Reading time: 4 mins

The history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is one of dispossession, destruction of culture and denial of fundamental human rights, reinforced by the collective cognitive dissonance of non-Indigenous leaders (Morgan, 2006). This history impacts the ways aboriginal people relate to education, namely with distrust, disengagement and feeling disempowered. Teachers need to be aware of this history and its implications as they can equip themselves with the tools to reconcile the relationships between Aboriginal people and Australian Education.

Teachers must show genuine interest in, and build relationships with the community of their Indigenous students.

Patrick & Moodie (2016) outline five major policy eras beginning in 1837: protection, segregation, assimilation, integration, and self-determination. Since the initial settlement in 1788 to the age of “protection” in 1837, it could be said that a sixth policy era took place: “eradication”, a period focused on the elimination of the Aboriginal population, resulting in massacres and the introduction of fatal pathogens (Pascoe, 2014). Following the attempt at eradication, the “protection” era promoted Christian ideals, trained the Indigenous as domestic workers, and enforced them to act within British Law (Patrick & Moodie, 2016). The late 1800s involved the “segregation” of Indigenous people from society and was a period of extraordinary controls on all aspects of Aboriginal lives (Patrick & Moodie, 2016). The “assimilation” era required Indigenous people to adopt non-Indigenous social, cultural and economic practices. This culminated in the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families to assimilate them into non-Indigenous society (Patrick & Moodie, 2016). From the 1960s, Indigenous Australians began to reclaim their rights to their languages and customs. This led into the period of “self-determination” and a realisation of the fundamental right to preserve their identity and traditional lifestyle (Patrick & Moodie, 2016). 

Schooling has been one of the most potent assimilation tools of colonisation (Morgan, 2006). Policies meant that public schools could exclude Aboriginal students if European-Australian parents complained about the well-being of their children (Hogarth, 2017; Morgan, 2006). As a result, the enrollment of Aboriginal students in public schools was diffuse and solitary. Many students attended separate Aboriginal schools. These employed unqualified teachers and were not run by the Education Department (Hogarth, 2017; Morgan, 2006). Under-resourced, these schools acted as a form of slavery as the curriculum focused on manual and domestic services needed to support white families (Morgan, 2006). Only in 1972 was the power for schools to remove Aboriginal children revoked (Hogarth, 2017). Since the 1820s, schools have taught eurocentric and assimilationist education, serving their primary goal of social engineering (Morgan, 2006).

To write a new future, Australian educators must be a student of history and teach from a place of empathy and cultural relevance.

The state forced Aboriginal children into a eurocentric education system, where testing and curriculum focused on white values and ideals. As a result, they found themselves alienated in a foreign and hostile learning environment (Morgan, 2006). Instructed in another language, from another culture, by another race, Aboriginal students were often taught with the perspective as an intellectually and emotionally deficient other (Morgan, 2006; Parbury, 2011). As an example of deficit thinking, the standard school syllabus in 1941 was 380 pages long. In comparison, the syllabus for Aboriginal schools comprised a total of 14 pages (Morgan, 2006). Morgan (2006) declares that Aboriginal education always was and remains a cleverly constructed tactic for cultural genocide. Ultimately, non-Indigenous students outperform Indigenous students not because Indigenous are less intelligent, but because the tests, skills and knowledge required to achieve relate to an Anglo upper-middle-class practice of living (Hogarth, 2017; Morgan, 2006; Patrick & Moodie, 2016).

Teachers must show genuine interest in, and build relationships with the community of their Indigenous students. This encourages students to engage in their schooling and achieve their full potential. Research shows that Indigenous students begin to disengage from learning at secondary school (Australian Government, 2020) and that schooling contributes to the unacceptable rate of youth suicide in Aboriginal communities (Morgan, 2006). Fortunately, teachers can engage students in positive learning experiences by grounding them in their aboriginal culture and identity and provide them with the skills and knowledge for modern society (Morgan, 2006). This is a significant challenge as most institutions train teachers according to the curriculum. As a result, they are poorly prepared to teach in Aboriginal contexts. However, teachers can dismiss racist deficit attitudes and can begin to understand the complex historical barriers to education that all Aboriginal students face. If teachers can extinguish what Pearson (2016) calls the soft bigotry of low expectations, they will increase their capacity to guide students toward a culturally appropriate and prosperous future.

To write a new future, Australian educators must be a student of history and teach from a place of empathy and cultural relevance. In 1938, Patten & Ferguson called for equal citizenship and humbly asked white Australia to teach Indigenous people to live in the modern age. No doubt their request is still valid as narratives of failure continue to dominate public discourse. If teachers continue to ignore the more than 60,000 years of Aboriginal history (Pascoe, 2014), then Indigenous people will forever remain disengaged and disempowered in an assimilationist education system.

References:

Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Australian Government. (2020). Closing The Gap Report 2020. Retrieved from https://ctgreport.niaa.gov.au/sites/default/files/pdf/closing-the-gap-report-2020.pdf   

Hogarth, M. (2017). Is policy on indigenous education deliberately being stalled?. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/is-policy-on-indigenous-education-deliberately-being-stalled-76855

Morgan, B. (2019). Beyond the guest paradigm: Eurocentric education and Aboriginal Peoples in NSW.

McKinley. E.A. and Smith, L.T. (eds) Handbook of Indigenous Education (Vol 1). Singapore: Springer (Ch 8, pp 111-128). 

Parbury, N. (2011). Terra nullius: Invasion and colonisation. In Craven, R (Ed), Teaching Aboriginal Studies: A Practical Resource for Primary and Secondary Teaching (p. 90-109). Allen & Unwin Australia

Pascoe, Bruce. (2014). Dark emu: Black seeds: Agriculture or accident? Broome, Western Australia:  Magabala Books

Patten, J. Ferguson, W. (1938). National Day of Mourning Manifesto “Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!” Aborigines Progressive Association. Retrieved from https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/images/collections-and-library/collections/oe_dom/09/0902/0902.pdf

Patrick R., Moodie N. (2016) Indigenous Education Policy Discourses in Australia. In: Barkatsas T., Bertram A. (eds) Global Learning in the 21st Century. Global Education in the 21st Century Series. SensePublishers, Rotterdam

Pearson, N. (2016). Soft bigotry of low expectations holds back indigenous reform. Retrieved from https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/opinion/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-holds-back-indigenous-reform/news-story/93bfe0109403280024e1358a5d1d0daa