AUSTRALIA: The lives sent down the drain

Don Watson, July 5, 2008–

Remote Aboriginal communities are still suffering from the almost incomprehensible neglect and incompetence of government.

UNTIL 40 or 50 years ago, thousands of Australian children were educated in schools consisting of one room and one teacher. Classes of less than a dozen were common. That the schools were in remote areas did not matter. Australian children had a right to education regardless of where they lived. It was an all but universal principle: education bestowed benefits on individuals and society that easily outweighed the cost of providing it. Among other things, it was the means by which children might escape the poverty of their parents and raise healthier and more adept offspring of their own.

To this end, Australian governments made education free and compulsory, and as the logical proof of their good faith, built and maintained these little rural schools and trained, paid and housed the teachers.

Students did not leave these schools with much command of physics or the classics, but they were numerate and literate. They were not qualified for university. But they could read a newspaper or a book or a summons or a form from the government. They could write a letter or read one from their mothers, prepare an invoice, measure distances, add, subtract, multiply and divide and point to Sydney on a map.

And having these abilities, should they wish, they could further educate themselves, and inevitably they did.

These things are proverbial and we are well past needing to mention them in any conversation about education or "education revolutions". But among Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, they are for all practical purposes unknown.

Children on Aboriginal homelands grow up unable to do any of the things that eight years in a remote school 50 years ago taught kids to do. At a homeland 250 kilometres west of Gove, the teacher comes three days a week sometimes, and sometimes only two. On the other days, educating the children falls to the Aboriginal assistant teacher who lives with her family next to the school. She is bright and dedicated, but very young and untrained and cannot exercise the authority of a qualified and experienced teacher

. Continued...