The attitudes and behaviours of students in the alternative education unit in the previous chapter are in part the product of Aboriginal politics that denigrates formal education as an irrelevant, overly abstract, disciplinary, culturally- inappropriate and assimilatory experience. The political discourse asserts that schooling is a ‗white‘ institution that alienates Aboriginal students from their culture, identity and self-esteem, and so fails to engage and provide them with the opportunity to gain equal outcomes. This discourse is evident in the interventions
4 See Prefatory Notes, p. v.
of the most influential representative of the political elite, Michael Mansell, who in March 2003 was quoted in the local newspaper5 as saying:
The Tasmanian education system fails Aboriginal children because it is a white system designed to meet the education needs of European children. It‘s no wonder Aboriginal children feel alienated. The sole cause of poor retention rates is the pitiful state of the curriculum and isolation each Aboriginal student feels within the classroom. Schools are meant to be an opportunity for children to develop. For most of our children, school attendance is dreaded.
In a letter to the editor the following year6 he said:
There is a crisis in Aboriginal education in Tasmania. Too few of our children complete high school, and hardly any go beyond that. Of those going through school, many can barely read and write. Where are our Aboriginal university graduates? In Tasmanian schools Aboriginal children learn about all things white—language, history, politics—but little or nothing of their own people. A few books published 20 years ago, are more or less all that teachers are given to educate about Aboriginal people. The absence of a significant Aboriginal component in education is a turn-off for black kids, and a deterrent from wanting to go to school ... Blind Freddy can see that education has failed to meet the needs of Aborigines. The Minister [for Education] cannot. We are at a total loss what to do.
These statements express the political claim that Aboriginal students have ‗distinct needs and issues‘7 and that the education system fails Aboriginal students because it does not cater for them. Another prominent activist expressed this position when he wrote that ‗Aboriginal students want knowledge that provides a strengthening of Aboriginality and development themes for the future. Aboriginal education that does not contribute to the Struggle must ultimately contribute to the oppression‘.8 This is consistent with national discourse, which has ‗advanc[ed] the
5The Mercury, 20/3/03: 21. 6The Mercury, 25/10/04: 15. 7The Mercury, 20/3/2003: 21.
8 This signed note was pinned to a notice board in Riawunna, the University‘s centre for Aboriginal Studies.
notion of Aboriginal Learning Styles and call[ed] for an Aboriginal Pedagogy for all Aboriginal people in Australia‘ (Hughes et al. 2004: 10).
Yet as Chapter Four indicates, that system has responded comprehensively to such calls, and the Aboriginal politics itself compromises Aboriginal students‘ engagement with, and chance of achieving success from schooling, as an event during the 2003 NAIDOC Week9 celebrations under the theme of ‗Our children, our future‘ demonstrates. When addressing a gathering at Riawunna, the University of Tasmania‘s Aboriginal Studies centre, at which a number of Aboriginal school and university students were present, one prominent member of the core community, Jim Everett, said that education has a ‗deliberate assimilationist agenda‘ and, while bemoaning the lack of university graduates, both he and Mansell described the university and Riawunna as ‗part of the problem‘. Mansell‘s message10 to the Hobart City Council NAIDOC launch that
year was to the effect that:
[e]ducation is [a] problem. We have no say in what our children are taught at schools. White people decide that ... Education represents opportunity to white children, but failure to Aborigines‘.
This is the dominant political discourse, pitting culture against education, in which Aboriginal students‘ educational success is of peripheral concern other than as corroborating evidence of the disjuncture of education and Aboriginality. The discourse manipulates the binary difference from ‗them‘ the white oppressor to construct ‗we‘ the Aboriginal victim. It disposes many students to think that Aboriginality inheres in practical interests, bush skills, connection to kin, particular learning styles and emotional straightforwardness, and to believe that schooling intentionally frustrates those apparently distinctive interests, strengths and needs. Though this is surely not the sole cause, many Aboriginal students come to see school in alienated terms such as the Aboriginal student‘s written description of school (27/3/02) over the page.
9 This refers to the annual national celebration of indigenous culture initiated by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Day of Observance Committee.
10 See Pakana News53 (2): 24.
• Just sit there and fuckin‘ listen. NOT FUN
• Go to class with smart cunts and feel dumb so the teachers single you out and don‘t help enough cause there‘s too many People and not enough time.
• Teachers are to old fashioned and don‘t encourage enough • Incentives not detentions.
• couldn‘t keep up so what‘s the fuck • Give up too easy cause its boring • Atmosphere sux
• To afraid of us
• If we aren‘t above average we get shut out. • Incentives. Can‘t just sit in room and say ra ra ra.
The essentialist oppressed Aboriginality contributes to many expressing their Aboriginality by attending irregularly or slipping away from class upon demand for intellectual or behavioural discipline. This is in part a product of the political machinations that are focused less on the achievement of improved educational outcomes than on gaining political leverage through marginalised difference. Thus, poor educational outcomes are exaggerated and may even be welcomed and provoked in pursuit of political ends. This is the import of the admission by influential Aboriginal educator, Professor Paul Hughes (Hughes et al. 2004: 9-10), that the agitation surrounding Aboriginal education nationally has been mounted ‗for purely political motives‘:
For years we had been arguing that we as Aboriginal people could take control ourselves and do things the ‗Aboriginal way‘. However when others said ―OK, what is the ‗Aboriginal way‘?‖ we could not come up with any statements that could help. I am the first to admit that there is no one ‗Aboriginal way‘ but it was necessary for us to develop some useful ‗Aboriginal way‘ statements that we could use politically. Despite this admission, the same assertions continue (see Indigenous Higher Education Advisory Council (IHEAC) 2008). This politics is then, part of the dialectic that establishes the conditions in schooling. It naturalises an extension of the progressive Aboriginality as the basis of claim to state concessions. It
motivates individuals‘ observance of a set of normative behaviours in order that such claims may be taken as natural, and can make that which is politically productive individually counter-productive.