Opinion: Teaching in Mother Tongue Key to Engaging Indigenous Students

IT WAS reported last week that Australian jail populations have “risen sharply” in the past year. In among the statistical data was the fact indigenous prisoners now represent 28 per cent of the total jail population. What wasn’t reported was this is an increase from 26 per cent last year and 25 per cent a year before that. At the time of the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody final report in 1991, it was 14 per cent.

As if the gap between life expectancies wasn’t shameful enough, the gap between incarceration rates are an absolute disgrace, with indigenous people 14 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-indigenous.

This is a human tragedy of major proportions.

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Research into the causes of crime and incarceration consistently finds that disability and disadvantage predict school failure or exclusion, with the resulting unemployment, mental health problems and substance abuse frequently leading to crime. The best way to keep young people out of prison is to keep them in school; the school attendance rates and rates of imprisonment are inversely related. We can see exactly what is happening in Australia but do we care enough to think outside the square?

Also last week Member for Bowman, Andrew Laming, was quoted as saying “much of the assistance to indigenous Australia is either inefficient or not achieving sustained improvements. Only by locking in clear outcomes for young Australians like finishing school and seeking out a job can the depressing status quo change”.

The question is, how do we keep young people in school? How do we get them to attend school in the first place? Laming mentions “attendance officers” but forcing children to attend school when they would rather be elsewhere will not solve the problem. It is too easy for a child to manipulate the system, misbehave and be excluded.

In May it was reported that some of the educational policies recommended in the Northern Territory would “not be popular in the communities”; policies such as prohibiting bilingual education and sending Year 9 students to boarding schools. And here is the heart of the problem. We talk about “assistance” to indigenous Australia and we recommend unpopular policies, even the removal of children from their families.

Australian governments are not reading the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Parents have the right to decide how their children should be educated and it is well known that indigenous parents in remote communities want their languages to survive.

Children in indigenous communities have the right to be taught to read and write using the language that they are most familiar with – their own language. Children in remote indigenous schools are apparently “two years behind” in Year 3 but are these children English- speaking? Most probably not. Two years behind their English-speaking peers when taught in English is not the same as two years behind.

Mahatma Gandhi recommended that children should learn in their “mother tongue”, and Indian schools use many different languages.

In South Africa, there are 11 languages used in education and children change over from their mother tongue to English at the age of nine. South African children engage with school in their early years and generally do not have to be forced to attend.

In the Cook Islands, children learn in Maori or English or both, as the parents prefer, and school attendance is not a major problem in the villages. Many Cook Islanders go on to attend university in Fiji or New Zealand.

What is it about Australia that we cannot accommodate indigenous culture in our schools and provide a culturally safe place for children to learn? Decisions about education should be made by parents, not by “independent consultants” who are based in Canberra, Darwin or Perth.

Are we really still engaged in the outdated fantasy of a White Australia where everyone will speak Standard Australian English? The result of this wilful blindness to both cultural diversity in Australia and the value of self-determination for indigenous communities is the ongoing alienation of young indigenous people.

As long as school is a foreign country, the jails will continue to be filled with those who refuse to be assimilated.

Meg Perkins is a registered psychologist