Opinion & Commentary
Pretend Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Northern Territory
The Northern Territory Department of Education reports that only 20% of Indigenous students in remote schools pass year 3 and 5 literacy benchmarks. For Indigenous students in Darwin and Alice Springs, the pass rate rises to 60%. For all non-Indigenous students, the pass rates are around 90%.
These discrepancies understate Aboriginal educational disadvantage. Most students who attend the Northern Territory’s sixty-two homeland ‘Learning Centres’ have not been tested on year 3 and 5 benchmarks. The department recognises that ‘Learning Centres’ are only pretend schools. They are not listed on the territory’s online school directory, and their enrolment numbers are not reported.
‘Learning Centres’ do not have the same standards of class rooms, teaching aids, and materials as regular primary schools. They often lack ablution blocks. More importantly, they have separate curriculums and teaching arrangements. Most rely on teachers who cannot meet the normal requirements of the Northern Territory’s Teacher Registration Board. Non-Indigenous teachers fly in for one, two, or at best three days a week, to teach only a few hours each day. ‘Community education centres’ in the larger settlements have similar curriculum and teaching problems.
Whatever arguments may be put forward for the ‘whole word’ teaching of literacy for native English speakers, for children speaking Aboriginal languages or ‘Aboriginal English,’ phonetics are essential. Yet most teachers do not have phonetics skills. Many are not able to teach mixed-age groups.
Of the twenty-nine students aged five to seventeen tested at the end of last year in one homeland ‘Learning Centre,’ not one had advanced beyond the level expected of a year 1 student at a mainstream primary school. Schooling is so ineffectual and boring that teenagers who have been going to school regularly for eight to ten years have the knowledge and the attention span of five-year-olds.
Only a handful of ‘Learning Centres’ are run by qualified, competent teachers who educate children to decent standards. The problems do not lie with student attendance but with inappropriate curriculums and poor teaching.
Because Aboriginal children were failing when they moved to mainstream secondary schools, the Northern Territory Department of Education extended ‘Learning Centres’ and ‘Community Education Centres’ to year 10 and even to year 12. These schools are now graduating youngsters with dumbed down Certificates of Education. Few of these graduates could manage the work in a senior mainstream high school. A ghetto residential secondary school is being established in the Tiwi Islands, and more are planned. Aboriginal parents have been persuaded that these schools will keep their teenagers ‘out of trouble’ by isolating them. They will, but at the cost of progress in English, maths, and other subjects, and at even greater cost when they have to deal with life in the wider community.
Northern Territory vocational education has been adjusted to meet the failure to teach basics in schools. Homelands vocational courses cover a wide range of subjects, from welding to administration. As participants are unable to take notes or write assignments, they enjoy a paid holiday. The ‘certificates’ issued only qualify them for ‘sit-down’ Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) jobs.
The result of thirty years of apartheid education is welfare dependence, with rampant alcohol and drug abuse and violence. Social dysfunction leads to poor school attendance. Yet most parents, despite their own poor schooling, are desperate to see their children educated. They want their children to be fully literate in English so they can get jobs. They want them to continue to speak local languages at home but to be immersed in English from kindergarten. They do not want them speaking the crude ‘Aboriginal English’ of the rap gangs. They are confident that with phonetic skills and literacy, their local languages will be written down and preserved, and not continue being lost as they are at present.
The 2006 census showed that half of the 50,000 Aborigines in the Northern Territory live within commuting distance of jobs. Yet a high proportion is unemployed. Jobs are filled by backpackers and other non-Indigenous workers. The mining industry’s remedial programs are seeking to meet Indigenous recruitment targets. Many additional jobs would be created if private property rights replaced communal enterprise in the larger Indigenous settlements, but without literacy and numeracy, Aborigines cannot become employed.
Apartheid in the Northern Territory’s education system is deeply entrenched. Toward the end of 2007, the territory’s Department of Education advertised for a principal for the dominantly non-Indigenous Nhulunbuy primary school. Yet it has adamantly refused to allow a nearby homeland community, supported by Rotary and a leading grammar school, to advertise for full-time positions for properly qualified teachers. The community has been seeking full-time qualified teachers for four years. With Rotary’s help, the community’s lads built a teachers’ residence. It stands empty. Surely, this apartheid situation cannot be allowed to persist.
Professor Helen Hughes is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. Her report ‘Strangers in Their Own Country: A Diary of Hope’ appears in the March 2008 issue of Quadrant.
