Cultural Dimensions of Indigenous Participation in Education and Training

Abstract

This study examines the role of traditional Indigenous culture in shaping Indigenous Australians’ engagement with education and training. It provides an important innovation to the existing literature by explicitly attempting to measure ‘cultural attachment’ and to model its relationships with socio-economic outcomes. Two critical and related empirical issues are whether Indigenous culture acts as a barrier to educational attainment, and whether the existing education and training system adequately accommodates the cultural differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This research seeks to address these issues by explicitly measuring Indigenous culture and exploring the links between cultural attachment and vocational education and training [VET] outcomes for Indigenous people, using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2002 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey. The results suggest that, in non-remote areas, cultural attachment is complementary with both educational attainment and participation in vocational training. Given the importance afforded to education as a means to addressing Indigenous disadvantage, this rejects the view underpinning the policies of assimilation that there is a trade-off between cultural maintenance and the achievement of mainstream socio-economic outcomes. From an equity perspective, the results also reflect positively on the sensitivity of Australia’s education and training system to cultural needs. There is evidence both of education and training being pursued to enhance objectives relating to cultural maintenance, and of cultural attachment itself having an enabling effect on Indigenous people. Lower access to education and training in more remote areas does, however, disproportionately impact upon Indigenous Australians with stronger cultural attachment.