Developing Aboriginal Community Involvement in Education

Abstract

Most Aboriginal communities in Australia have been provided with government schools, built, staffed and organized by government departments. As with mission schools, the motivation for schooling has largely come from outside the community itself, though often with tacit community support. Although formal ‘Western’ schooling fits uncomfortably with the values of a hunter-gatherer society, in most cases schools have adapted very little to the special environment of an Aboriginal community. Not surprisingly, both achievement and attendance are often poor. Attempts to vary programs, as in bilingual education, and to augment the staff of these schools with Aboriginal teacher aides (teaching assistants), have not altered this situation greatly, though this does not negate the worth of these initiatives.One of the many possible reasons for this predicament is the lack of community control over what happens in its school. In many cases this is almost absolute, duplicating the lack of control over land, law, health services and many other aspects of life. For this reason, schools have been seen by some authors as one of the more direct agents of cultural change, acting to assimilate Aboriginal people into white society with a community that functions as a ‘total’ institution. The natural resistance of Aboriginal people to this process is likely to have profound implications for Aboriginal community schools.