Call to offer freedom through schooling
Justine Ferrari; 8/4/08
Indigenous children will be locked up in their communities and sentenced to live as exotic tourist attractions if denied the same quality of education as the rest of the nation. The executive director of the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute in Queensland, Chris Sarra, yesterday rejected the notion children in remote areas need only enough education to survive in local communities. Dr Sarra said there was a mindset pervading the education field that the more educated Aboriginal children were, the less Aboriginal they became. “It isn’t the case. The truth is the more we educate Aboriginal children, the more we strengthen Aboriginal identity,” he said.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23503894-5013172,00.html
Glib lines won’t fix indigenous schools
Marion Scrymgour; 8/4/08
It’s an easy exercise for partisan critics such as Helen Hughes to throw around terms such as apartheid and “pretend schools” inher flimsy and selective diatribe about remote education in the Northern Territory. It’s far more difficult to provide evidence-based, sustainable answers, more so for the NT, where many decades of undercapitalisation, lagging recurrent resources and inappropriate policies have affected our people across health, housing, employment and enterprise, not to mention education. To get a sense of the enormousness of this task, a main desert township has yet to have a student graduate directly from its high school in its 60-year history. It was not until 2003 - under the Martin Labor government - that the first secondary students graduated directly from a bush school.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23502474-7583,00.html
Indigenous school policies fail young; Helen Hughes; 7/4/08; http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23494249-7583,00.html
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Education