Leg-up to the top
Stuart Rintoul; 31/5/08
As Joe Ross sits talking about a program to propel thousands of indigenous students through some of the nation’s best schools, the name Barack Obama comes into conversation. “Would Obama now be running for the US presidency had he not had access to some of America’s best schools?” he wonders. “What would happen if Obama was an Aboriginal child in Australia?” Is this where he hopes the program will take Aboriginal children? “Why not?” he says. As he looks into the future, Ross imagines Aboriginal students pouring out of the best schools into law, medicine, commerce, the arts, social sciences, trades and politics. He imagines children of a different dreaming. Ross is chairman of the Indigenous Youth Leadership Program, which during the past two years has placed 200 Aboriginal students from remote communities into 40 high-achieving private and government schools across the nation in a pilot program set to enter a second phase in which 300 new students every year will be placed in elite schools. The program is “unashamedly elitist”, he says, “if giving an indigenous child the choice to access the best education Australia can offer is elitist”.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23783622-5013172,00.html
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Education