Education is not the answer
If you keep getting crazy answers that don’t work, maybe reconsider the
question.
This is from Blair McFarland. I am manager of CAYLUS, the Central Australian
Youth Link-Up Service, based at Tangentyere Council and operating across the
bottom part of the NT. We are an anti-petrolsniffing program, and have had good
results – a 94% reduction since 20081. CAYLUS received an award for
Prevention in 2007 from the Australian National Council on Drugs for our
advocacy work in getting Opal rolled out. This was achieved when Mr Abbott
was Health Minister. Our website is www.caylus.org.au for further information.
This is not a CAYLUS document as to get it through our approval systems would
take more time than I have, so the following is a personal opinion. I have been
working in Central Australia since 1986 on substance abuse issues, and was
awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Outstanding Contribution in Drug and
Alcohol Endeavours in 2008.
I was impressed with Mr Forrest’s capacity to cut through the bullshit at the Alice
Springs review forum. His question “so what do we do about it” was a stumper for
some people, and made me reluctant to try to offer suggestions in that forum.
Partly this is because some of my answers might get me lynched at a gathering
like that (“education is not the answer”), and partly because they are more
complex than can be summarized in a few minutes.
I think there are Answers, but one aspect of getting the Question right is that
some underlying assumptions need a little ventilation, and the forum was not the
place to challenge the assumptions that so many people there have based their
lives and livelihoods on. I offer a few here below.
In relation to possible Answers, I think there are quite a few, and will propose
some of them in the later part of the document. But I think my main contribution is
in challenging some of the sacred cows, and hopefully moving the analysis
beyond the flawed assumptions outlined below. Changing the whip will not get a
dead horse moving any faster. I also hope to stop any policy that forces kids into
schools when there is really no point till the schools improve. The poor kids are
the potential victims of this misguided push from the mainstream.
Executive Summary of the “Evaluation of the Impact of Opal Fuel” written by
Peter d’Abbs and Gillian Shaw for the Commonwealth Department of Health and
Ageing, October 2008, p2
1
Assumption one : that increased attendance will improve outcomes.
Seems to make sense, but long term research shows otherwise. There are no
improvements in results of groups that attend school 60% of the time versus 90%
of the time2 Forcing kids to attend more will have no result on school outcomes
as assessed by The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy
(NAPLAN ). The underlying assumption is that the schools are meeting the
educational needs of the children, so more time at school will result in more
education. So is it the schools? This leads to
Assumption two : schools in remote locations are disadvantaged.
If this were the case, the results of non-Indigenous kids at those schools would
also suffer. However, the school performance of those kids are on a par with
urban schools3. So it’s not the schools.
So why should the kids elect to go to school more than they currently do if it
makes no difference to outcomes? Convenient though it is to blame these clever
little children, it seems the problem is in the education system. Not the dedicated
teachers doing a hard job in remote locations, nor in the ability of the curriculum
to foster an education. In the education system itself.
The results might be different if non-Indigenous kids were tested on tracking and
hunting, with the exam in Pitjatjantjara. But they never will be, in part because
NAPLAN is unconsciously a test of whiteness.
Given the above, and policy of forcing those clever kids into more school must be
considered irrational. The pressures that are being brought to bear on the
families of these clever kids have the potential of causing problems between
generations for no reason. It would be experienced thusly by the children. The
way to improve outcomes is demonstrably changing the schools.
Assumption three : Indigenous people need a better education to get work.
Mainstream kids know from watching their parents and their environment that
better education results in better pay. Education = work opportunities. Seems to
make sense in today’s workforce, but not where the kids live. In remote Central
Australia there are plenty of jobs Aboriginal people could be doing now. Analysis
of census data shows more than 3000 jobs being done in that area by
non_Indigenous people with no certificate qualifications who have not gone
“no relationship between attendance and school performance” ABC rural, C.
Brain, 19/9/13 interviewing Senior Research fellow Sam Osbourne, Uni of SA.
3 Ibid, also 2012 National report on NAPLAN, Australian Curriculum Assessment
Reporting Authority 2012a: 18 – 19.
2
beyond year 104. So in the remote context in which the kids live, there is plenty of
work for people with low educational outcomes. This also brings up
Assumption four : there is no work out there.
Clearly there is, with 3000 paid positions in the southern NT that could be done
by Aboriginal people occupied by unskilled non-Aboriginal people. Or are they
unskilled? Maybe these non-Indigenous workers have cultural skills that allow
them not to give old women food when they are hungry unless they pay for it.
The clever children know what would happen if their beloved grandmother asked
them for food. They know she has been feeding the kids for years out of her
pension, and the packet of rice she cannot afford would be dinner for a pack of
her hungry grandkids. Which set of values does the checkout operator apply?
So it’s not lack of work. It’s lack of understanding of the challenge that some
types of work pose to the clever kid, who knows where his next stew is coming
from, and chooses accordingly.
The clever kids hope they can avoid types of work that pose big problems for
sympathetic and generous people. Painting is such an enterprise. It can be a
reliable source of resources that can be undertaken at the convenience of the
painter, but the market is flooded. But deep down, the kids know the family will
look after them and they will not starve. That changes the underlying power
dynamic of the workplace substantially.
Assumption five : no work is going on in remote communities
A lot of unpaid work is done by Aboriginal people looking after family. Census
data indicates that 8% of remote indigenous people are disabled, and the rate of
assistance required by disabled Aboriginal people is twice that of other groups5.
It was found that throughout Australia – in remote, rural and urban areas – most
Indigenous people with a disability were, and are, cared for within their extended
family. 13.3% of Indigenous Australians 15 years and over are providing care to
someone with a disability, a long-term illness, or problems related to old age6.
4
Education is the key, but what door does it open? The values of education in
very remote NT young people, Paper presented
5 www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/related-issues/disability/reviews/disability-withinthe-indigenous-community
6 CAEPR, Indigenous Population Project 2011 Census Papers Paper 4 “unpaid
work, unpaid care”, Yap and Biddle, at page 2
Aboriginal people, mostly women, are also looking after those clever and
numerous kids. 12% of Indigenous people are under 4, compared to 6% of nonIndigenous people7. And they live far from childcare centers.
So there’s plenty of work going on, paid and unpaid, in the environment the kids
are growing up in. Census data shows a substantial increase in Indigenous
employment in non-CDEP employment since the 1990s8. CDEP, a work for the
dole scheme, is subject to changes in government policy, so including it in the
data results in substantial bouncing around. The underlying trend is up. The
Indigenous increases in employment exceeded the increases for the Australian
population as whole.
Somehow more and more Aboriginal people are getting work despite not having
a good education.
Assumption six : if the kids miss out on school, they are disadvantaged for life
There is some evidence that Aboriginal people are getting further education later
in life. Looking at the total population aged 15 and over, Indigenous males are in
fact 6.4% more likely to be attending education at a given point in time than nonIndigenous males, and Indigenous females are 12.6% more likely9.
Answers
One : improve the schools. There are numerous reports showing how to do this,
including fostering teaching using traditional knowledge of biology and botany to
prepare kids for work as rangers. The school could have this as a science
stream, the youth program could have a Junior Rangers stream that lead into
employment on country as Rangers – a flow through school through adolescence
and into adult employment in culturally valued activities. It would also foster
cultural knowledge transmission and give the elders a real role in the schools. A
similar streaming could support the development of art, which has become a
multimillion dollar industry. Tourism has similar potential. Indigenous people,
many of whom are multilingual from early childhood, could learn Japanese and
7
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012) Australian demographic statistics, March
quarter 2012. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics
8 Indigenous Employment: A story of continuing growth”Gray, Hunter, Howlett,
Topical issue No 2/2013
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), Research School of
Social Sciences College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National
University
9 “A human capital approach to the educational marginalization of Indigenous
Australians”, N. Biddle, CAEPR Working paper 67/2010, P16
other languages to enhance their capacity to work with tourists. All of these
examples can be done on country, within the existing cultural realities.
Two : make the internet accessible in remote communities. This is a simple but
profound way of reducing the isolation, encouraging literacy and numeracy (seen
any books in a typical Aboriginal house?) and makes a lot of sense as a way of
fostering enterprises. It also can be used as an incentive to attend school, but
please : not till the schools are improved.
Three : design work that reduces the cultural stress on the workers. We have
some experience at doing this, as do the Mt Theo program. It can be done.
Develop local employment options. I would be curious to know how much has
been spent on employment and training programs over the years, as if that sum
had been invested in infrastructure and business development, the scenario out
bush might be quite different. It seems a lot of Indigenous funding ends up
supporting middle class whitefellas. The training funds are certainly enough for
many training businesses to operate, though I think they build their business
models on failure – they don’t count on getting the payment for placing people in
work long term.
These are some ideas about Answers. I have more to share about deeper
cultural clashes, but these are too far out of the box, despite the assertions that
some radical thinking is required. Ideas like taking Indigenous people off
Centrelink and placing them onto a royalties dividend system that reflects their
status as major landowners, and would decomplicate their engagement with
systems that are trying to force them into work when they just don’t see the point.
I think this would be a system that could work for all Australians, and the
dispersion of a dividend to all citizens, irrespective of employment status, could
save a lot of administrative costs. Ideas like non - Aboriginal Australians learning
to kick back and relax more, spend more time with family, consider quality of life,
reduce their consumption and carbon footprint. In a way, we post-industrial
people have more in common with nomadic hunter/gatherers than with the
farmers who shaped out values.
Anyway, I hope that reconsidering the whipping of the dead horse will create the
space for some new actions. I would be happy to discuss any of the above.