Armed for success
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Chris Sarra
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Chris Sarra's biography and other articles by this writer
In 1984, I was a seventeen year-old Aboriginal youth just finishing school. I had a Tertiary Entrance score that told me I was average and that I only had the capacity to do some type of agricultural course if I was serious about entertaining the notion of study beyond high school. Fortunately for me, what is now the Queensland University of Technology was running a program designed to encourage more Aboriginal people into teaching. I enrolled and my mentor there Gary MacLennan taught me a great deal, most importantly to see myself positively regardless of how others with limited expectations perceived me. What started off as a lucky break saw me, many years later, graduating with a PhD in psychology and on a continuing journey to challenge other educators to believe in the learning capacity of indigenous Australians. For part of this journey I took on the role of Cherbourg State School's first Aboriginal principal.
Cherbourg State School is an Aboriginal Community School about 300 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. Cherbourg itself was formerly a mission or reserve where Aboriginal people from as far north as Cooktown and as far west as Quilpie were rounded up and dumped to be taught to be less Aboriginal.
On my arrival in August 1998, I discovered a school in chaos. It was a school in which Aboriginal children thought they were reinforcing their sense of being Aboriginal by aspiring downwards.
As part of my doctoral research, I facilitated 30 discussions about "mainstream" Australia's perception of Aboriginal people. At each forum I would say, "What are some words that mainstream Australia uses to describe Aboriginal people? Remember, I am not looking for your personal perceptions of Aboriginal people. I want to know how mainstream Australia sees Aboriginal people." Members of the forum would suggest words and I would note these on a whiteboard. Throughout the entire process I counted the frequency of use of each word.
At every forum, the participants reported that mainstream Australia perceived Aboriginal people as alcoholics, drunks or heavy drinkers. It was also widely held that Aboriginal people were privileged or that, in some way, they "got it good". Aboriginal people were regarded as "welfare dependent", "dole bludgers" and "lazy people who wouldn't work". On every occasion, many considered that mainstream Australia used pejorative terms such as "coon", "nigger", "boong", "black cunts" and "black bastards" in relation to Aboriginal people. These were the names my brothers and I were called at school.
Whilst I acknowledge the discomfort of some when confronted by these terms, I ask you to imagine how it would feel to live your life hearing these terms, and experiencing the attitudes that come with them, aimed directly at you.
What my research uncovered was a vicious, negative attitude towards Aborigines. This is the world into which the young Aborigine is thrown. He or she does not invent it. It is real. It is the poisoned chalice that mainstream Australia hands young Aborigines, whether they know it consciously or not.
IN OUR SCHOOL THERE WAS COLLUSION WITH THIS PERCEPTION. White teachers and Aboriginal children both subscribed to and reinforced this negative and inaccurate perception of what it means to be Aboriginal. Within the school two status quos existed. In the white status quo, the teachers blamed the community for the students' failure and their own performance was largely left unchallenged. In the black status quo, there was a recognition that the students were failing but the community could always blame the school and the teachers.
Many of the white teachers on staff had been there for years. They were like those who'd say, "My life has been transformed as a result of working on an Aboriginal community." That was a very nice, romantic view for them to take. Meanwhile, nothing in the lives of the children they were responsible for teaching was being transformed: The children were failing miserably. Extremely poor student behaviour and poor attendance was tolerated. The school grounds were a mess, littered and vandalised. The retention of children at high school was abysmal. (Research by a former principal of Murgon State High School found that of 4,260 students who went on to high school, most attended for only nine months.) As a result, some parents were bypassing the local school and sending their children to nearby Murgon, where they encountered similar watered-down expectations.
As principal, I made it clear that I would not tolerate failure. As an Aboriginal person, I made it clear I would not tolerate failure. When I questioned the staff about the extent of the school's failure they would suggest it was because of the social and cultural complexities of the children, and that the parents and children didn't value education.
They blamed the children and/or the community for the failure. At no stage did the staff scrutinise their own performance and ask, "What is it that we are doing that is contributing to such dramatic underachievement?"
To me this was the key. Clearly, we had very little control or influence over the external forces of the children's social and cultural environment. However, we did have control over what happened in the school environment. If the staff developed and embraced a culture and society of dismal failure, then this was what we were destined to achieve. In Education Queensland we have Principles of Effective Learning and Teaching. One of them is: "Effective learning and teaching shapes and responds to the social and cultural context of the learner." In schools, educators must shape and respond to a child's social and cultural context, not blame it. What frustrated and angered me most about this tendency to externalise and blame was that for a teacher in an Aboriginal community school, regardless of student outcomes, life went on. However, children and adults with limited or no education continue to suffer throughout their lives.
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1998) found that, of all those young Aboriginal people who died in some form of incarceration, most were illiterate and had very limited education. For some young Aboriginal people with extremely limited literacy skills, life doesn't go on at all. It is not my intention to overstate the importance of having a sound education, but I certainly do not want to understate it either.