Proposals for special training courses for Aboriginals in New South Wales have been made intermittently over the last few years. It has been firmly established that Aboriginals have not been acquiring trade skills, despite policies designed to provide equal opportunities for both Aboriginals and white Australians. Aboriginals have tended to gravitate towards unskilled, casual or labouring positions, while unemployment has been many times higher than of the general population. Although the educational system has attempted to prepare Aboriginals for a European life style, they have nevertheless tended to fall into the low income/unskilled employment class.

It is generally conceded that Aboriginals are disadvantaged in comparison to non-Aboriginals in regard to open employment. The disadvantages stem from remoteness from employment opportunities, relatively low levels of education, lack of work skills and cultural differences.

This paper examines a proposal that there is a need for a reappraisal of community education as the term is understood and applied in schools on relatively remote, tribally oriented Aboriginal communities.

A fairly detailed examination is made of the current realities involved in teaching in such localities in order to develop an alternative approach to this concept. Implicit in this alternative is a rejection of the stratagem whereby an Aboriginal council or board acts as a rubber stamp in an a priori decision making process. The principles involved in compensatory education are also rejected as being singularly inappropriate to the needs of Aboriginal communities.

A number of ‘radical’ overseas educationalists, whose comments and ideals seem appropriate to developing cross cultural perspectives, provide much of the material used in support of this plea for a new alternative in Aboriginal education.

No one has ever defined art in a way that has achieved universal acceptance, yet usually we operate as if this were not so.

Is hairdressing art? Is pottery art? Was Christo’s wrapping up of Little Bay art? Is architecture art? Is John Cage art? Is photography art? Is Andy Warhol’s “Flesh” art? Both “yes” and “no” have been answered to these questions.

From a child’s point of view, some of the main concepts of the language-experience approach to the teaching of reading are:

What I think about, I can talk about.

What I talk about can be expressed in other ways.

Anything I write can be read.

I can read what I write and what other people write.

What I say and write is as important to me as what other people have written for me to read.

This approach was adopted at Koonibba school at the beginning of last year in an endeavour to try to make reading more meaningful and interesting for the children. Excursions became a vital part of the language program. Each week the “classroom” was found somewhere within a hundred mile radius of the reserve. Places were visited along the coast as well as areas beyond the dingo-proof fence. Transport varied from trucks, land rovers, boats, canoes, buses, station wagons, on foot, utilities and a tugboat. The premises that reading should come from the child’s experiences and that all children want to read and write were adopted here. The child’s wish to communicate with others about the excursion was also capitalized upon.

Engaged as we are in the essential task of assisting Aboriginal children to decode and encode a language which presents many problems to them, it behoves us to strive for the one aspect that many teachers – particularly those new to the field of Aboriginal education, and those charged with the teaching of reading to our school beginners – appear to miss. The reference, of course, is to relevancy.

How many of us, in retrospect, have been guilty of peddling irrelevant or “foreign” reading materials during our careers? Are we still guilty? Do your children readily relate to the books you present for their use? If not, then the following thoughts and suggestions may have some value in your situation, be it one where a tribal language is still the main means of communication, one where a bi-lingual program is in force, or where English (or a non-standard form of it) is the main communication medium.

The following article is an extract from Mr. Lines’ dissertation for his Advanced Diploma Course at Torrens College of Advanced Education, Adelaide.

The following article discusses how the Aboriginal Studies program at Alice Springs High School could be expanded and enriched by –

It is a widely-held view that the thought processes of “non-industrial” peoples are radically different from those of Western educated man. Major differences are purported to lie in the capacity for abstract thought and logical analysis, and in the separation of cognition from affect, or “reason” from emotion.

There are obvious differences in cognitive contents across cultures. Different values and beliefs are held by different peoples. And there are obvious differences in cognitive styles. One of the best examples I know was presented by Michael Cole and his associates, working among unschooled African tribesmen. The researchers were investigating methods of classification, and had asked the men to group together similar items from a miscellaneous collection of objects. The tendency among “European”-educated adolescents and adults is to form superordinate groups – for example, groups of weapons or of fruits might be made. The Africans tended to group things on a functional basis, for example, a knife and orange might be placed together because you use the knife to cut the orange. The researchers found, however, that such concrete reasons for the groupings were rarely given. When asked why they had made certain selections, the men usually answered : “Because a wise man would do it so.” Becoming a little impatient with this reply, one of the researchers asked how a fool would do it – and was quickly answered with groups of weapons, of fruits and so on!

One anthropologist who opposes the view of differences in cognitive structures between cultures is Levi Strauss. He holds that there is no difference in the way the mind works from culture to culture – there are simply differences in the strategies by which man makes nature accessible. Both traditional and scientific thought systems seek to order or systematise information. The difference is in the attributes used in imposing order – in forming general classes out of various objects and experiences encountered.