Yintarri is a West Australian government community school situated at Coonana: 180Km due east of Kalgoorlie. It has about sixty children who enter school speaking Wangkatja, a Western Desert language. There is no formal bi-lingual program; the language of instruction being English. The Yintarri Project is an International Literacy Year (ILY) funded program which uses touch-sensitive boards with microcomputers to assist in the development of literacy in both Wangkatja and English. This is accomplished, at Yintarri, with Concept Keyboards and Acorn BBC microcomputers though the same facilities could be provided with all other major types of computer. The project won a major ILY Literacy Achievement Award for its ‘Outstanding Contribution to Literacy‘.

My purpose in this paper is to describe the interaction among 3-5 year old children at two child care centres. The centres become ‘windows’ through which to observe the children and the child rearing strategies of the adults who direct and carry out the work of the two centres (Lubeck, 1985, 1). The two centres reflect the values of two different cultures which are here described as Koori culture and mainstream culture.

Children living on a number of remote outstations or homeland centres in Central Arnhem Land have had access to European style education for nearly twenty years now. The Northern Territory Education Department employs visiting teachers who make regular visits to some outstations to work with Aboriginal teachers and children in these small ‘remote’ communities. The visiting teachers mostly live in a central larger community and use the central hub school as their base. A number of these hub schools or C.E.C.s now have homeland centre education resource buildings which provide the base for the provision of educational services to homeland centre schools.

Language develops our thoughts and shapes our understanding of the environment. Through working in different schools I have noticed that English plays a key role in the acquisition of school mathematics. Not only is the mathematics syllabus expressed in English but those students growing up using English appear to have a view of their world that is far more compatible with this mathematics than those students who use an Aboriginal language. The worldview of students using an Aboriginal language would appear to be very different.

In 1988 the Aboriginal Education Policy Task Force called for broad equity between Aboriginal people and other Australians in access, participation, and outcomes at all stages of education. Aboriginals are not achieving a comparative level of success at school compared to non-Aboriginals. Symptomatic of problems in our schools are, the over representation of Aboriginals in lower classes, the high drop-out rate of Aboriginal children and their low participation rates in the senior years of high school. Some 17% of Aboriginal youth continue their schooling to year 12 compared to 49% of all students (Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1988, p.7). The failure of Aboriginal children to achieve at school has been widely interpreted as an individual failure on the part of Aboriginal children. Poor attainment has been attributed to lower I.Q. and ability, inadequate home environments, and poor parenting and not to the inadequacies of the education provided, to prejudices Aboriginal children face or to the active resistance by Aboriginal people to the cultural destruction implicit in many educational programs (McConnochie, 1982, p.20). An examination of the determinants of school success shows that Aboriginal children’s cultural values, beliefs and practices and Australian schools are often in conflict. To improve the outcomes for Aboriginal children schools are required to assess whether or not they are catering for the inherent needs and talents of individual Aboriginal children.