Those involved in educational programs with Aboriginal children have noted that the parents have little contact with the schools, and feel that they are unable to help their children with their school work, even where they express interest in their children’s school progress.

In her comprehensive study of the Aboriginal Secondary Grants Scheme, Watts (1976) reported that fewer than 40% of parents said that they helped their children with their schoolwork, and the main reason they gave for not helping was that they did not feel able to. Furthermore, the majority of Aboriginal parents had little contact with the school: 70% stated that they had not met their children’s teachers. These figures refer to parents of high school children, but it seems unlikely that the pattern would be greatly different if home-school contacts at the primary level were investigated. Watts (1975:48) commented that schools have done little to involve parents in a meaningful way in the education of their children, and so parents remain unaware of the practical ways in which they could help their children and support them in their schooling. A great gulf is fixed between the home and the school, to the disadvantage of many children in Australian society.

Despite growing initiatives in Aboriginal-designed educational facilities, most Aboriginal children still undertake their schooling in mainstream classrooms where methodology and organisation have evolved according to a white Australian tradition.

The school system is an institution relentlessly perpetuating the stereotypes and social order that have been Australia’s since the British occupation. Aboriginal children are seen to ‘underachieve’ in terms of a system designed to meet the needs of the dominant society. While ‘underachievement’ may be slightly diminished by adjustments in teaching styles, these changes should be part of an overall classroom strategy that is based on an understanding of Aboriginal characteristics and cultural traditions, and a realisation that Aboriginal children’s behaviour reflects their experience of a largely racist society.

Language death can occur naturally, and in different ways, or it can be caused by deliberate policy. This is how deliberate practices and policies brought it about in Australia.

• • Diverse linguistic groups of Aborigines were forced into small missions or reserves to live together; consequently languages that were numerically stronger squeezed the others out of use.

• • Anxious to ‘Christianise’ the Aborigines, missionaries enforced harsh penalties on users of Aboriginal languages, even to the point of snatching babies from their mothers and institutionalising them, so they would not hear their parental languages.

• • Aboriginal religious ceremonies were banned; initiations did not take place, and so liturgical, ceremonial and secret languages were unable to be passed on. As old people died, their languages died with them.

• • Assimilationist/integrationist policies were enforced which required Aborigines to attend schools where English-only was the medium of instruction.

• • Finally, denigration of the Aboriginal languages set the seal on their fate in Victoria (within forty years of white settlement, all Gippsland languages had become extinct), most of New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland. Labelling the languages “rubbish”, “heathen jargon”, “primitive jibberish”, and so on, made Aboriginal people reluctant to use their normal means of communication.

Language is an important part of a child’s total development as a person. Through language the child learns the behaviour patterns that are expected within his society, the society’s religious beliefs, and how the society sees the organisation of the world around it.

“Language is a powerful force of socialisation or the preparation of a young person for later life in a social group.” It has a vital function in “accumulating and transmitting culture” (Bostock, 1977, p.6).

Education as a form of initiation has severely affected Aboriginal children as they endeavour to live in ‘two worlds’.

Education involves the initiation of a child into society. At an early age a child attends school where he or she learns attitudes, values and beliefs that are seen as desirable.

Australia’s early white settlers saw that the Aborigines had no buildings and no formal institutions, this led them to draw a distorted view of Aboriginal education. Coming from the European situation where classrooms, boarding schools, and university buildings represented learning, they concluded that Aborigines were completely without any system of education.