Summer 2006

Innovation in education

Don't blame me!

Chris Sarra reflects on the importance of embracing indigenous identity as part of the process of pursuing improved literacy and numeracy outcomes for students at Cherbourg school.

Learning from the past

Steven Spielberg’s masterly mini-series Into the West contained an episode called ‘Casualties of War’ that deals in part with the Carlisle Indian school founded in 1875 by Captain Richard Pratt. This was a searing, honest and factually accurate account of how Pratt set about educating indigenous Americans. Pratt’s favourite slogan was apparently ‘To save the man, one must kill the Indian’ and he set about the task with rare zeal. The students were taken out of their native clothes and put into uniforms; their hair was cut; they were given English names and they were forbidden to speak their native languages. Pratt was proud of what he did and used a series of before and after photos of the school children to show how he had brought civilisation to the savages. These photos are available on the web on a number of sites.

Viewing them and watching the series was a very disturbing experience for me as an Aboriginal Australian, for we too have had our fair share of Pratts (no pun intended) in Australia. In A History of Cherbourg Settlement—A Dumping Ground, Blake reveals quite clearly the extent to which the school in Cherbourg was only for nurturing domestic and slave labour. Historical documents show that it, like Carlisle Indian school, had a clear brief to destroy indigenous identity.

A deficit model

At Cherbourg School, the destruction of Aboriginal identity was accomplished not by educating the students in an alternative culture but rather in failing to educate them at all. When I first came to Cherbourg, I found a school that had achieved the direst of sustainable outcomes. Year after year students had graduated with shockingly low levels of literacy and numeracy.

In an effort to be fair, one should acknowledge that Cherbourg School was far from unique in this respect. Throughout Australia indigenous education is marked by failure. I would like to stress that this sustainability, that is the constant production of failing students, is underpinned by low expectations. Staff do not expect children to succeed, grow cynical and blame the children, the parents, the culture—everything but themselves.

I have no wish here to deny the complexities of indigenous communities. I am all too aware of the complex degrees of dysfunction that exist in such places. It is all too easy, however, to blame these factors and to sink into disengagement. Educators in indigenous schools must not take refuge in despair. They can challenge the children to succeed.

Identifying the way forward

At Cherbourg, we established a team of dedicated professionals. My staff did not accept that our children would fail. They demanded the best and eventually got it. They embraced Aboriginal teacher aides as co-educators and these partnerships were to become models of what can be achieved in terms of indigenous education.

The children, however, initially accepted that their fate was to fail and acted fully on this. Thus at Cherbourg attendance was at best sporadic. Vandalism and bullying were rampant. When I insisted that students attend class punctually, I was challenged by a pupil who accused me of ‘trying to make Cherbourg State School like a white school’. This encounter was significant for me because it showed that the children had interiorised the notion that to be an Aborigine was to be doomed to be a school failure.

Where had this notion come from? The answer is that it comes from the interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. In my own research I have asked the question about how mainstream Australia describes Aborigines. I have done this exercise many times. The result is always depressingly familiar with the exercise producing adjectives such as: coons, niggers, boongs, alcoholics, hoons, Abos, Dole bludgers, hobos, aggressive, violent.

What is important to grasp is that these words form an identity. Moreover, it is the identity that the young Aborigine is thrown into. They can reproduce it, of course, and when I arrived in Cherbourg, reproduction was in full swing. Or the Aboriginal child can endeavour to transcend that identity. But in order to transcend to a more positive Aboriginal identity, our children had to be surrounded by people who understood that being Aboriginal could realistically be a positive reality.

Innovation at work

My principal innovation at Cherbourg was to place this transformation of identity to the fore. I was determined to give children the tools with which to forge a positive identity. The school motto and philosophy, Strong and Smart—encapsulated the essence of the new identity. Children had to be ‘strong’ and proud to be Aborigines and to realise that that was a very special and precious thing to be. They also had to be ‘smart’ enough to ‘mix it’ in the wider society.

I should acknowledge here that I have from time to time encountered some discomfort when I acknowledge the reality of racism and its impact on Aboriginal children. In some circles it seems identity politics are somehow passé or work against the ‘One Australia’ which we are all supposed to live in. Many are intimidated by the need to understand or engage in discourse about identity and/or racism, and of course there is no consequence if they don’t. Most want to subscribe to the notion that we are all supposed to be equal. Such thinking refuses to acknowledge the reality that, as I have said, Aboriginal children are thrown into an identity which places them as inferior to other Australians. This negative identity must be rejected but its reality cannot be simply ignored.

More recently some critics assert the need to ‘close the cultural curtain’ in order to pursue improved literacy and numeracy. The more we pretend a child’s Aboriginal identity does not exist, the more we alienate that child in a way that has been done for far too long, with consequences only for Aboriginal children. Surely by now we must understand the need to ‘tear the cultural curtain open’, peer through without fear and ignorance, and warmly embrace the Aboriginal identity of children as a fundamental part of the pursuit of better literacy and numeracy outcomes.

The road to success

In our school we challenged children to work extremely hard and as part of this process we celebrated being Aboriginal every day—all of a sudden school made sense to them, regardless of the complex nature of their social context. At our school, children developed the courage to reach within themselves to find there the strength and the spirituality to become Strong and Smart Aborigines. It is precisely what white educators like Captain Pratt have seen as a weakness that constitutes their potential strength. Their Aboriginal identity is not a hindrance and any educator that comes near Cherbourg School must get with the Strong and Smart philosophy or get rolled by it! The confrontation between the indigenous way of life and modernity is not a zero sum game, for Aboriginality is a living, adapting resource or way of being, which has helped our people for thousands of years. Contra Captain Pratt and his successors, to save the Indigenous man one must allow him to continue to be an Aborigine.

Reference

Blake, T (2001). A History of Cherbourg Settlement—A Dumping Ground, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, pp. 37–9.

Chris Sarra is director of the Institute for Indigenous Leadership in Education and Development based at Cherbourg in Queensland.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au