Indigenous Education System Analysis

From the onset of the invasion of Australia in 1788, supported by the claim that Australia was uninhabited land, ‘Terra Nullius’, a ripple effect of disadvantage began which resulted in intergenerational discrepancies in the educational outcomes of Indigenous Australians. However, the unequal outcomes of Indigenous Australians were, and often still are, attributed to the belief of Indigenous Australians’ inherent inequality to Whites. This is despite the fact that the systems established in post-invasion Australia perpetuated this very inequality through structural and institutionalised racism. The views of race and racial hierarchy which sanctioned these systems continue to linger on and pervade areas of society today, albeit often in a more …show more content…
Therefore the provision of mandatory education was extended to Indigenous Australians in a highly-limited form, reflecting opinions on Indigenous Australians’ limited capacity for knowledge. Consequently, the provision was only for the bare minimum amount of schooling; that is, an education that did not usually surpass the 3rd or 4th grade (Beresford, Partington and Gower, 2012 p. 92). It should be noted that this education was not offered to simply teach a limited curriculum, but to also effectively ‘colonise the mind’ (Tur, 2016) of Indigenous Australians by instilling Western beliefs, culture and language. However, the Whiteness of this education, interlaced with the overt racism of schools and the greater community, as evident in Aunty Tur’s recount of her school experience (Tur, 2010), reinforced Indigenous Australians’ feelings of disenfranchisement towards what was seen as the ‘white man’s process’ of education (Grey 1974, cited in Beresford, Partington and Gower, 2012 p. 100). This is an issue still present in Australian schools today, and one which Focus Areas 1.4 and 2.4 of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) standards seek to …show more content…
The importance of meeting this standard cannot be understated, as teachers, being in positions of influence, possess the agency to foster reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians through education. To do this, teachers must challenge the Whiteness and structural racism of the classroom by employing critical pedagogical practices: questioning whose beliefs, values and interests are served by classroom content and practices (Rigney, 2016); using tools of Critical Race Theory to highlight the perspectives of minorities through activities such as reading, analysing and reflecting on counter-stories (Schulz, 2016); and by overall taking a resistance approach to teaching, reflecting the belief of teachers as having the power to be ‘[...] “agents” and schools as sites for the generation of “equitable social change” [...]’ (Tur and Schulz, 2016). Recognising and addressing the White hegemony in education, and its effects on perpetuating interests, values and ideology of this dominant culture, is essential in answering the question of equalising the outcomes of education for Indigenous and non-Indigenous