Education in a Multi-Cultural Community

Extract

Traeger Park Primary School is situated in a community composed of white and Aboriginal cultures and sub-cultures. The enrolment is approximately three hundred and eighty and of this more than half the children are of Aboriginal descent. Approximately sixty of these Aboriginal children live in cottage homes because they come from cattle stations or they are state wards. The various sub-cultures would include –

1. Stable middle-class part-Aboriginal group.

2. Lower socio-economic group of part-Aboriginal people living in town.

3. Full blood Aboriginal people in fringe-dwelling situations

4. A transient white group who live at caravan parks.

5. People employed by railways.

6. A small group of middle-class whites.

Within the white cultures, there are many disadvantaged children from broken or disturbed homes. All these sub-cultures within the school have tended to make the middle-class white group disadvantaged. We are faced with the problem of keeping these children up to the academic standard expected by parents. In the fringe-dwelling group there are twenty-five children from one particular camp and thirty-five from other camp situations all around the town. Many of these people see this school as theirs even though they live much closer to other primary schools. The principal aim of the school is to develop in the children an awareness of themselves and their place in the community, and a self-concept that enables them to live a full and satisfying existence in the environment of their own choice.