Aboriginal children are confronted with numerous problems coping with the school system. An Aboriginal child is torn between the extremes of two cultures; the dominant white culture and Aboriginal culture.

The dominant white culture perceives the Aboriginal culture to be different and at worst, very inferior. The Aboriginal culture is resigned to the white culture’s perception of it, because this perception is reinforced in the reality of the dominant white situation.

The Aboriginal race is seen by many whites as lazy, irresponsible, uneducated, and a burden to society. The white Australian perception of Aboriginals as an ethnic group is still, in many ways, one of inferiors. Aboriginals have encountered white superiority since white settlement. Aboriginals were hunted and destroyed as vermin, and at a later stage, those that survived were placed on missions or reserves. At the time this seemed an effective solution, but it did in fact take Aboriginals away from their tribal lands, which were an important part of their culture. The Aboriginals were degraded and culturally ruined. Although there has been a small effort by white authorities to help Aboriginals, Aboriginals still have a strong feeling for white hostility and dominance.

The Aboriginal child is a product of these two widely different cultures, but he is forced into a white school system, which still, in many ways, merely tolerates his Aboriginal heritage.

Aboriginal children are particularly susceptible to ear disease and therefore to loss of hearing. In fact, it is a reasonable generalization that at any one time, around 25% of Aboriginal children have significant hearing loss. All teachers should know something about hearing disorders and classroom management. It is even more important for those of us who teach Aboriginal children. I want to do three things, Firstly, I want to look at ear disease itself, because we must understand what we are talking about. Secondly, I want to talk about the implications for classroom management. Thirdly, and somewhat less importantly, I want to provide some medical statistical data, for those who perhaps in some other context may feel the need to justify concern in this matter.

Throughout 1974 and 1975 I worked among Aboriginal people in Rural Town, S.W. Queensland. With one exception, all Aboriginal people in this country town have attained at least a primary education. Further, almost 30 per cent of men and women in the 16–30 age group have attended some secondary school; although only two completed grade 10 in 1974, a further three attended tenth arade in 1975.

These figures reflect the pattern of Queensland Aboriginal education as presented in Roper (1970:55). On the basis of these trends it should be possible to hypothesize that younger Aboriginals are attaining higher educational standards than their parents. But the figures lie – simply because more children are staying at school for longer periods this does not mean that they either learn more at school or are experiencing more satisfaction in the school situation.

Obviously the proportion of individuals who attend at least some secondary school is increasing; Aboriginal parents generally support the principle that education is essential if the child is to acquire reasonable employment. Such schemes as the Aboriginal Secondary Grant Scheme are recognised by the Aboriginal community as worthwhile endeavours, not only because they enable parents to support their children for longer periods at school, but because they make the whole educational issue topical. Discussions about the grant lead to discussions about children’s problems at school. Ambitions for “good jobs” are intrinsically linked with educational achievement. Education officers associated with the Aboriginal Secondary Grant are sought out, asked for help to “have the kids sent to boarding school”, as the Rural Town high school does not teach classes beyond Grade 10, and their expertise enlisted to find employment. This concern is not restricted to high school students either. Mothers generally recognise that:

In country areas of Australia it is not a rare concept for multi-grade classrooms to exist under the instruction of one or two teachers. However, even within the structure of single teacher schools, there is usually a grade structure within the classroom, where the teacher divides the children into grades and the blackboard into grade areas. This works efficiently if the children in each grade section are of the same academic level and of similar chronological age. In many cases the teacher can call on the senior students, when they have completed their work, to help the juniors, and in this way the teacher surreptitiously sets recapitulatory and revisionary work for all the students. The big ones helping the little ones is an efficient concept in small school teaching, especially if the children are of European extraction and have had a fairly continuous educational exposure.

In an Aboriginal school or a school with an enrolment of predominantly Aboriginal children, the assumption that the children have had a continual exposure to education cannot be made, and if made, can be very detrimental to the educational development of the child. A teacher arriving in an Aboriginal community peruses reports and other information regarding the children and after several weeks of teaching and testing, sets up “grade areas”. Here the dangers creep in.

Most Aboriginal children are lacking in the basic European competitive instinct and do not wish to be singled out as superior students. They seem to believe in the words of Eldridge Cleaver that, “Competition is the law of the jungle and co-operation is the law of civilization”. Perhaps the Aboriginal people are more civilized than those of the European west.

In 1975 we were preparing a source book of the Northern Territory for the Northern Territory Curriculum Branch. There was a thick book at the end of it, but it was evident to us that only one section of the population was represented. That was the European, and only the literate part of that. The Aboriginal view of the past was simply not available from history books, nor, except to Aboriginal children, from anywhere else. It was obvious, that to produce an Aboriginal history of the Territory, we would have to move from reading the written word to listening to the spoken.

This was the task we set ourselves for 1977–78. Employed by the Curriculum Branch, and backed by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, we would act as editors in the task of presenting an Aboriginal history of the Northern Territory to school children. All interviews and discussions would be taped, and cassettes made to go with each booklet of transcriptions and illustrations.

Faced with an enormous amount of material, vast distances to cover, and not unlimited time, we decided, rather than produce a hotch-potch volume of what we had managed to record, to edit a series of shorter books on different themes. Some are on specific topics, like the Coniston massacre, or wartime recollections. Other topics are more general but no less interesting: how, when and why did Aboriginal people give up (or were forced to give up) traditional life; how they adapted to the European intrusion; why there has been a shift to out-stations and a preference for bicultural education?

Obviously we have not been able to visit large areas of the Territory. We chose mostly to visit places where we already knew someone. Often this was the teacher, who would ask the community in advance if it were interested in taking part in the project. Almost everywhere, the older people were keen to tell stories of the early days, especially when they knew their words would be heard and read by children throughout the Territory. Generally the stories are no older than the third generation, and in English.

We, as teachers, usually find it difficult to accept the oral language patterns that some of our pupils bring to school. “We are prone to inject an element of morality into our pseudo-standard of English.” (Cheney 1976, p.58).

As Hall (1959) so ably comments, “Our native speech is inextricably bound to our perception of friends, community, religion, nation and other peoples.”

Basically, non-standard dialects are viewed either as a deficit form of standard English or a different but equal language system. These are basically the two main models. Wolfram (1973, p.68) says that, in the deficit model, speech differences are viewed and described with reference to a norm and deviation from that norm. The control group norm is, of course, middle-class speech or standard English. Nonconformity to this norm is seen as an indication of retarded language acquisition or under-developed language. Nonstandard dialects are considered as the pathology of non-organic speech deficiencies, and the patterns of these dialects are labelled with such terms as ‘misarticuiations’; ‘deviations’; ‘replacements’; ‘faulty pronunciations’ and the like.

The ‘difference’ model sees non-standard dialects as self-contained systems in their own rights. They have their own phonological and grammatical rules and are equally legitimate both socially and psychologically, as well as being syntactically functionally equivalent to standard English.

Townsville, North Queensland is the setting for a unique innovation in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island education. A number of parents have opted out of the State education system in favour of developing a school which reflects their culture and which aims to provide a program better suited to black children.

The Black Community School was established in October 1974. Initially it aimed to provide for children late in their primary schooling because parents recognised this as the most critical stage. However, by January 1975, it was realized that it was difficult to finance the extensive resources required at secondary level. Therefore the school amended its original aim and now operates to provide the best possible early education up to secondary level, by which time it is hoped successful transfer can take place.

As in previous years, the school at Mornington Island has considered that one of the major disadvantages of the educational program here has been the lack of opportunity for interaction with other children, and the experiencing of other aspects of life which are so readily available to children living on the mainland and particularly those nearer to large centres of population.

Over the past two years, with financial help from the Aboriginal Secondary Grants Scheme and Disadvantaged Schools, plus local help-, children in the upper grades have had the opportunity to visit various centres of interest such as Cairns and hinterland, Mt. Isa and Brisbane.

The evaluation of such educational tours is a long term process and made even more difficult as many of the children leave school, but from what has been ascertained, it is felt that such tours to European centres, though of value in developing a variety of concepts, did not totally satisfy the needs of our school or meet with the major objectives of developing the need for a sense of responsibility within our younger people who will be required to be the leaders of the community in the future.

In previous tours our Aboriginal children observed Europeans at work and play, but rarely saw any of their own skin involved in outside life, and then only in labouring types of work. With this thinking in the background, and an enthusiastic report from Doomadgee about their trip to Papua New Guinea last year, we considered the possibility of visiting another country.

In this article I attempt to point out the types of children I worked with, the problems they had, and some of the ways I attempted to overcome these problems.

The basic idea was for me to work from 2.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. helping under-achievers master some fundamental language skills. This appears very clear-cut. However, I think, as the article progresses, the Inala nightmare suddenly grows upon you. I write informally throughout this article – the work was much the same. Within a broad framework plan, the spontaneity and understanding needed in unexpected situations flourished best. Some incidents and sayings are dispersed throughout the work.

“Tonight Wayne, why don’t you be an ordinary teacher like the ones at school? Come in and roar at us.”

“It’s going to be hard, we’d know it’s just a game.”

“Come on Wayne, it’d be good. We’ll act like we’re at school and you be the teacher.”

Havighurst (1970) talks of an implicit contract between the home and the school. By this he means that –

Watts (1972) notes that this could be particularly true of “the socially disadvantaged parents of this country, nearly all of whom fail to meet the terms of the contract”, but points out that the schools also fail “by failing to understand how the children of these families can learn most successfully”.