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Strangers in their own land - an extract

By Helen Hughes - posted Friday, 7 March 2008


Returning to school in the afternoon, their writing is very neat and clear. They have been copying words and numbers from the blackboard and in early childhood and primary language workbooks for years. These were based on large laminated textbooks. Aboriginal children are evidently not entitled to their own copy of a school text. The current text The World That We Want is a booklet about marine life for 5-9 year-olds.

Charlotte and Margaret know phrases and passages by heart from The World That We Want but they cannot read the text. After identifying an initial letter they have been taught to guess a word but not to read it. They are at early primary levels in spite of regular school attendance because they have been badly taught.

The girls have seen many violent films on DVD, they have watched the Fox channel with their families but they do not listen to the English dialogue. They could not remember any of the plots of the films they have seen. A partial exception was Ten Canoes, shown one evening by visiting missionaries. We try watching television, without success. Going to films is not a great success because of the girls limited English. When they watch films in the evening on the computer in their room, they turn the sound down so as not to be disturbed by the English voices.

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Writing, reading and arithmetic do not turn out be Charlotte's and Margaret's principal learning difficulties. Years of sitting in undisciplined classes that made no attempt to tailor learning to age and level of learning, and that had no progression of learning, had numbed their minds. They are overwhelmed by a world of signs and print of which they can make no sense and that they have not been led to want to understand. Most of the time it appears that they do not care whether they understand or not: the task seems so far beyond their grasp.

In a bookshop they reject buying Storm Boy because they know it has been made into a film. They say they do not need to learn to read books because there is always a film.

After years of Wangupeni schooling, Charlotte and Margaret have the concentration span of pre-schoolers. How can they ever relate to a normal high school or a job? Yet Charlotte wants to be a teacher and Margaret wants to work in an office.

I buy a map of the world. Charlotte and Margaret find Australia, know some states and the Northern Territory and can find Darwin, Cairns and Sydney. They do not know what capital of Australia means or what and where it is. We find pictures of Parliament House in Canberra. The girls do not know any other country, continent or ocean. They have no idea what these words mean.

The girls know of the equator but no other geography. They have not heard of Captain Cook. They thought a left-over election poster of Kevin Rudd is George Bush.

The Wangupeni school was given half a dozen computers. They were locked away most of the time. The girls enjoy playing solitaire. We trail cables round the house so that we have two computers set up with Internet access and e-mail addresses.

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Every day we practise using e-mails and becoming familiar with Google. We use DVDs as learning supplements. Josephine finds a maths game she can play with Charlotte and Margaret, each of the three girls competing at her own maths level. We get multiplication tables on DVDs.

We go to a local cafe for a snack. The mentors take Charlotte and Margaret out for a restaurant meal. The girls are wonderful guests, appreciative of every meal, but they are unable to read menus. They head for the familiar KFC or McDonald's where they can read chips and other items, though not the recently introduced health foods.

Having settled an intensive schooling program, we expand our horizons. To supplement their pocket money I find jobs they can do round the house to earn $12 an hour. Thinking of Margaret's wish to become an office worker, I drag out a pile of neglected newspapers that have been set aside for cuttings to be clipped, dated and sorted in chronological order. The girls are not used to using scissors, just as the Rotarians found that the girls' brothers and cousins were not used to handling hammers, screwdrivers or any other tools and could not read tape measures. The girls cannot read enough of the newspaper titles and columns to know where a topic starts and ends. I have to draw the outline of each cutting to make this office task work. We make a game of filing the cuttings by date.

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First published in The Australian on February 27, 2008. The names of the girls and their community have been changed to protect their identities. This is an edited extract of Strangers in their own country by Centre for Independent Studies senior fellow Helen Hughes, to be published in March 3 edition of Quadrant.



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About the Author

Professor Helen Hughes AO is a senior fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies.

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