The everyday natural disaster nobody sees

The everyday natural disaster nobody sees

It is obvious people go the extra mile to help those affected by a natural disaster. We only need to think of the global responses to the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In January 2010, the world mobilised its efforts to respond to the earthquake in Haiti that left 220,000 people dead.

There would not have been an Australian school child or employee that wasn’t asked to donate or contribute in some way to at least one of these relief efforts. When an issue such as this is front and centre in our minds, we respond.

However, there is another natural disaster that is destroying lives every day, the effects of which will be handed down to generation after generation. The effects from the fallout of this disaster include sub-standard living conditions, poor education, poor health and higher levels of crime. Ironically this became all the more apparent to me having recently visited New Orleans spending time with survivors of Hurricane Katrina as well as teachers and social workers who work with their children.

For those born into poverty, every day is a natural disaster. Yet in this case, society often appears to turn a blind eye. The very same people who criticised George W Bush’s administration for their inept response to Katrina are the ones who cross the road to avoid the homeless. Those who ran around the office with a bucket telling you how much you should give to help the Haitian people are the same ones who avoid eye contact with those, who really should just go get a job.

It seems that a cause is not a just one unless it is leading the hourly news, or a famous rock star is challenging us all to do our bit.

Living in poverty, as with any natural disaster, hits children the hardest; and all too often we think of poverty as something that is common in other countries than our own.

In 2007, UNICEF’s report on Child Poverty in the OECD (PDF 1.51MB) stated that Australia has a relative child poverty rate of nearly 12 per cent. That is, 12 per cent of children living in a house where the family income is 50 per cent or less of the median wage. Some people argue that the poverty level is higher than this, as relative poverty only looks at those who (for whatever reason) earn very little, and not those who earn nothing at all. More than 500,000 Australian children live without an employed parent in their household.

As a society we must look at ways to break the cycle. There are many factors that need to be considered when addressing poverty, government spending to improve housing and benefit payments as well as pushing for an increase in the minimum wage; and then there is education.

Education is often lauded as the great bright hope; if we can educate the young, they can break free of the poverty trap and yet the very same 2007 UNICEF report states that Australia led the way along with Finland, Canada and Japan with regard to education (an overview of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy at age 15.)

How can this be? How can we excel at education and still have more than half a million young Australians living without an employed parent in their household?

The fact is, the poor are being failed by the very thing that was meant to save them. Education for the poor is fundamentally flawed.

Research (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2007 - The Impact of Poverty on Young Childrens’ Experiences of School) has shown that by the age of seven or eight, many boys from low socioeconomic backgrounds have disengaged from their educational experience. Many more follow in the early years of high school.

One of the primary reasons is that too many schools fail to engage the students in a meaningful way. They do not put learning into context. School is seen as something you do to prepare for life.

This fails the students on a number of levels, but in the very worst case scenarios (where violence and gang culture are rife) it fails young males who do not place much importance on the future; for them, it’s all about the here and now.

Education must realise this and start dealing with the here and now.

Add to the fact that in comparison to their middle class peers, children as young as nine-year-olds know their education is inferior; they know their access to extra-curricular activities is diminished; and they know they will get lower paying jobs.

Education first and foremost needs to reframe this knowledge. That means moving away from the relentless push to improve literacy and numeracy above and beyond all else. It means giving the young people power to identify their strengths and form a new context in which to live their lives.

This takes a skilled and dedicated teaching body committed to reshaping the educational model but all too often, where the best teachers are needed, few can be found. To counter this, the government has tried offering incentives to go and teach in the bush, as well as backing the Teach for Australia (TFA) program. Noble ideals, but we need to recognise that teaching is a craft; one that needs to be honed and continually adapted to meet the needs of an ever changing society. Just throwing money at the situation, or sending in graduates with little more than six weeks intensive training into the “thick of it” may have detrimental effects in the long term. In order to work in these schools you need a passion and dedication that the students feed off. You need to dedicate to them in the long term. Leaving after two years, as the majority of Teach for America (the model TFA was inspired by) Corps members do, often leads to more distrust of the educational system in the communities they were meant to engage. It remains to be seen what impact TFA will have on our poor communities. Of course I hope it is positive, I just hope that the government does not sit back and think that TFA is the only (or major) answer.

In order to address this poverty we need an attitudinal shift in society. Although we can’t give a dollar every time we are asked, we can reframe our thinking. We can recognise it for what it is; poverty.

If we do this maybe we will mobilise our efforts in the same way we do when Bono asks us to.

Maybe as a society we won’t cross the street, or avoid eye contact so as to deny its very existence.

Maybe governments will better fund outreach education programs; seriously consider the educational needs of the vastly different communities and recognise the need to redress the real purpose of education.

Maybe.