What is the Best Way to Encourage Young Aboriginal Australians to Attend School?
In 2018, I had the privilege of visiting a school in the northern territory of Australia. The school is located in a remote town called Jabiru and has a large Aboriginal Australian population. The school goes by the name Jabiru Area School. A select number of classmates and I spent a small amount of time at the school. However, the experience left me greatly impacted. Since my visit, I have had the idea of gaining a degree in education so that I can go back home to Australia and teach Aboriginal children. Yet, many questions arise when I think about the kind of impact I could have on Aboriginal students. The main question that I will attempt to answer in this research paper is how does one make Indigenous Australians want to attend school? When I visited Jabiru Area School, the teachers made it a point of emphasis that sometimes the kids just simply didn’t come to school. Hardly any students would attend school every day of the week. Most would come in maybe once a week. There are several reasons that these kids don’t attend school. The main reason is that Aboriginal students simply don’t want to attend school. I strongly believe that this main reason can be addressed. Multiple questions come to mind for me when I begin to wonder what the solution might be. How could one make coming to school for these kids exciting? How could one make these kids want to attend school every single day? After some research into the topic, it is evident that solutions in other countries have already arisen. In particular Canada. Canada has implemented a new system of schooling. Known as Entrepreneurship Education. This form of education steers away from testing and exams and rather focuses on skills to build their own success in the workforce from an earlier age. Many argue that Indigenous Australians should be taught the same way the rest of Australians are taught. Personally, I don’t believe this is the best way to provide Aboriginal Australians with the education they deserve. Because currently, the schooling system is not organized in a way to excite, engage and encourage Indigenous students to attend school every day. No education regarding Aboriginal Australian history and cultural practices is implemented into this form of education. I believe that schools in Australia with high percentages of Aboriginal students should begin to become ‘Entrepreneurship Education’ based institutions.
For some historical context, it has been estimated that Aboriginal Australians have inhibited Australian land for at least 65,000 years. Since the arrival of Europeans on January 26th, 1788, Aboriginal people have been oppressed in a world unnatural to their existence. From as soon as European settlers arrived on the land, the invader’s main goal was to eradicate the native Australians because they were considered strange fauna. The act of killing Indigenous Australians lasted for decades and decades. Meanwhile, from the mid-1800s to as recent as the 1970s, a period of time occurred where Indigenous children were taken from their homes. They were often on their way to and from school and taken by the Australian police force due to government policies in place at the time. This period is referred to as the Stolen Generations. The children were denied access to their own culture, were forbidden from speaking their own languages and were punished if they did so. Aboriginal children were educated by white people and in most cases fostered by white people to absorb “the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples into white Australian society”. It was said by the Australian government at the time that “the [Indigenous] children were living in poverty and would be better off if raised by whites”. It is possible that this traumatic history of being forced to go to school run by white people in order to become more like white people is a deterrent for young Aboriginals in regards to attending school today. The genocide of Aboriginal Australians and the Stolen Generation are tragic examples of how globalization can have devastating effects. But if we are to look forward, the concept of globalization can be used in an attempt to restore the extreme wrong-doings aboriginal Australians have faced.
By providing Aboriginal students with an education that has been extremely successful in Canada, globalization can have a more positive and beneficial effect. Entrepreneurship education can be defined as a “learning process that prepares people to be responsible and enterprising individuals. It helps people develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to achieve the goals they set out for themselves. Evidence also shows that people with entrepreneurial education are more employable.” Entrepreneurship education aims to persuade “individuals to take up self-employment as a career by inculcating a specific curricular canon (accounting, financial management, marketing, and venture plans) purported to lead to entrepreneurial success”. This form of education in Canada is proving to be a lot more engaging as Indigenous peoples in their country are interested in building their own skills and focusing on what they want to do with their careers. As well as this Entrepreneurship education can be arranged to provide Aboriginal Australians with skills that are specific to their cultural practices. This ensures that they learn about their ancestors and the history of their people. I believe that by providing young Aboriginals with relevant, interesting and often more ‘hands-on’ lessons that they know will benefit themselves in the future, will result in them wanting to attend school each day.
According to the United Nations Indigenous Peoples sector, there are six main reasons why Indigenous people have such low schooling attendance rates. The six reasons are “lack of respect and resources cause critical education gap”, “numerous obstacles to education”, “loss of identity, caught in no man’s land”, “invisible and at-risk”, “education often irrelevant”, “despite efforts, no solution in foreseeable future”. Entrepreneurship Education can address most of these reasons. The idea of a young aboriginal child feeling a sense of “loss of identity, caught in no man’s land” is both saddening and frightening. Entrepreneurship Education aims to provide students with direction. When Indigenous Entrepreneurship education includes education regarding Aboriginal Australian culture and history, indigenous school children are no longer “in danger of losing part of their identity, their connection with their parents and predecessors and, ultimately, of being caught in a no man’s land whereby they lose an important aspect of their identity while not fully becoming a part of the dominant national society”. This heavily relates to the term “lack of respect and resources” which refers to traditional educational institutions that do not respect the diverse cultures of indigenous peoples. There are far too few teachers who are fluent in their native tongues, and schools frequently lack basic resources for Indigenous students. It’s especially difficult to find educational materials that provide accurate and balanced knowledge of indigenous peoples and their cultures. Once again, Entrepreneurship education can be constructed to educate Indigenous Australians about their cultural practices as well as provide them with the skills to build a secure and financially beneficial future. The main issue Entrepreneurship education targets is the idea that the education Indigenous students receive often is extremely irrelevant. Indigenous students frequently feel as if the education they receive promotes individualism and competition over communal ways of life and cooperation. They are not taught vital survival and employment skills that are appropriate for indigenous economies so instead, they return to their communities with a formal education that is either irrelevant or unsuitable for their needs. They often feel obliged to look for work in the national economy, which results in a vicious circle of social fragmentation, brain drain, and lack of development, especially given the positions and pay available to them do not equal their educational achievements. Entrepreneurship education aims to provide Indigenous Australians with skills that are extremely relevant to the workplaces and job opportunities they desire to take part in. These targeted ways of learning and specific teachings aim to ensure Indigenous peoples can gain an education that allows them to return and give back to their communities by using their newly acquired education.
There are potential issues that could arise when attempting to implement Entrepreneurship Education in schooling systems. The main issue that arises is the concept of redoing Australia’s wrongs of the past. More specifically, as spoken about earlier in this paper, Aboriginal Australians were once forced to learn ‘white’ ways of life and were educated by white people the way white people wanted them to be educated. Even in Canada, “critics have argued that conventional EE reflects colonial approaches to assimilation that fail to disrupt hegemonic power imbalances when targeted to indigenous peoples” (Banerjee & Tedmanson, 2010; Revely & Down, 2009). Simply put, critics have said that Entrepreneurship Education is simply a newer form of education where white people teach Indigenous people the way they want them to be taught. They argue that this is just like what Colonials once did as a result of power imbalances which are unfortunately still present between Aboriginal people and white people in Australia. Hence, the questions “Does indigenous EE help to liberate these ‘Others’ on their own terms? Or are these programs ‘civilizing missions’ that attempt to impose Eurocentric practices and values in the form of ‘tools and opportunities’ for ‘them’?” are asked. In my personal opinion, if Entrepreneurship education is set up correctly and carefully, these issues can be easily avoided. A way of dealing with this is setting up institutions run by Aboriginal people. That solves the main concern of white people being in charge and controlling the education of Aboriginal people once again. Not only does this ensure that a repeat of Australia’s poor history doesn’t occur, it allows for Aboriginal people to pass on their own heritage and cultural values. Embedding the mighty important passing down of Aboriginal history, language, stories, and teachings. It also provides job opportunities for Indigenous peoples, potentially encouraging young aboriginals to become educators themselves. This simple solution has multiple benefits and just adds to the list of why Entrepreneurship education is the superior form of education for Aboriginal Australians.
Entrepreneurship education is the most effective form of education for Aboriginal Australians. It will have the ability to provide students with relevant skills to allow them to go into the future with confidence. This confidence will stem from the knowledge that they can form their own work opportunities and earn money for their families to build a secure and financially stable lifestyle for themselves. Entrepreneurship education also can ensure Indigenous Australians learn as much information regarding their history and culture from people of their own heritage. This will not only keep more students engaged and wanting to come to school as they have the desire to learn relevant information but also increase the currently low Aboriginal Australian employment rate.
