What is the Best Way to Encourage Young Aboriginal Australians to Attend School?

In 2018, I had the privilege of visiting Jabiru Area School in the Northern Territory of Australia. The school is located in a remote town called Jabiru and has a large Aboriginal Australian population. 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 ‘what is the best way to encourage young Aboriginal Australians to attend school?’ In simpler terms, ‘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 go to 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. It is a form of education that is used in Canada specifically for Canadian Indigenous peoples. This form of education also places a large emphasis on teaching the students about their rich culture, history, and language. Currently in Australia, many argue that Aboriginals should be taught the same way Non-Indigenous Australians are taught. Personally, I don’t believe this is the best way to provide Aboriginal Australians with the education they deserve. Currently, the schooling system is not organized in a way to excite, engage, and encourage Indigenous students to attend school every day. As well as this, limited education regarding Aboriginal Australian history and cultural practices is implemented into this current form of education. I believe that schools in Australia with high percentages of Aboriginal students should begin to become ‘Entrepreneurship Education’ based institutions because this form of education has the ability to encourage young Aboriginal Australians to attend school.

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 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 in an attempt to absorb “the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples into white Australian society.” (Britannica) 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.”(Britannica) It is possible that this traumatic history of being forced to become more like white people in their childhood education is a deterrent for young Aboriginals. The Stolen Generation is a tragic example 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.

Current day education of young Indigenous Australians is nothing to write home about. Indigenous Australians are forced to attend the same classes and learn the same curriculum as their Non-Indigenous peers. According to the Australian Government (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet) “the overall attendance rate for Indigenous students nationally was 83.2 per cent, compared with 93.0 per cent for non-Indigenous students.”(Australian Government Department of the Prime minister and Cabinet) Australia as a nation should not be proud of these statistics and in my belief, our country isn’t doing a good enough job at increasing these percentages. Whilst the government writes about “closing the gap [on] education-related targets,”(Australian Institute of Health and Welfare) there is not enough action taking place for this to occur. “Under the Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) established in July 2014, the Australian Government has provided more than $1.3 billion to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.” (Australian Government Department of the Prime minister and Cabinet) However, evidently by analyzing the statistics in this paragraph, this funding has made no improvements to their attendance of schooling. Monetary assistance is most definitely required but the focus needs to be on what this money is being spent on. Rather than continuing with the current education model for Indigenous students, Australia needs to look at making a change such as developing entrepreneurship education based institutions. Clearly the current education model of standard schooling and hoping that money will fix the low attendance rates of Indigenous Students is not working.

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”. (United Nations). Entrepreneurship Education can address most of these reasons. The idea of a young Aboriginal child feeling a sense of “loss of identity [and] caught in no man’s land” (United Nations) 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.” (United Nations)

The main issue entrepreneurship education targets is the idea that the education Indigenous students receive is often 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. Instead, they return to their communities with a formal education that is 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. In a study conducted by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, a male Aboriginal high schooler said, “‘I don’t want to get up and go to school for nothing. I can just wait and go to TAFE at I6’” (Gray 16). TAFE (Australian Technical and Further Education) is a form of tertiary education that provides students with industry related skills. However it is only offered to Individuals after they graduate high school. This quote exacerbates the desire that young Indigenous Australians want to gain an education that prepares them for the workforce earlier than post-high school. Entrepreneurship education aims to provide Indigenous Australians with skills that are extremely relevant to 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.

By providing Aboriginal students with an education that has been extremely successful in Canada, globalization can have a 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” (IGI Global). 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.” (Pinto et al. 358) 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.

There are potential problems that could arise when attempting to implement Entrepreneurship Education into Australian schooling systems. Firstly, it must be considered that there are differences between Indigenous Canadians and Indigenous Australians. The difference between these groups of individuals’ ways of life may cause difficulties regarding translation between the two nations. However, in saying this, Jonathan Rudin, head of Aboriginal Legal Services of Canada, a leading Canadian advocate has said “Aboriginal disadvantage in Canada mirrors that of Indigenous people in Australia because both are survivors of colonialism.” (Calla) On this topic of colonialism, 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.” (Pinto et al. 2) 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 repetition of history is a result of power imbalances which are unfortunately still present between Aboriginal people and white people in Australia. Hence, the queries of “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’?” ( 2) 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 would be by setting up institutions run by Aboriginal people. This 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 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 young 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 can also ensure Indigenous Australians learn as much information regarding their history and culture from people of their own heritage. This will increase the currently low attendance percentages of young Indigenous Australians in schools.

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