Another week, another industry closed down and another distraction from the main game of education.
FEDERAL School Education Minister Peter Garrett has declared he will talk to state governments about adopting bilingual education for indigenous children, arguing school attendance rates would improve if they were taught in their first language.
Update. OK I get it, Lurch is the guy they put in charge of projects that they want to fail. Why do they hate him so much?
Remind me again just how many Aboriginal languages there are in Australia…
http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/map/
A Lurker
18 Sep 12 at 8:26 am
But, but, but…
A 100% improvement – they’ll be illiterate in two languages, rather than just one!
Rabz
18 Sep 12 at 8:32 am
That’s a damn fine map, Mr Lurker. I’d thought from my workings with remote Aboriginal settlements that there was about thirty, but it appears I was a long way out.
Yep. Another brain fart by someone who should know better.
Yep. Another totally stuffed up plan begins to ripen.
Bob Sewell
18 Sep 12 at 8:35 am
That’s a lot of languages. How many qualified teachers do we have that can speak an Aboriginal language?
Gab
18 Sep 12 at 8:44 am
Garrett is merely legislating Labor doctrine that ‘proper’ Aboriginals ideally should live as ideologically correct undisturbed traditional hunter gatherers wandering in a Green Garden of Eden on the public teat.
This sort of handicapping must be deliberate, these kids need every English teaching hour available.
Alfonso
18 Sep 12 at 8:55 am
Wait till the muslims hear about this. They’ll be demanding the same on cultural grounds, and if they don’t receive it, they’ll claim Islam has been insulted™
Keith
18 Sep 12 at 9:12 am
Remind me again – which Aboriginal language will Larissa Behrendt be insisting they teach to her kids?
boy on a bike
18 Sep 12 at 9:12 am
Did you read the fine print on the map?
This is only the major language groups. There isn’t enough room to show all the smaller languages and dialectes.
boy on a bike
18 Sep 12 at 9:14 am
11% – Percentage of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people mainly speaking an Aboriginal language at home in 2008, unchanged from 2002 [24]. 75% of these can also speak English [36].
50% – Percentage of Indigenous people in some remote areas of Australia whose [sic] speak an Aboriginal language at home [1].
145 – Number of Aboriginal languages spoken in Australia today. 110 of them are “critically endangered” [28].
804 – Number of people in NSW who identified as speaking an Aboriginal language in the 2006 census. Same figure in 2002: 2,682 [25].
0 – Number of private sector employers who consider it crucial an employee is fluent in any of the 145 Aboriginal languages.
Gab
18 Sep 12 at 9:23 am
Garret is regarded as a useless twat even by his Labor colleagues. This will go nowhere. And that’s before the States tell him to eff off.
DavidLeyonhjelm
18 Sep 12 at 10:14 am
Bolt is on the money:
Garrett has always used Aborigines as cultural props.
C.L.
18 Sep 12 at 10:43 am
I have seen plenty of asian families where the kids are fluent in the ‘mother tongue’ yet speak perfect English from attending an Australian school. Sometimes the kids interpret for the parents.
I’m all for following family traditions and heritage, but surely this sort of thing is best left to the family and community. I like to see, for example, Chinese families, teaching their kids chinese traditions and bringing in the salient bits of their culture to their Australian way of life.
No doubt the wannabe-law makers are looking across the Tasman for this type of thing, but the Maori, sharing a much smaller island from a more homogenous group, all speak the same language. The language is spoken by a relatively decent slice of the population, and a lot of Kiwis are interested in at least being able to pronounce various place names and things properly.
Preservation of dying languages can only be done by isolating people. In an interconnected world, one of the costs of a better way of life for everyone is less variance amongst languages spoken. The only way you could advance an Aboriginal language movement within Australia would be to standardise to some degree an Australia-wide Aboriginal language, agree on a written format in latin characters, and then start with that. Because you’re never going to get things like Aboriginal language radio or tv programs until the broadly-dispersed people can all understand each other.
It might sound like blasphemy to the average head-tilting leftie, but many languages have gone through this very process. French, for example, was once not spoken by most of the inhabitants of France. They once had a very large variety of regional dialects (a few survive, some only in the occasional local word). A state-wide movement to standardise on a particular type of french improved life for everyone in France.
And so it goes. If the Aboroginal people want to preserve at least some aspects of their culture- and I think this is a goal worth pursuing – then they should be at the forefront of organising the project themselves. Leaving it to the Feds is asking for a disaster.
brc
18 Sep 12 at 10:43 am
They can’t even roll out a $600M program to house our indigenous brothers, what hope does this have?
Dan
18 Sep 12 at 10:55 am
It is too late for this and impossible/not feasible given the wide variety of Aboriginal languages and language groupings.
.
18 Sep 12 at 11:03 am
Seems interesting
Dan
18 Sep 12 at 11:12 am
Dead right brc, as Alison Anderson, member for Namatjira said recently,
“It is not the responsibility of the Education Department or Government to teach language (aboriginal) and culture, that is the responsibility of the family and community.’
The best thing the Government can do is make sure these kids have the best education they can have (and I believe Noel Pearson is getting pretty good results with his learning system,) so these kids can leave the community (as every other kid in a country town has had to do) equipped to get a job.
That is the other elephant in the room. The size of these communities, even if outside businesses were allowed to come in, means there will never be enough industry or business to employ more than a handful of people. If they are to get jobs, they will have to leave and it is utter fallacy to pretend otherwise.
Knowing that, what this language program really proposes is to fail these kids and leave them trapped in the welfare/poverty cycle forever. Shameful. But acceptable and palatable to the Paternalists out there, who venerate the concept of the noble savage (so long as he is not living next door.)
Helen Armstrong
18 Sep 12 at 11:30 am
The Left obtains much of its self importance and relevance by pretending to be the friend and protector of the disadvantaged aboriginals. They dont want to screw up a good thing by teaching them to read books.
Jannie
18 Sep 12 at 11:31 am
what of teaching australians to speak english with some clarity. – to abandon such pseudo customs as ‘mayte’ etc.
Maybe their future customers might understand them.
john malpas
18 Sep 12 at 11:37 am
That system (Direct Instruction) is worth looking into. It’s a leftists worst nightmare.
Substantially better results, especially amongst disadvantaged groups. Teachers aides able to deliver classes. Larger class sizes without consequence.
Turns everything on its head, but its results are demonstrable and hard to ignore, if your intent is to achieve educational outcomes.
Driftforge
18 Sep 12 at 12:00 pm
Decade after decade after decade ………leftist idiocy means aboriginals suffer. This has got to be the biggest scandal in Australia right now – these people are dangerously stupid.
MACK1
18 Sep 12 at 12:13 pm
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/andrewbolt/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/garrett_does_a_pinks_batts_to_aboriginal_artists/
Ivan Denisovich
18 Sep 12 at 12:15 pm
Phonics, phonics that works……..or “language immersion” ie. give them a book and they’ll eventually read when they’re ready ( a remembered direct quote from a primary school teacher in ADL), suits bone lazy teachers down to the ground, a Teacher’s Union organised work benefit.
Alfonso
18 Sep 12 at 12:17 pm
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/aborigines_trapped_in_never_never/
Ivan Denisovich
18 Sep 12 at 12:26 pm
Pretty regularly you’ll hear lefty/arts/abc types run a story about some aboriginal language that’s about to die off unless they get a few more people to learn it. Hello?
Get over it and just make sure the kids are schooled – in English – and have job prospects. That’s a tough enough assignment, given the dissembling that goes on all the time about what’s good for them.
blogstrop
18 Sep 12 at 12:33 pm
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/just_the_facts_maam1/
Ivan Denisovich
18 Sep 12 at 12:37 pm
Culture is a real issue for real Aboriginal communities. People are making real decisions about it. For instance there are only 4 old dancing ladies left at Kalkarindji. No young ones want to learn. Are they shame for exposing their breasts? They can’t be covered up as the body paint tells a part of the story, along with the dance. (Unless they were to wear a body suit, I guess.)
But it appears that these people are making a decision (even if an involuntary one) about what parts of their culture they want to preserve. I don’t believe that ‘preservation of culture’ can be forced or paid or legislated to be kept. It must be embraced and it is particularly sad in this instance that it will disappear with the passing of these old ladies.
Does it simply come down to how do you make traditional dance cool? The Chooky Dancers did a great job for boys, but it appears to me the generational evolution is the same as in any community.
It is something these people have to face (or not). Which parts they keep and which parts they loose. And it will be their choice.
Helen Armstrong
18 Sep 12 at 12:44 pm
Except of course, as Ivan’s Piers’ link upside says, those parts of Aboriginal culture that are illegal – under age marriage, spearing and other corporal punishments etc.
Helen Armstrong
18 Sep 12 at 1:19 pm
A book I am currently reading at bedtime (to share thrilling snippets with HIA) is by David Crystal, British ‘national treasure’ linguist. He states:
“We mustn’t overstate the irregularity. When you examine all the words in a college dictionary, you will find that over three-quarters of them are spelled on perfectly regular principles. There is nothing problematical about ‘cat’, obviously, but nor is there about ‘catatonic’ or ‘catapult’. That is why the phonic approach to the teaching of reading in English is so essential. Most words can be ‘sounded out’ and related to spellings in a reasonably orderly way” p.122 In Search of English, Harper 2007
Crystal also points out that those words with standardised non-phonic spellings (the origins of which he discusses delightfully, among other linguistic treats in his very discursive book) can be easily taught as ‘sight’ words, and that there are also many useful principles governing English spelling to help kids along with difficulties that result from the differential historical construction of written English words.
Lazy teachers and blinkered ‘education’ academics have once again thrown a baby out and kept back the bathwater.
How is it possible that we still have ‘noble savage’ ideologues continuing to aim a ‘Nuggett Coombes’ type of lunacy on yet another generation of Aboriginal children? These people are educational thugs, robbers and vandals. Dismiss them asap.
As for whole languages, Crystal suggests that for a language to survive it needs a substantial population size of mothertongue speakers. Otherwise the language becomes fossilised as a mere exhibit in a linguist’s language lab. Many, many languages are dying or have died in this world, more than 50,000 by one estimate. Most have gone unrecorded by history, some leave traces in other languages. Crystal’s discussion of accents and dialects is also instructive: no language stands still if it is used. English is the paramount world language of concept and word accretion. That is its great strength.
Axiomatic. What fools we have in charge of things.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
18 Sep 12 at 1:45 pm
Nice find, Lizzie. As it happens, most of Australia’s eminent researchers in this linguistics are pro-phonics, and several years back they even did an open letter to the government, with lots of big-name signatories, urging them to ignore the high-profile crackpots. (I don’t think the letter used the word ‘crackpot’ as such). The science is settled on this. Rigorous, boring, sounding-out-the-words and memorising word spelling, works.
dd
18 Sep 12 at 1:50 pm
Andrew Bolt is completely on the money on this issue, as CL and Ivan note above. In fact, his comment is word perfect. Preserving languages is a fools errand. Making kids with dark skin speak some arcane language in order to ‘preserve a language’ is cruel. If people want to preserve an aboriginal language, they should abandon English, learn that cherished ‘dying language’ themselves, and start using it in everyday life, addressing everyone in their new language.
Don’t inflict it on kids.
dd
18 Sep 12 at 1:54 pm
dd – full title of the book is actually “By Hook or By Crook – A Journey in Search of English”, just in case anyone wants to look it up.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
18 Sep 12 at 2:20 pm
Imagine being the Aboriginal “Einstein” and being condemned to a 2nd rate education, lack of dicipline, and disfunctional home?
We could be effectively surrendering the Australian Aboriginal “MLK” or brightest and best to irrelivance on an outstation all because of language barriers.
The most elouquent and precise speech in a dead or dying language is incomprehensible to the mainstream.
thefrollickingmole
18 Sep 12 at 2:34 pm
Never before have I seen anything so stupid. The er, frollickingmole said it well. What use is it to have skills in a dying language that your employer will find totally incomprehensible? Discipline and work ethic is what is required but the parents see school as a creche. The cycle of welfare dependency can be broken by education but I find the best way to engage the community, like everything else is bums on seats. Get everyong involved, stop blaming ‘whitey’ for conceived ills and do something to improve your lot.
Black Ball
18 Sep 12 at 2:55 pm
I hope someone is recording their dance and the meanings they offer, for posterity. And doing it accurately, without putting their own ideological blinkers over the content or style. I’d like to ask these ladies how they ‘feel’ about their dancing and see what they say about that too, additional to the ‘narrative’ meanings etc which are usually sought. I am a dancer (of sorts) and dancing is experiential, it’s like sex or religious understanding (to the extent that I know anything at all about that) or any psycho-physical activity that changes body chemistry. A culture ‘speaks’ to this experiental aspect as well.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
18 Sep 12 at 3:04 pm
“For instance there are only 4 old dancing ladies left at Kalkarindji”
So what?
The language and culture will die like many others because it is incompetent.
Continual renewal….see Charles Darwin.
Alfonso
18 Sep 12 at 3:26 pm
I have raised it as a matter of urgency – it might need some-one like you, Lizzie to drive it.
Write to Bess Price.
Helen Armstrong
18 Sep 12 at 3:39 pm
True, but if there is a retro thing happening at some time in the future, they wont have any old magazine or records or tape to play to see how it was if we don’t record it now, will they?
Helen Armstrong
18 Sep 12 at 3:41 pm
A few years ago ,I waslooking for a Russian /English book to give as a present,I searched 3 country towns ,7bookshops no luck ,but I could have bought Pitjinjarrah/English dictionaries in pocket book size and coffee table size, published by the government ,paid for by the Taxpayer!
i suppose 1000or so illiterate people speak Pitjinjarrah ,whereas onlyabout 300million speak Russian,getting our priorities right?
Borisgodunov
18 Sep 12 at 3:49 pm
If they do have a “retro thing” happen in the future in a time after the old stories are left behind, will those old stories still be their stories in the future?
——-
I had a rip into Big Ted over at BoltA’s on a similar thread but the post hasn’t come up yet and frankly never will, as it’s too close to the truth. I’ve two-fold problems with this.
“Aboriginality” isn’t a polyglot culture. The old ladies at Kalkarindji, for example. Totally different dance and story to, say, Larissa Beherendt’s Sydney based dance troupe. Then there’s Wadeye; 2,000 indigenous, 21 clan groups, 7 distinct languages. How the hell do you teach all those children in their own tounge? Do you have to come up with an artificial construct like Kriol? But that defeats the purpose of saving languages. Pick one language and prioritise that, like Murin Patha? Then that’s discarding 6 more languages, 6 more cultures and all that.
Culture shouldn’t be taught in the classroom. Culture, by tradition, 40,000 years or more of it, has not and cannot be taught that way. Different lore and stories and songs for males and females; is their idea to segregate on gender? Seperate schools, perhaps? Segregate on clan groups?
And I’ve been interupted by a few phonecalls and my train of thought has been derailed. I was tempted to delete all this, but I won’t.
Supplice
18 Sep 12 at 4:14 pm
I’m interested; what’s your criticism here?
Supplice
18 Sep 12 at 4:20 pm
The strawman answers your question, Supplice.
http://bovination.com/readArticle.php?articleId=1661838
.
18 Sep 12 at 4:29 pm
The meat:
Two years ago Kevin (‘economic stimulus’) Rudd allocated 672 million dollars to build houses for Aborigines. Now, dear reader, let’s do a quick calculation on how many houses that might build. A friend of mine spent $350,000 building a house recently. Add 50,000 for servicing a block, and that’s probably around $400,000 to build a lovely spacious modern house. So 672 million hard-earned tax dollars should build around 1920 houses, right? In fact if we were willing to do without the double garage with internal access we could easily do over 2000.
So how does that get allocated? Well, Tenant Creek was allocated $36 Million for 20 houses. That’s 1.8 million dollars per house! But it gets worse. It was then revised down to nine houses. That’s four million dollars per house! Apparently “training costs and fees for consultants” were significant (who’d have thought). But still it gets worse. Now it’s been revised to zero houses. Yes, that’s right – zero houses will be built with the $36 million. The money is going to be spent on fixing up some existing houses.
In fact no houses at all have been built on the scheme so far. Anywhere. With the whole 672 million dollars. Some houses might be built in 2011. Maybe. And they are talking about a total of 300 houses. That’s 2.2 million dollars per house! If they even build that many.
Many Australians were overjoyed when Kevin Rudd apologized to the Aborigines. All the child abuse, the drug problems, the health issues were all going to be solved. Because we apologized. Kevin had the solution. Kevin was smart. Kevin could close the gap. Kevin could make everyone happy.
Except that 672 million of hard-earned tax-payers money and two years has not produced a single house.
.
18 Sep 12 at 4:30 pm
Languages die, cultures die. Around five thousand years ago Stonehenge was built by the neolithic people of Britian. We have no absolute idea what its purpose was, we can only make educated guesses. Thanks to first the Romans, then the Anglo Saxons, and then everyone else afterwards, we know almost nothing of early Celtic culture in Britian. Again, it’s all guesswork, and Celtic words in Britian linger only in a couple of placenames. The Aboriginal people are lucky that their hunter-gatherer culture survived into the modern world, other cultures were not so lucky, of many there is simply little to no trace. Yes, we should preserve what we can of archaic cultures, but the people of those cultures should not be considered as museum pieces, but rather active participants in the modern world.
A Lurker
18 Sep 12 at 4:35 pm
Where would Noel Pearson be without St Peters ?
Pickles
18 Sep 12 at 4:39 pm
I struggle to understand the reasons for most heritage protection. Most heritage protection on buildings is just a rotten tax on property or an uncompensated taking of property rights. Protecting indigenous cultures is baffling.
Now, if anybody wants to protect their culture then great, go right ahead as long as its not genital mutilation or dugong shashimi. But if the State takes a hand then it is difficult to see how the cultural heritage goal can be managed without the much more important goal of making sure people are effective participants in the modern world.
Pedro
18 Sep 12 at 4:43 pm
dot, that’s pretty out of date. Do you have anything about the program beyond that?
And I know where the money was spent in Tennant Creek. 78 house rebuilds at about $100,000 each, and several million dollars in infrastructure upgrades; new water, sewerage, power, roads and footpaths, stormwater to large sections of Tennant Creek where there was poor to no service at all. SIHIP was never about houses alone; the second “I” stands for “Infrastructure,” and beyond that, building houses has been a secondary consideration for the government agencies involved. They spend more time on indigenous employment, participation and training outcomes than anything else.
Supplice
18 Sep 12 at 4:52 pm
And by my rough count, it’s about 700 new houses and 2,500 refurbishments completed to date, and another 200ish new houses to complete over the next 12 months.
Supplice
18 Sep 12 at 5:02 pm
Supplice, the local aboriginies and the oldies in the NT call it Pt Keats, please don’t tell me you pronounce it Wadeyre like the ALPBC! LOL
You may be right re T/C work but at Kalk it was 75K to replace a kitchen – a perfectly good stainless steel kitchen thrown on the dump replaced with an inferior kitchen with one drawer and a very small cupboard. And paint gurneyed off the walls and not repainted because there was no money. Per house. This is what drove Alison Anderson to leave the ALP in despair.
The building the education revolution was revealing there too, because classrooms were built without hand washing facilities, so teacher has to walk herself and or the child 200 m across open playground (think rain, think sun think heat) to wash hands. Multiply that by quite a few times and you have seriously dented time for learning – of any type. Teacher has to think – will I pick up that tissue? Will I touch that child’s pencil when she has a steaming nose from cold etc, and the pencil is covered with the evidence of her illness? Because if she does any of this – and she has to, to teach, she will have to take time out of the class to make the walk to wash her hands.
Helen Armstrong
18 Sep 12 at 5:15 pm
aborigines
Helen Armstrong
18 Sep 12 at 5:15 pm
I know it’s called Port Keats, but I’m forced to call it Wadeye due to… involvement. I still pronounce it wad-EYE deliberately.
Don’t know where you got the idea of $75k for a refurb at Kalk though. Certainly wasn’t from the actual budget. After government interference, it was more like $18k a pop.
Oops, I’ve said too much.
Supplice
18 Sep 12 at 5:20 pm
Helen, no disrespect intended, but your comment about Ms. Anderson didn’t ring true for me, so I looked. She quit the ALP in 2009. The Kalkarindji refurbishment program didn’t commence (due to leasing issues) until mid-December 2011, and not in earnest until early January 2012.
I don’t think you mean to suggest it was Kalkarindji specifically that pushed Ms. Anderson over the edge?
Supplice
18 Sep 12 at 6:04 pm
That is certainly not uncommon, especially when the children were born in Australia or were very young when they arrived. However, my understanding is that the situation is quite different in some remote aboriginal communities where Aboriginal children are arriving at school with little to no english at all. Perhaps in such remote environments its a lot more common for the children to have very little exposure to spoken english – whereas in the cities its pretty much impossible to avoid – and as babies children will be exposed to people speaking english in everything from Mum’s groups (even if the mum has little to no english) to childcare and just simply being out and about.
The article is paywalled so I can’t see exactly what was proposed, but my understanding is that bilingual teaching is nothing new in remote communities and has been going on at some schools for a long time. However, the aim has not been to run a bilingual curriculum reception->highschool, but as an integration program. Eg rather than just spend the first few years trying to teach the children english from scratch, they teach english as well as other parts of the normal curriculum but in the child’s native language. There’s no point in trying to teach them maths in English if they don’t understand English.
The aim is to get their English skills up to a state so in later years of primary school they can be taught solely in English – but not to put a hold on other subjects until that point because of a lack of English skills. Its not surprising that kids would be uninterested in attending school if their teachers are babbling on in a language they simply don’t understand.
A couple of public schools near to me have a significant chinese background population and as a result they have mandarin lessons for all of their students from their first year. Its only something like one hour a week so its not like students are going to be fluent, but they also incorporate lessons about chinese culture into the other subjects. Its enough to give non mandarin speakers a head start when it comes to high school if they decide to take up mandarin though. Its something that from what I’ve seen works pretty well and has the support of the parents (both ethnically Chinese and non-Chinese). They even have dual language signage on things like toilets.
Other schools in the areas teach European languages like French or German.
Also there is one public school in Canberra that is a true bilingual French/English school with non language lessons given in both languages. There’s actually enough students in the area with parents who are native French speakers (students have to be pretty fluent in French before they can attend) who are interested in their children continuing to being truly bilingual. I think the French government kicks in some money too. From what I’ve heard the school has a really good reputation too.
Chris
18 Sep 12 at 10:33 pm
No, not specifically but SIHIP in general she is well quoted in the press for her reasons at the time.
Helen Armstrong
19 Sep 12 at 10:55 am
Supplice, I have no reason to doubt my information and I cannot reveal it. You are obviously involved in the area, as am I, you have a pseudonym, I do not.
I can only say if the line entry says 18K I will have to wait til the CLP audits the accounts to know if this is the extent of the costings or if there is spending off line not included. Time will tell. It defies credulity that any building/renovation could be done on a remote community for 18K per house. Whatever the spending, what was replaced was superior to what it was replaced with.
I am glad you say WadEYE! Cheers
Helen Armstrong
19 Sep 12 at 11:07 am
Oh Helen, how I feel we are two sides of the same coin. I didn’t mean to get into this subject at all. The topic subject is still a concern; I didn’t want to detrail the thread. Sorry.
Supplice
19 Sep 12 at 12:27 pm