December 1966 School Magazine

December, 1966

Brisbane Girls' Grammar School Magazine

December, 1966

Brisbane Girls' Grammar School Magazine

AS YET UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ON ABORIGINAL ASSIMILATI.ON IN AUSTRALIA "When I from black and he fro m white cloud free ."' How can we bring a Stone Age people into the Space Age in a couple of generations? Can we? Is it fair to the Aboriginal? Is it fair to the white Australian? Now don't be carried away on a surge of righteous senti- mentality. How would you feel if your sister married a full- blood Aboriginal? Many say Australia is their country and we are usurpers. I consider myself, a seventeen year old girl, born in Australia of Australian-born parents, as much an Australian as a seventeen year old gin who was born of Aboriginal parents in a tribal camp in the middle of the bush. I have a strong sense of nationalism-a pride in the beauty, the opportunities, the culture, the achievements, and ·the life of my country. This is more than most Aboriginals have. Because nationalism is a sentiment present only in an educated person. I have had the opportunity of a good education-most Aboriginals have not. I don't consider myself superior because of this , but that I have had superior chances is a fact to be faced. Lacking as they do, this spirit of nationalism, they thus lack a desire for the progress of Australia. The Australian Aboriginal is a delightful person and I speak from personal experience. He is, on the whole, happy, carefree, tolerant, generous, and lazy. This laziness becomes apathy in the face of vital decisions. The Aboriginal, possibly through the many years of being a grossly underpaid and underprivileged second-class citizen, lack the spirit of ambition, and the will to compete in our competitive society. Perhaps this lack of ambition is born of the Aboriginal nature; perhaps because he has found how useless it is to com- pete on the same basis as a white man. Probably it is a com- bination of these two. However, all these factors have meant that Aboriginals are illiterate or barely educated-without the will to further them- selves; they accept as their due in most cases unthinkingly, living conditions, vastly sub-standard to the majority of those of the white Australians; and they work as little as possible for their meagre pay. How much blame for these faults can be laid at our door? The Aboriginal lacks incentive-but have we ever given him hope of a higher goal? He lacks the will to enter the fields of higher education-but wouldn't he suffer bitter disappointment 49

sity or training college . They must be roundly educated, socially as well as academically. They must be worth growing up to, for they are the interpreters and reducers to simple ' terms of new knowledge as it affects civilization. Their moral standards need to be high, for through them should arise right attitudes to new facts and critical examinations of new experiences the pupil is likely to meet. Self discipline, so much needed by to-day's citizens, should be evolved from the discipline enforced in school. Pupils seldom realize the moulding power exercised by rules, however unpopu- lar, on their characters. Nevertheless, too much discipline can have the opposite effect of crushing all self reliance and initiative. Many schools make the mistake of supervising every single activity of the pupil's school life. Ancient Sparta made this mistake of edu- cating solely to obey, with the result that when the Spartans were transplanted into circumstances demanding a capacity for adap- tation rather than the willingness to die for their fatherland, their training fell short. It is the school's duty to avoid the tend- ency to teach the theory "Theirs not to reason why", which marks the collapse of a well balanced education. The curriculum should allow the students opportunities for a wider knowledge of the world outside school walls. Even the humanities, when narrowly conceived and badly taught, are as remote from the needs of to-day as any pure technology. When the schools teach anything "for the classroom, not for life" as Seneca warned, they fail to fulfil their obligation. When we consider the nature of a Christian society, we think in terms of personality, integrity, discipline and self disci- pline, freedom and restraint, obligation and responsibility, think- ing and working, knowledge and understanding, co-operation, neighbourliness, love. All these factors should be thought out and organized into the details of school life. A school's duty to its pupils is to know where priorities lie; to discover a balance between liberty and restraints; to learn how to foster individual gifts and at the same time exact hard en- deavour and develop social responsibility; to evolve types of dis- cipline that are responsibly accepted by the pupil as means of his own self-discipline; to build a curriculum into a significant body of learning; and to develop an awareness of the world beyond the school community. - SUSAN DAVIES, VIA, GIBSON HOUSE

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