Babette - seems you fancy the mantle of John the Baptist. The question is not really how much Australian Aboriginals would gain from a rigorous education - undoubtedly it would be a great deal. The question, however, should be how the 'dominant' culture can provide such an education, when it does not even value a rigorous education for its own - as can be deduced from the comments to date!

veritas,

"the comments to date" are a recognition of the consummate arrogance commonly expressed by apologists for European culture over the cultures they have vanquished.

Are you holding up modern consumer culture and its gaudy and vacuous entourage as the pinnacle of man's evolutionary consciousness? How many muddled-headed, couch potato, telly-watching examples of our brand of "rigorous education" could tell you anything they gleaned from European high art of literature?

Deep immersion in English may have served Babette, but if the whole of the Indian continent had gone the same way, there would be precious few left to tell of the grandeur of their own culture.

"Make no mistake, all languages have their equivalent to Shakespeare in the lessons handed down through the generations".

Indeed Poirot. The precious irony our patronising Babette fails to realise, like most conservatives I suspect, is that none of the literature or music she worships is transcendent in the sublime ways she imagines. According to modern philosophy neither Shakespeare nor the others can transcend their cultural pontificating--that is their language games--into a universal realm. There is arguably no universal realm, just the chatter adapted to and by the activities and sensual experience of those beings crawling on the planet's face; modes of indigenous communication with no extension whatsoever, just projection--including those mysterious intimations gleaned from the unrepresented (by language) phantoms we can never know, because they don't actually exist. Only what's configured by language, made sense of--our illusions--exists for us; the rest is confabulation, a conjuring and fetishising of ignorance, like the dreamtime.

See Wittgenstein and Lyotard,--and Shakespeare, who also perceived the joke I suspect.

" According to modern philosophy neither Shakespeare nor the others can transcend their cultural pontificating--that is their language games--into a universal realm."

Thinking of a scene from one of the Star Trek movies (The Undiscovered Country) where a General Chang makes a remark about Shakespear sounding better in the original Klingon.

An interesting piece on the use of Shakespear in the Star Trek universe at http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/shakespeare/star.trek.html

I'm not convinced that an apreciation of old English writers is going to help indiginous children in quite the same way that the author seems to suggest. I suspect that an over emphasis on that stuff during my own school years by teachers did amazing things to dampen the enjoyment I got from story writing as a younger child (and provided a massive distraction from learning some of the other parts of written english which would have served a greater purpose).

Our education systems do seem to struggle to provide a workable mix of education experience and outcomes for a lot of children with flow on impacts into adulthood, indiginous and others. For many schools fail to foster any real love of learning and that's a tragedy.

R0bert

Just to point out the complexity of something so simple, people of whatever race & community large or small, evolve differently. Just look at how technologically advanced the Mayans & Chinese were or those who inhabited present-day Egypt. Or the Romans, the Greeks etc.
What the "experts" fail to comprehend without fail is that it's as simple as one goes the other arrives.
It's always been like that & will continue like that.
The notion that one lot is more intelligent than the other must be taken in context of era.
Yes the Australian indigenous were stone-age but so were the europeans 5000 years ago.
The european will be the next to re-enter stone-age & perhaps it is the Aborigines turn to rise next to go a long way. Presently, it certainly looks as though the ball is in their court.

*Well the English of Shakespeare, Keats, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen, not to mention Queen Elizabeth II, is like a foreign language to the Aboriginal school children playing truant in our north*

Sorry Babette, but you have it exactly backwards and not just for
Aboriginal children. As a kid I was forced to learn and hear this
stuff as part of English and there is frankly nothing more boring
to a boy then Jane Austen. No wonder kids play truant and arn't
interested in school, if English teachers force this stuff on kids.

Find out what interests kids, find out what their aptitudes are
and get them to read what they enjoy. Then they will take to it
enthusiastically and easily. Force Jane Austen and similar down
their throats, as you propose, will give them every incentive to get
the hell out of school as fast as they can, by any means that they
can think of.