The title of this thread says it all, REMOTE.

What do they expect.

Mainstream education has failed us miserably since & due to Goaf & his silly deciples. It's so blatantly obvious but the educated can't see it due to that failure.
I found many indigenous children are rather bright but they're being dragged down by the guilt industry agenda soldiers. Ignorant white teachers also have a lot of negative impact.
TV & violent computer games are also highly destructive to their naturally healthy mentality.
I have seen many bright & friendly kids totally ruined when they started school.

So much bullsh!t, so little time :)

Where to start ? Well, for a start, there are now more than thirty three thousand Indigenous university graduates. 33,000. Maybe another two thousand this year, or about 18 % of the 24-year-old age-group, the vast majority in urban areas, and in mainstream courses.

This is quite an improvement on the two hundred in 1980, and the three thousand, back in 1990. Back then, a high proportion of graduates (but never more than about 30 %) were confined to fields like Indigenous (or Aboriginal) studies, Aboriginal Administration, Aboriginal Health, etc.

But since about 2005, thankfully, the @rse has dropped out of Indigenous-oriented Studies and degree-level enrolments in mainstream courses has risen more than 60 %. I wouldn't be surprised if fewer than 5 % of enrolments these days are in Indigenous-oriented courses.

Around six thousand Indigenous people have qualified in mainstream teaching courses. More than four thousand have qualified in maonstream nursing courses, and perhaps a thousand in law courses.

Yes, there are drastic problems for people in remote areas, but not too many Australians generally graduate while living in remote areas. And in any case, the vast majority of jobs for qualified people are in urban and semi-urban areas.

Fortunately, the vast majority of Indigenous people now live in such areas. For all the teeth-gnashing and rending-of-hair, much less than 10 % of all indigenous people live in hole-in-the-wall remote settlements, and even most of those people would spend a hell of a lot of time sort of window-shopping in nearby towns and cities like Alice Springs or Port Augusta or Cairns.

Indigenous students - particularly women, who outnumber men by two to one - are seizing opportunities at university education. Their 'leaders', and a huge proportion of Indigenous academics at universities, seem to have abandoned their own people, in order to build careers lecturing to captive non-Indigenous student audiences and flying off to extremely important overseas Conferences, in Hawai'i in our Winter, and in Arizona in our Summer.

[TBC]

[continued]

So the fragmentation of the professional Indigenous population - and the population generally - will proceed apace, thanks to the self-interest of those academics.

Indigenous affairs is indeed a wasteland of thwarted opportunities - save for the rapid growth in graduate numbers. By 2020, I'm confident that there will be well over 50,000 (fifty thousand) Indigenous university graduates, the vast majority in standard, mainstream fields of study. And by 2034 - barely twenty years away - there could be one hundred thousand Indigenous university graduates, almost all in standard, mainstream fields of study, and making up around 20 % of the entire Indigenous adult population.

of course, by that time, the current crop of 'leaders' will be distant memories.

And hopefully, in the next generation, Indigenous commencing students will move away from 'helper-role', welfare-oriented courses towards science- and business-oriented courses. I long for the day when Indigenous people can be PEOPLE with their own quirky interests, and study whatever the hell they like.

Joe

Gemma, I agree; children in remote communities should be taught by people who have grown up in those sorts of places, who share or at least understand the culture and can teach in the students' first language.
The priority for remote education has to be enough indigenous teachers to satisfy the needs of those areas, and the Principal has to be one of their own. No matter how well intentioned, if the boss man or woman is a whitey, that undermines budding confidence in being able to 'make it' in the wider world.
More money, more facilities, more gimmicks will do nothing if the people doing the teaching are 'foreigners' and incompetent.
A good, sympathetic teacher is worth a room full of computers in an air-conditioned impersonal modern facility.
There is no truth in the white supremacist notion that our indigenous people are less intelligent - indeed, the fact that they survived, culturally intact, for tens of thousands of years without destroying their land, tells me they're a lot smarter than the invaders who have done so much harm to this land that there's doubt it will be able to support us in a few centuries.

Ybirp,

Yes, you're right that Indigenous people - all people - are equally intelligent, that's not an issue. So let's not try to divert this difficult problem down that side-track.

Whether teachers are Indigenous or otherwise, surely the key for the teaching of children in remote settlements is how to ensure that they can access, tap into, the opportunities in the world that they may wish to participate in, ALWAYS assuming that they can match effort and attinment of other children. This is not only vital but certainly possible - as the school at Bamaga has amply demonstrated - and it is clear that ALL Indigenous children can achieve as much as any other children.

I do recall when I was working in career workshop sessions (what we called AICAP: the Aboriginal and Islander Career Aspirations Program) with Indigenous children here in South Australia in the nineties, occasionally some hot-shot official or bureaucrat would be heard to say that 'not all Indigenous children could go to university'. I came to assume that this was code for 'I don't think any of these kids can get to university' - this coming from both Black and white bureaucrats.

How wrong they were. But how much damage they must have done, indirectly, since then. How many Aboriginal children's dreams - and those lovely kids were so full of so many ideas, dreams, aspirations, hopes - were dashed by those elitist b@stards, with their delusions that only a Precious Few could succeed.

Aboriginal kids can achieve anything they aim for, if they put the effort in. They don't have to be locked into some phony 'cultural' bird-cage. There are Aboriginal vets, optometrists, dentists, accountants, human resource managers, conservation managers, you name it.

Let's not go down yet another racist path which assume that they can do nothing but Indigenous this or Indigenous that. The Indigenous kids of tomorrow shouldn't have to lock themselves into some cultural strait-jacket just to squeeze out some sort of career in Indigenous studies, teaching bullsh!t to bored non-Indigenous students. .

Joe