I just heard a report on BBC Worldservice radio, about the Australian government's proposal to tie Aboriginal welfare payments to the sending of their children to school. The proposal is that a family will have to send its kids to school before they can collect their welfare cheque.
This is a kind of tough love.
It's based on years of observations that welfare cheques are picked up, used to buy the minimum of food for survival, then used for grog, and the kids are forgotten.
Then another fellow, an "expert on Aboriginal education" we're told, comes on and says that the policy is horribly condescending.
Then he proceeds to condescend atrociously himself, saying that he'd had "tremendous success" in teaching aboriginal kids to be "proud of your aboriginality" and that it's best to learn in the native aboriginal language first and only then learn English.
This seems to me to be misguided. If you want them to continue sitting round in the bush -- and if that's what they want to do - fine. But if they (not you, white man, but they) want to advance in Aussie society -- and surely it's a soft bigotry to assume they don't -- then they need English first.
Here in Hong Kong there's been a move by the government to have "mother tongue teaching". But guess what? The local Hong Kong Chinese want their kids to be taught in English, not Chinese. These are people who are not in any doubt about their culture; and they're not in any doubt either about what's best for their kids. If it's true for Chinese, when Chinese is massively more widely spoken than any aboriginal language, and who have a very robust sense of their own culture, then it must hold true for aboriginal languages and the aboriginal culture a fortiori.
Spare us from these post-modern "experts"....
This is a kind of tough love.
It's based on years of observations that welfare cheques are picked up, used to buy the minimum of food for survival, then used for grog, and the kids are forgotten.
Then another fellow, an "expert on Aboriginal education" we're told, comes on and says that the policy is horribly condescending.
Then he proceeds to condescend atrociously himself, saying that he'd had "tremendous success" in teaching aboriginal kids to be "proud of your aboriginality" and that it's best to learn in the native aboriginal language first and only then learn English.
This seems to me to be misguided. If you want them to continue sitting round in the bush -- and if that's what they want to do - fine. But if they (not you, white man, but they) want to advance in Aussie society -- and surely it's a soft bigotry to assume they don't -- then they need English first.
Here in Hong Kong there's been a move by the government to have "mother tongue teaching". But guess what? The local Hong Kong Chinese want their kids to be taught in English, not Chinese. These are people who are not in any doubt about their culture; and they're not in any doubt either about what's best for their kids. If it's true for Chinese, when Chinese is massively more widely spoken than any aboriginal language, and who have a very robust sense of their own culture, then it must hold true for aboriginal languages and the aboriginal culture a fortiori.
Spare us from these post-modern "experts"....
