Pearson's Aboriginal Literacy Push
Conservative Government Support for New Indigenous Literacy Program
In Australia, millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on a phonics program to turn back the clock on Indigenous education.
Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, darling of the new-right backlash mob, has announced his support and leadership of a 48 million dollar program to inundate Cape York Aboriginal communities with the latest in a long line of phonics-based literacy programs.
This is the favored approach of teachers in remote indigenous communities, because it is easy - requiring no planning, no work and no relationship with the students. Pearson himself says that it is so basic you don't even need a teaching degree to use it. Most of these approaches are, and that is one of the reasons that basic children's literacy teaching has dominated the school curriculum in Cape York (even in high school, where students do abc's instead of algebra) for over ten years, resulting in a culture of failure in Indigenous schools, and the worst outcomes in the country. The other reason is political, a kind of fallout from the culture wars that have spilled across from the conservative backlash culture of the U.S.
Cape York government agency cultures cultivate conservative teachers. Many aren't conservative when they arrive, but retreat into conservatism as soon as they have their noble savage illusions shattered. One of the catch-cries of neo-conservativism is a call for a "return to the basics" in education, and that is why the phonics issue is sold as a "controversy" to the public by the new-right. Neo-conservatives like to portray themselves as oppressed battlers (even though they hold all the power in the western world!), as a down-to-earth minority in a world full of snobby elitist left wing academics. They like to portray themselves as victims, which is ironic considering it is they who victimise the real minorities, such as Aboriginal people.
That is why in the media Pearson is referring to the program as "unfashionable", as though somehow phonics-based education is a struggling minority approach in Cape York Indigenous education, and the fashionable lefties are controlling everything with their evil post-modernist ways. That is far from the truth. On this issue, the far left agrees with the far right. Marxists and unionists hate post-modernism as much as the neo-cons, and so in the field of Indigenous education they've both converged on their common enemy - the moderates in the centre (now that is truly a minority).
Unfortunately, the centre is where Aboriginal thinkers live. Traditional philosophy leads us to view opposites as creating synergy rather than conflict, so the Aboriginal way to resolve tensions between phonics and "whole language" would be to teach using the best of both, and the best of multiple other approaches as well. This place of synergy in education was where the New Basics curriculum once sat, raising standards of education for Aboriginal people not only in Indigenous literacy but in academic rigor across all subject areas. Noel Pearson once supported this, but now he seems to have swung the other way. New Basics was opposed by the right, and has since been dumped from the Queensland curriculum in favor of more simplistic approaches.
But this new-right phonics invasion is nothing new. It happens every other year in Indigenous communities on the Cape. The last one I saw was a reading program from Israel, which had been found to work with Ethiopian students living in Israel. They figured if it worked for one group of black kids it should work for another. Well, of course, that program failed, as all other catch-up deficit-thinking curricula have failed over the last decade on Cape York. Yet somehow this failure continues to be blamed on progressive approaches that have never actually been implemented.
So now we have the latest simplistic program, this one so basic that even Noel Pearson says you don't need a teaching degree to use it. So instead of raising the bar in Indigenous education, once again we have lowered it. Maybe this is why the Howard Government, notoriously reluctant to give money to Aborigines and to Education, has been so forthcoming with the outrageous amount of 48 million to launch this basal literacy program in Cape York Aboriginal schools.
