Monsoonal confusion reigns in NT education

I’ve written on the subject of he recent set of crises in the NT Education system, and particularly the administration of education in remote Aboriginal townships, at Crikey here and the (then) NT Education Minister Marion Scrymgour has had her say here.

Matters moved fairly slowly over the Christmas break (just about half of the NT population flees southwards from the first day of the long break in December) but it is only in the small-town politics that is the Northern Territory under Paul Henderson’s Labor government could things get this weird.

Hendo, in what may well be the lamest excuse yet for government failure and ineptitude, says that the real reason he reshuffled his hapless NT Government Ministries was because of the Global Financial Crisis.

Well, I’m sure there are some who’d believe that – but they are most likely face down in a gutter and barely breathing.

With immaculate timing – right at the start of the new school year – Hendo sacked his Education Minister Marion Scrymgour and gave her the job, among others, of Attorney-General and Minister for Justice. In her short 18 months as Education Minister about the only thing she did really well was to alienate a lot of people in what should have been, for her as the most powerful elected Aboriginal politician in the country, her natural constituency – remote Aboriginal education.

And in a sign of just how much ‘things are different’ in the NT, yesterday afternoon she was still performing Education-related duties.

Contrary to my assertion in Crikey yesterday that Hendo, as the new Education Minister, would attend at a meeting with a delegation of supporters of bilingual education in the NT, a few hours after being sacked from the job Scrymgour turned up to talk bilingual education.

Scrymgour met with a powerful delegation of Educators concerned about the fate of the NT’s bilingual programs and her hasty decision that English would be the mandated language for the first four hours of every school day across the NT.

Maybe Hendo doesn’t have much confidence in his own ability to do the hard yards required in Education.

The delegation included Mandawuy and Yalmay Yunupingu and a number of other senior Yolngu educators from north-east Arnhem Land with decades of experience in bilingual education.

Also before Scrymgour were two letters from senior Aboriginal women from the far south of the NT. Between them Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan and Cecily Napanangka Granites have been involved in bilingual education at Yuendumu and the wider Warlpiri world for over 60 years.

The messages to Scrymgour from the Aboriginal educators are clear and concise – please protect our languages.

In her letter Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan tells Scrymgour:

“All my children and grandchildren went to school every day and they all read and write English and Warlpiri…I hear the children of my relatives who live in other communities with no Two-way bilingual program talking mixed-up language and not even understanding Warlpiri properly. Language is important to think clearly and understand well.

“In our communities it is most important for government people to work together with the community people to provide what the community wants, not just for the Government to force their ideas.

“We really need to keep our Two-way programs in the Warlpiri schools going strongly. We can’t do this if the first four hours of the day have to be [taught in] English.

…

If we lose our language we will be lost people, not knowing our place in the Aboriginal world. We see other lost sad people around Australia. We don’t want our children to be lost.”

Cecily Napanangka Granites’s letter to Scrymgour contains the text of her speech to the recent World Indigenous Peoples Conference held in Melbourne in early December 2008.

“I decided to work as a teacher because I want to see our children grow up strong in Warlpiri language and culture and also learn English as a second language.

…

“Very now and then there are people in the government who don’t agree with us teaching our children in Warlpiri even though we have always taught English as well. We are having this problem right now.

…

“We will never give up because our Warlpiri language is so important to us. It’s who we are. We are Warlpiri and we are strong, proud people. We can’t let our parents and grandparents down even though they might have passed away.”

Crikey understands that the meeting involved some ‘frank discussions’, particularly about the material and data used in support of the Scrymgour’s policy of mandatory four hours of English tuition in every NT school, every day, from the commencement of the NT school year in 2010 or sooner. And Scrymgour made it clear that she was determined that the policy would proceed.

But amidst the gloom there was some there was some indication of progress for the Aboriginal delegates, with Scrymgour agreeing on a number of issues for further discussion and negotiation and for regular meetings in the future.

And according to one delegate at the meeting, Scrymgour and her Departmental advisors still fail to understand the first principle of the value of English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching.

That principle, that ESL respects knowledge gained in the learners first language as an essential tool for second-language and culture acquisition, was put to Scrymgour and the NT Education bureaucrats succinctly by Mandawuy Yunupingu.

Before he became famous as Australian of the Year for 1992 and the lead singer of Yothu Yindi, Mandawuy was a teacher for twenty years and principal of the Yirrkala School for a further five years and a visionary proponent of ‘Both-Ways’ education.

“We shouldn’t be doing anything that requires indigenous students to leave the things they already know outside of the classroom.”