Homeschooling revolt

The Australian State of Queensland seems to have laws about homeschooling that are similar to Germany's. The approach to enforcement is however very different

An attempt by the State Government to overhaul home-schooling registration requirements appears to have failed. A new system was introduced in January to make it easier for parents teaching their children at home to legally report to the state without fear of being forced to send them to school. But Eleanor Sparks of Education Choices Magazine for home-schoolers said thousands of parents were reluctant to register with the Government "There is still a lot of distrust there. A lot of parents don't want to sign up and then have the department try to change the way they choose to educate their children," she said.

An Education Queensland report estimates up to 10,500 children are being home-schooled, but just 260 of them are officially registered with the State Government. Education Minister Rod Welford does not accept the figure though it comes from his own department's Home Schooling Review. He said he believed parents who have registered under the department's distance education scheme (4800 students) and the 260 students under the new system represented the "overwhelming majority". "There may be one or two hundred who we still haven't captured because we don't know precisely the number of children who are not in school," he said.

He said he believed the "home-school industry" had an interest in exaggerating its numbers. "I want to spread the message that it is against the law not to be registered, and secondly that it is in their interests to do that," he said. "It is not a question of bludgeoning parents into some sort of Big Brother control system. "By registering those students we can give them support such as advice on teaching text and give them some assistance through nearby schools if they want to access that."

Parents who reject the school system say they do so for many reasons. There are financial benefits to home schooling as parents do not have to worry about fees. uniforms, text books or trips. But parents say the decision to home-school also means financial sacrifices, as at least one parent must spend all their time with their children.

Amanda from Ipswich told The Sunday Mail she opted out of schools because she feared exposing her children to peer groups there. "I know that a lot of people out there think that people like us are weirdos who want to live outside society but we're not. We just don't believe that schools are the best place to put your children." Amanda, who asked that her full name not be revealed, has not registered any of her children with Education Queensland and has never followed a structured learning system.

Her eldest child, Gabby, 15, did not start reading until she was nine but is studying for a bachelor of arts at the Open University (an online higher education service that does not require any entry grades). "I enjoyed it. It was a fun way to learn and now that I am at university I don't find the work too hard. I am able to handle it," Gabby said.

Parents must send their children to school unless they receive special dispensation from Education Queensland. But Ms Sparks says governments have turned a blind eye to thousands of parents who choose to school their children ast home.

The article above by Edmund Burke appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on March 25, 2007




Road to university widens

A good idea. General knowledge is so indicative that it has been used as a proxy for an IQ test

THOUSANDS of VCE students could get an extra shot at university under a plan to use general knowledge tests in course selection. Under the radical proposal, the General Achievement Test would be used for the first time alongside ENTER and VCE scores for selection in some uni courses. The GAT would be used to help choose "middle band" students -- whose results fell just below ENTER cut-off scores for courses. The proposal by Monash University and the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre could be implemented by the middle of this year if schools support it.

A joint discussion paper outlining the plan says that, although the ENTER provides a "good outcome" for most students, there is a need to improve the selection process for some university applicants. "For some students, the ENTER score may not fully reflect their ability to succeed at tertiary study," the paper states.

About half of all university courses -- up to 1500 of them -- use "middle band" selection along with the ENTER score. This means that some universities look at individual subject scores when deciding whether to take middle-band applicants. But under the proposed plan the GAT -- which tests English, maths and science skills -- would be taken into account for the first time.

Every VCE student currently sits the GAT in the middle of the academic year but it has been used only to check student work and exams. The GAT could also be used as a supplementary tool to select students who have suffered disadvantage during year 12. "It is proposed that applicants' GAT scores . . . be available for use as an additional tool to increase the reliability of middle-band selection," the report states.

VTAC director Elaine Wenn said the proposal would be implemented by June if supported by schools and universities. She said Monash University had advanced the proposal but other universities could take it up if it were approved. Ms Wenn denied the plan amounted to a move away from the ENTER score as the main selection tool for university. "The ENTER score is still the best predictor of academic performance," she said. Monash University pro-vice chancellor Prof Merran Edwards said the university was trying to improve middle-band selection.

The president of the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals, Brian Burgess, said the ENTER score was not a particularly effective way of selecting students. "That one third of students fail their first year says something about how universities are selecting their students," he said. Australian Education Union Victorian branch president Mary Bluett welcomed the plan. "We think the idea of broadening out the entry criteria is a good thing," she said. "Too much depends on the ENTER score."

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Students' results just get worse

SHOCKING student test results revealed thousands of children were getting lower scores in literacy and numeracy the longer they stayed at school. The disturbing trend has emerged in a national analysis of results provided to Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop. Figures showed the 6 per cent of Year 3 students who failed to reach the numeracy benchmark grew to 9 per cent by Year 5 and 18 per cent in the first year of high school. Despite millions of dollars poured into classroom programs, 25 per cent of Year 7 students in NSW did not meet benchmark standards for numeracy and 12 per cent for reading.

The number of students meeting an acceptable standard in numeracy plummeted between primary school - where it reached the mid-90s - and high school. Ms Bishop said yesterday she was worried about the results showing the decline in student performance after Year 3. "It concerns me that too many students are still failing to meet these minimum standards," she said. "Reading, writing and mathematics are fundamental life skills that every person needs for further education, employment and participation in society."

The data, based on 2005 exam results in all the states and territories, had taken the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs almost two years to process. In NSW, females outscored males by up to 6 per cent - particularly in reading and writing. Students in Years 3 and 5 performed better than the national average but slipped below it once they reached high school. Students living in cities did slightly better than those in regional and remote areas.

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Facing black realities

Comment by Christopher Pearson

Since the 1960s, across the spectrum of Australian politics, there has been a default position on traditional Aboriginal culture. It is, axiomatically, a many splendoured thing, as viable a world view for contemporary indigenous people as it was for their ancestors. Louis Nowra's new book, "Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children", is a sustained critique of all that.

Nowra is to be congratulated for rare courage in confronting the dysfunctional aspects of both traditional culture and its latter-day manifestations. It's not likely to win him many friends. But then, as someone who's been thinking about the cultural problems underlying Aboriginal men's violence against women and children for more than 30 years, he's had plenty of time to sort out which of Aboriginal Australia's (usually self-appointed) champions are in earnest.

Two who he thinks have failed that test are fellow columnists at The Australian, Phillip Adams and Elspeth Probyn. "After recent revelations about the extent of domestic violence in Aboriginal communities," Nowra says, "Adams, a left-wing ABC broadcaster, opined that the public outcry about its magnitude was an example of conservatives using the information to pick on Aborigines, expressing his belief (erroneous, of course) that there is just as much domestic violence and child abuse in the general community."

Probyn, a professor of gender studies at the University of Sydney, is another of those experts who's reluctant to let the facts get in the way. According to Nowra: "She wrote that the abuse in Aboriginal communities is 'supposedly rife', yet was horrified that children would be removed from their families, even though it would be to protect them from a grim situation. And that has been the problem with this issue. Ideology has taken prevalence over revealing the ghastly facts of what is happening to indigenous women, boys and girls."

Nowra has assembled a catalogue of the ghastly facts to silence all those who want to wish the problem away. He quotes Nanette Rogers, the Alice Springs lawyer who was interviewed last year to such gripping effect on Lateline: "The volume of sexual assault is huge and I don't have a single file in my room that is not related to violence."

There are other, more clinical, indications of the scale of the problem. The rate of syphilis infection in the Northern Territory Aboriginal population is 65 times the non-indigenous rate. One-third of 13-year-old girls in the territory are infected with chlamydia and gonorrhoea. How much of the underage activity was involuntary, as well as illegal, is hard to say. However there is no shortage of Aboriginal leaders to attest that sexual abuse of children has reached epidemic proportions in urban, rural and remote communities.

Nowra cites research to show that more than half the perpetrators of sexual violence were victims of it themselves in their youth. It's a sign of what anthropologists call "a repetitive culture". At least one in 10 Aboriginal boys can expect to be sexually assaulted. In Western Australia there was a documented tenfold increase in the sexual assault of women and children between 1961 and 1981. The urban statistics are grim, especially for Alice Springs, but grimmer still in remote settlements. "One of the most salient features of domestic violence and child abuse is that the highest incidences are occurring in communities that are the most traditional, and where men defend their actions as being part of customary law."

There are a variety of contemporary circumstances that exacerbate the problem of sexual violence. The collapse of Christian observance and the work ethic among most of Noel Pearson's generation is part of it. Bored idleness on welfare is another major element. Alcohol, illegal drugs and pornography sap the self-discipline of men, many of whom are already demoralised and lacking any moral compass. One of the more shocking passages in the book recounts the matter-of-fact way in which middle-aged perpetrators talk to him about their exploits, with no sense of shame.

These are all contributory factors, but Nowra claims it is the dysfunctional elements of traditional culture, which still persist in even more pernicious forms, that are the ultimate cause. He takes a short tour through the historical and anthropological record, from Watkin Tench's journal in 1788 to the end of the 19th century. His conclusions are hard to argue with, although the sub-discipline of feminist anthropology has been trying to divert attention from the inconvenient evidence for most of the past 40 years.

Aboriginal custom entrenched a male gerontocracy. Women were commonly treated as though they were chattels and could be lent out in sexual servitude to strangers in exchange for trade goods or to help settle a dispute. Sometimes young girls were offered to white men in payment for food, blankets or axes. Nowra quotes A.W. Howitt on the gang rape of young girls, typified by orgiastic scenes, sometimes including their fathers. He also cites Joan Kimm's finding that "the sexual use of young girls by older men, indeed much older men, was an intrinsic part of Aboriginal culture and is a heritage that cannot be denied". Nowra is admirably straightforward about traditionally sanctioned sexual relations between men and boys, another taboo subject for most anthropologists. He notes boy-wives in some tribes and the widespread evidence of pederasty. Along with Fred Hollows, he touches on homosexual activity, casual and otherwise, in historic as well as contemporary rituals of initiation. He also remarks on the many gay Aboriginal men in present-day Australia and tells the story of an Aboriginal drag queen he says he became close to after leaving university. "He told me that he had been molested by his father and two brothers when he was young. At the time it seemed far-fetched to me. But it sparked an interest in Aborigines and their cultural conflicts with white society."

Nowra summarises the argument thus: "Traditional Aboriginal society expressed anger through aggression but the violence and sexual behaviour was tightly structured through ritual, ceremony and proscribed procedures. But with the influence of alcohol and acculturation, some of these customs have become a pathological distortion of those that were the basis of traditional life."

Because white Australia sentimentalises hunter-gatherer customs - no matter how brutal - latter-day noble savages are exploiting the precedent of past practices to do as they please and ignore the law. Another dimension of the problem is that Aboriginal women are very often reluctant to report domestic violence or sexual abuse. He says "they cannot separate their cultural identity from their gender. In other words, some women believe that if they accuse their men of such crimes, they in turn can be accused of criticising their own culture. After two centuries of seeing their culture devalued and mocked by whites, one can understand this. So they would rather suffer in silence than be seen to be criticising their identity as Aborigines. They consider their status as a woman to be less important than being Aboriginal."

The importance of Bad Dreaming lies in its documentation of shameful abuses that the perpetrators and their lawyers and other apologists have been able to cover up for decades. One of the strongest arguments Nowra mounts is that the permit system - which excludes journalists, among others, from visiting isolated settlements where women and children often lead lives of quiet desperation - should be abolished. "The permit system, although useful for protecting sacred sites, is also used to keep dark secrets of domestic violence and sexual abuse from being publicised," he writes. "People should not be prevented from accessing what are essentially public townships, accessed by public roads."

There is no quick fix for a culture with so much archaic baggage, not to mention "sit-down money", drugs, all-day pornographic video sessions and binge drinking. Nowra seems attracted by Tony Abbott's suggestion of "a new form of paternalism". He finds it almost indistinguishable from Nicolas Rothwell's more nuanced view that failing indigenous communities should be subject to "a system of benign social control". He offers as a small sign of hope the example of Groote Eylandt, where a new alcohol management scheme came into force in July 2005: "Anyone who wanted to drink had to have a permit. At the first hint of domestic violence, the permit was revoked. Within a year, domestic violence on Groote had dropped by 40 per cent."

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