In country areas of Australia it is not a rare concept for multi-grade classrooms to exist under the instruction of one or two teachers. However, even within the structure of single teacher schools, there is usually a grade structure within the classroom, where the teacher divides the children into grades and the blackboard into grade areas. This works efficiently if the children in each grade section are of the same academic level and of similar chronological age. In many cases the teacher can call on the senior students, when they have completed their work, to help the juniors, and in this way the teacher surreptitiously sets recapitulatory and revisionary work for all the students. The big ones helping the little ones is an efficient concept in small school teaching, especially if the children are of European extraction and have had a fairly continuous educational exposure.

In an Aboriginal school or a school with an enrolment of predominantly Aboriginal children, the assumption that the children have had a continual exposure to education cannot be made, and if made, can be very detrimental to the educational development of the child. A teacher arriving in an Aboriginal community peruses reports and other information regarding the children and after several weeks of teaching and testing, sets up “grade areas”. Here the dangers creep in.

Most Aboriginal children are lacking in the basic European competitive instinct and do not wish to be singled out as superior students. They seem to believe in the words of Eldridge Cleaver that, “Competition is the law of the jungle and co-operation is the law of civilization”. Perhaps the Aboriginal people are more civilized than those of the European west.