Throughout this exploration of the education of Aborigines the view is taken that school success means success in achieving the full range of goals envisaged in the establishment of schools and the determination of their programs:

The first problem that beginning teachers will face on ‘day one’ in the classroom is a communication barrier. Teachers fresh from universities and colleges of advanced education will find that the language they are using is too sophisticated for their students. Therefore they must be conscious of the need to simplify their own language while simultaneously improving the vocabulary of their students. The beginning teacher will also find that the majority of students use non-standard English. It should be noted, however, that the use of non-standard English is not a sign of backwardness. Peer pressure not to appear ‘flash’ is a strong factor in Aborigines maintaining their speech patterns.

Once the young teacher ‘gets his ear in’ he or she will find communication becomes easier. To speed this process I suggest that for the first few weeks the teacher spends a considerable amount of time listening to his or her students. Drama games such as ‘biographies’ and class debates on various topics are useful. It is also important that during this period the beginning teacher be honest and forthright about his or her own background. I found my Year 8 class extremely interested in my family and their background. A family photograph album is a good resource to stimulate class discussion. The students should be encouraged to bring in their family’s photographs. (Children from particularly impoverished backgrounds can be offered the use of a camera if they don’t have any family photographs.) These photographs can lead to the development of environmental readers for remedial readers.

Like most teachers, I started my career using the old method of teaching spelling. Each week I would make up or find in a book a list of spelling words to be learnt by the class or group. Each day a different learning activity would be employed and on Friday the children would be tested. There are lots of difficulties with teaching by this method – so many, in fact, that like most teachers I gave it up after a while and for a long time didn’t really work on spelling at all. Probably the main problem was the wasted effort. Despite the teacher’s efforts selecting appropriate words for the class, it was usually uncomfortably clear that the words which each individual needed to learn to spell were seldom included at the right time. It seems that for every ten words a child had in his list, four of them he already knew, four he didn’t know and didn’t need to know, one he learnt and forgot during the weekend, and only one survived. This is a perfect example of something being almost impossible to teach when it is divorced from the meaningful situation.

So it became clear to me that, although it was important to teach spelling, the traditional formal methods seemed not to work very well. Another more serious problem that I noticed, especially with Aboriginal children, was their inability or unwillingness to make a reasonable attempt at spelling words they didn’t know. If they wanted to spell a word, most of them had efficient ways of finding it – looking at yesterday’s stories, asking friends or the teacher – but few of them would actually sit down and think about the problem themselves. It never seemed to occur to them that spelling could be worked out with a bit of thought; to them the answer was always out there somewhere and had to be located. Even traditional methods of teaching spelling do little to help children use their own imagination and thinking power in spelling because the words to be learnt are still provided fron an external source, the teacher.

What I was looking for was a method that

The status of Aborigines described above has been considered to be the result of a cycle of causation whereby poor educational standards lead to low-paying occupations resulting in poor housing, poor health and feelings of helplessness and defeat which lead again to poor educational advancement. More recently it has been recognized that the institutions of the dominant white Australian culture play a very important part in perpetuating this cycle and the education system is no exception (McConnochie, 1973). Thus, if the status of Aborigines is to be improved and the cycle broken, institutional changes must occur.

One attempt at bringing about positive change within the education system is the employment of Aboriginal counsellors to work with school personnel, including guidance officers. While guidance officers are in a unique position to positively influence the personal, educational and vocational development of students, the cross-cultural counselling situation poses many problems for guidance officers. These include the tendency for minority groups not to utilize such specialist services, accepting different world views, appropriateness of techniques and tests and establishment of rapport between counsellor and counsellee (Sue, 1977).