Education is foundational to life and culture and has the power to transform lives. First Nations education and learning systems are the oldest in the world, rooted in cultural knowledge, stories and languages.
But too often First Nations children are harmed in or excluded from Western educational systems, held to Western assessment and standards and forced to endure structural racism and discrimination. They are, in other words, set up to fail.
Any discussion of failures, exclusion or gaps in the education of First Nations children in Australia, however, must start with this fact: for at least 65,000 years, First Nations communities have been successfully educating their young ones through ancestrally perfected ways of learning. These include sophisticated practices based on spoken knowledge, oral storytelling and teaching by experience and observation.
After invasion, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander pedagogies (methods and practices of teaching) were largely replaced with education systems transplanted from Anglo European contexts. Despite considerable and consistent effort by First Nations peoples to reclaim their pedagogies and reform current educational policy and practice over many decades, little has changed at a structural level. This systemic failure has manifested in a stark and sustained discrepancy between First Nations and non-Indigenous educational outcomes – what is often referred to as the ‘gap’.
Of the 17 socioeconomic outcomes included in the 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap, five are related to education. They are:
The most recent data from the Productivity Commission shows that educational outcomes for First Nations students and children are not on track, with only one of the Closing the Gap targets related to education showing good improvement (Target 3, related to enrolment of children in Year Before Full time Schooling (YBFS) pre-school education).
And while the specific education targets under Closing the Gap’s National Agreement are important, they only tell part of the story.
The tireless activism of First Nations individuals, organisations and advocates have led to hard-won steps forward in education, and yet it remains largely the case that government-led reforms, policies and commitments to improve the experiences of First Nations children in the education system – including ensuring their ability to access education that is culturally relevant and safe, rooted in their culture, knowledge, languages and value systems – have fundamentally failed.
This begs the question: why do educational inequality and disadvantage continue to be experienced by so many First Nations peoples, despite significant policy attention? Why does the gap seemingly refuse to close?
Ultimately, the answer should come as no surprise: because settler colonial systems (whether focused on education, health care, child protection, housing and many more) were not only never designed for First Nations peoples, they were in many cases explicitly intended to reinforce their disappearance, exclusion, marginalisation and dispossession. In this sense, the systems are working as designed.
How, then, can we work to improve education outcomes for First Nations people while at the same time working to transform the systems which have both given rise to and continually perpetuate this gap? And, perhaps most importantly, what happens when we view First Nations education not through the lens of a deficit or gap, but in the context of thousands of years of developing sophisticated methods of teaching and learning?
The inherent right of First Nations peoples to education is enshrined in a number of key international human rights documents, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
Article 13.1 of UNDRIP specifically sets out that:
“Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalise, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.”
Importantly, Article 14 of UNDRIP clarifies that the inherent right to education which First Nations peoples possess is not simply to have fair and equal access to all levels and forms of the mainstream education systems of the State, but also to establish and control their own educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning. This is a significant right grounded in the inherent right of First Nations peoples to self-determination.
Michelle Bishop, Gamilaroi academicSchooling was designed to uphold and further an imperial agenda, and we were subjects to civilise, indoctrinate, acculturate, assimilate.
While the right to education is now widely considered an inalienable and inherent human right under international law, education has for many years been weaponised against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. Increasingly, academics, educators and those working within or alongside education systems are critically analysing the role of education in the Australian settler colonial project, and asking what role formal education continues to play in legitimising the settler state and undermining First Nations sovereignty.
Colonial education systems were a critical tool employed by early colonists to sever the connection between First Nations children and their families, languages, culture and ways of knowing, to ‘civilise’ them into Whiteness, disappear them into the wider population through policies of assimilation, and exclude them from mainstream society and institutions. And while official policies of assimilation and exclusion have ended, many critical education scholars argue that contemporary mainstream education in Australia – having its roots in the early colonial practices of forced child removal, segregation, Christianisation and assimilation – remains a key mechanism by which the settler state relays Whiteness and white dominance intergenerationally.
This perspective certainly matches the lived experience of many First Nations people, who face disproportionate levels of structural racism, discrimination, exclusion and lack of cultural safety within the mainstream Australian education system.
In 2019, a comprehensive systematic review of the literature of First Nations education in Australia was published. The research, which reviewed over 10,000 papers, found racism was a prevalent force, stating that the impacts of racism on First Nations students are ‘harmful, wide-reaching and life-long’ and that racist practices in schools are ‘deeply embedded’ and ‘of grave concern’.
Similarly, the Speak Out Against Racism (SOAR) project – a school-based study on racism, racial discrimination and bystander responses to racism based on the experiences and attitudes of students in New South Wales and Victorian government schools between years five and nine – revealed that more than 40 percent of students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds had been racially discriminated against by their peers. In one survey conducted by the ACT’s Human Rights Commission for a 2023 report on racism, almost 100 percent of the young First Nations respondents said they had personally experienced racism, including at the hands of teachers.
So how do we navigate, interrupt and, better yet, dismantle the white dominance that has for so long informed the design and operation of – and been maintained by – our mainstream education systems? And what alternatives exist for First Nations education systems rooted in culture, language, knowledge systems and sovereignty, as is their inherent right?
The recognised benefits of First Nations-led and designed education systems are vast, and include:
One landmark pathway to the development of First Nations learning systems has been recently laid out in the M.K. Turner report, which calls for a national education policy that would institutionally embed a First Nations led and designed learning system as part of our national education system.
Similarly, the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition (NIYEC) – the first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth-led organisation committed to transforming education – advocates for a new education ecosystem based on self-determination, “where we can govern and self-determine an education of our own design, for the future of our Nations”. NIYEC advocate for the inclusion of First Nations youth in decisions made about their education, alongside the development of an independent First Nations education system that:
As we reflect on the legacies of formal education as a tool of settler colonial control, together with the transformative power of First Nations-led learning systems to powerfully reframe education as an act and process of resistance, self-determination and sovereignty, we begin to understand the many complexities, tensions and questions living within conceptions and practices of education.
These questions should, above all, prompt us to think more critically about what role education plays in historical and contemporary expressions of the settler colonial state. If we are to design, establish and support robust educational systems that are truly liberatory, equitable and transformative for First Nations children and all young people, we must ask difficult questions about power, race, Whiteness and control, and how these forces continue to work within, against and across education systems.
Above all, these critical questions function as a reminder that First Nations teaching and learning practices are powerful, ancient, adaptive and sophisticated. In creating space for these practices to sit at the heart of education systems designed by and for First Nations peoples, we might find that there really is no gap at all – just space for young mob to dream, imagine, create and collectively strategise towards their own self-determined learning futures.
