Cognition, language and culture: foundations for aboriginal schooling

The aim of this inquiry is to shed light on the nature of influences impeding the performance of Aboriginal children at school, and especially at tasks requiring number and language abilities. In recognition of the intricacy and interrelatedness of these influences, and of the inability of unidimensional perspectives of single disciplines to encompass fully this complexity, elements of an eclectic approach that draw, in particular, from the disciplines of education, history, anthropology, sociology, psychology and linguistics were adopted in the inquiryo The study includes both theoretical and empirical research components and has been divided into two sections. In Part A, theoretical issues and pertinent research concerned with Aboriginal schooling, cognition, language and culture are examined in detail, with a view, in particular, to shedding light on questions of deficit or difference as they relate to Aborigines. A major conclusion from these discussions is the need for policy-makers, educators and others to avoid simplistic caricatures of complex psychological and sociocultural interactions, by adopting less ethnocentric or Misciplinocentric* interpretations of observed behaviour. A study of socioculturai, psychological and educational characteristics of coastal Aborigines in southern New South Wales is presented in Part B. The research contains two strands one sociohistorical, and the other quantitativCo The sociohistorical strand comprises an investigation and an interpretation of the history of interactions between Aborigines and Whites in this regiono Based on evidence available from both primary and secondary sources, it is argued that complex 'assimilatory' and 'accommodatory' sociocultural mechanisms with psychological (and ultimately, biological) roots, have been governing the nature and rate of culture change experienced by both groups, and that these processes have led to the emergence of a local Aboriginal variant of what Oscar Lewis calls the 'culture of poverty*. In the quantitative strand, all available Aboriginal children and a comparison group of White children, aged not more than ten years and six months, and attending primary school at each of the three main towns in the district, were given a test battery designed to assess classificatory and language performance and locus-of-control orientation« Their school attendance records and teacher assessments of their academic performance and application also were obtained. In addition, at least one parent of most of the children tested was interviewed and askejd to answer an especially-devised quantifiable questionnaire based on the concept of a subculture of poverty. The thesis concludes with the argument that the weight of empirical and theoretical evidence gathered or reviewed in the inquiry suggests that cognitive and language differences between Aborigines and Whites primarily reflect variations between them in the *culturalisation* (as distinct from socialisation) processes to which they are exposed. It is further concluded that unless complementary 'cultural accommodations' by both sociocultural groups are promoted actively, the cognitive and language differences, and hence school performance differences, between both groups will persist. Finally, it is suggested that there is a need for educators, researchers and government policy-makers to go beyond the conceptual constraints of deficit-difference controversies and to concentrate instead on concepts such as 'functional outcomes', or 'adaptational options' as part of a programme directed towards identifying and implementing means for facilitating reciprocal cultural accommodations by both groups.