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Quarterly Essay #35
Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia
In Radical Hope, one of Australia’s most original and provocative thinkers turns his attention to the question of education. Noel Pearson begins with two fundamental questions: How to ensure the survival of a people, their culture and way of life? And can education transform the lives of the disadvantaged many, or will it at best raise up a fortunate few?
In an essay that is personal and philosophical, wide-ranging and politically engaged, Pearson discusses what makes a good teacher and recalls his own mentors and inspirations. He argues powerfully that underclass students, many of whom are Aboriginal, should receive a rigorous schooling that gives them the means to negotiate the wider world. He examines the long-term failure of educational policy in Australia, especially in the indigenous sector, and asks why it is always “Groundhog Day” when there are lessons to be learned from innovations now underway. This is an essay filled with ideas and arguments and information – from a little-known educational revolutionary named Siegfried Englemann, to the No Excuses ethos and the Knowledge Is Power program, to Barack Obama’s efforts to balance individual responsibility and historical legacy. Pearson introduces new findings from research and practice, and takes on some of the most difficult and controversial issues. Throughout, he searches for the radical centre – the way forward that will raise up the many, preserve culture, and ensure no child is left behind.
“It is time to ask: are we Aborigines a serious people? … Do we have the seriousness necessary to maintain our languages, traditions and knowledge? … The truth is that I am prone to bouts of doubt and sadness around these questions. But I have hope. Our hope is dependent upon education. Our hope depends on how serious we become about the education of our people.” —Noel Pearson, Radical Hope
"A work of universal significance in which Pearson once again shows himself to be Australia’s most powerful contemporary thinker. His essay is essential reading for all who care about the true nature of the society we have created in Australia. For the first time in my life I encountered here a mature insight into the private hells produced by the very kind of failed education I received as a boy growing up at the bottom of a class ridden culture in London after the war." —Alex Miller
In an essay that is personal and philosophical, wide-ranging and politically engaged, Pearson discusses what makes a good teacher and recalls his own mentors and inspirations. He argues powerfully that underclass students, many of whom are Aboriginal, should receive a rigorous schooling that gives them the means to negotiate the wider world. He examines the long-term failure of educational policy in Australia, especially in the indigenous sector, and asks why it is always “Groundhog Day” when there are lessons to be learned from innovations now underway. This is an essay filled with ideas and arguments and information – from a little-known educational revolutionary named Siegfried Englemann, to the No Excuses ethos and the Knowledge Is Power program, to Barack Obama’s efforts to balance individual responsibility and historical legacy. Pearson introduces new findings from research and practice, and takes on some of the most difficult and controversial issues. Throughout, he searches for the radical centre – the way forward that will raise up the many, preserve culture, and ensure no child is left behind.
“It is time to ask: are we Aborigines a serious people? … Do we have the seriousness necessary to maintain our languages, traditions and knowledge? … The truth is that I am prone to bouts of doubt and sadness around these questions. But I have hope. Our hope is dependent upon education. Our hope depends on how serious we become about the education of our people.” —Noel Pearson, Radical Hope
"A work of universal significance in which Pearson once again shows himself to be Australia’s most powerful contemporary thinker. His essay is essential reading for all who care about the true nature of the society we have created in Australia. For the first time in my life I encountered here a mature insight into the private hells produced by the very kind of failed education I received as a boy growing up at the bottom of a class ridden culture in London after the war." —Alex Miller
128 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2009
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71 people want to read
About the author
Noel Pearson
14 books7 followersNoel Pearson is the founder and director of the Cape York Partnership, and the author of Up From the Mission, two Quarterly Essays and many essays, articles and speeches.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 18, 2010
Noel Pearson is a fascinating character and one that I find very challenging. There is nothing ‘easy’ about him. The problems that face Aboriginal Australia are not just complex and numerous, they are heart-breaking. If ever a people have had ‘excuses’ for ‘under-achieving’, it is the Australian Aboriginals. In 200 years their lands have been stolen from them, often their children have been stolen from them, they have faced both cultural and literal genocide, white diseases and guns killed up to 90% of their populations (naturally, mostly children and old people) and all of this has been done within a social construction that patronises them as a ‘stone-age’ people. As if the trauma of white settlement was not enough we have also gone out of our way to create standards by which we can judge Aboriginals that they are nearly certain to fail – in reality we expect them to live down to our expectations and have created remarkably efficient methods to ensure that they do exactly that.
Noel Pearson is Aboriginal. His land is Cape York – far North Queensland – and he is a remarkably controversial leader of his people. I first heard of him a few years ago when he proposed methods of reducing welfare dependency in Aboriginal communities. As a loony left-wing type that sort of talk makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. It smells of the sorts of things people say about single-mothers. If there is something that really makes me sick to the stomach it is people who are very comfortable (with an abundance of everything) denying the necessities of life to other people in the name of ‘helping them to help themselves’. I assume there is a particularly warm part of hell reserved for people who punish the victims of this world.
And that is where Noel comes in. For he is very concerned with the problems of Black Australia and not the least in that he believes that welfare, as the sole means to sustain life, is destroying any possibility of really sustaining his people as a people. A people with dignity, or as he himself says, a serious people.
For this is the central question of this essay: “Are we Aboriginal people a series people? Do we have serious leaders? Do we have the seriousness necessary to maintain the hard places we call home? Do we have the seriousness necessary to maintain our languages, traditions and knowledge?” It is a question he faces with, at times, brutal honesty – it is clear that he is a remarkably brave man, and brave not just in the sense that he is prepared to say things that are highly controversial, but also brave enough to really think about his position and to challenge people to also think about what he has to say.
It would be too easy to say that he is right-wing – and I have to admit that I’m very prone to using such labels as a convenient way of not having to counter certain arguments – however, it is also clear that he is keenly interested in improving the lot of Black Australia and that his saying that what we have been doing as a society to date is not working for anyone. Something needs to change – and if his solution does not sound appealing, then the obligation is on those opposing his solution to come up with something better – because status quo isn’t a solution and has been tolerated for far too long.
This essay focuses on education – he is very hard on people like Pablo Freire and his ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ He admits to having read this book on more than one occasion, of being repeatedly told how wonderful it is and of finding it virtually incomprehensible. He believes that rather than being a handbook for the liberation of the oppressed, it would more accurately be defined as a guarantee that the oppressed will remain oppressed. Pearson clearly feels that gaining the tools of the master is the first criteria for being able to overcome the oppression by the master. I have some sympathy with this idea.
However, I also have some sympathy with Freire – not least when he says that education is essentially a process of explaining to people how they fit in the society they are a part of and of making sure they stay within that structure. I’m also fond of his ‘learn to read the word and the world’ idea. We like to think of education as being about teaching reason and teaching people to think ‘outside the square’ – but in fact people tend to become much more conservative as they receive more education (our liberal party - the conservatives in Australia - is dominated by lawyers and doctors, clearly not the uneducated people here) whereas every movement for social change is generally dominated by people who have had much more limited educations. As ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’ points out, one of the first priorities in most revolutions is to have a campaign to educate the masses, and why? Because educated masses are much more compliant.
Pearson is faced with a problem. Aboriginal kids come to school – if at all – with a deficit that makes catching up almost impossible. If one of the best ways to overcome deficits in education is to have wonderful teachers, the problem is that in the remote regions of Australia where many of these kids live it is incredibly difficult to get any teachers at all. The teachers you do get are generally only there for a very short time and even then their ‘quality’ is often (what’s a good euphemism? Questionable?)…
For this reason Pearson has become a very strong supporter of Direct Instruction – I’ve gone from never having heard of this style of teaching before to hearing about it all of the time. Essentially it is a form of instruction that takes the teacher out of the equation. What the teacher says in any class is fully scripted – they teach ‘back to basics’ 3Rs and pretty well nothing else. As someone who has become quite fond of Dewey and his notion of educating people to become active citizens, this direct instruction stuff makes my skin crawl. But Pearson sees it as the only hope Aboriginal kids will have to a future that is not the same as the devastation that is their present. Essentially he is saying, give the kids the basics and at least then there will be some hope.
Something else I’ve read recently said there are effectively three types of problems: Crisis (where authoritarian responses are the only ones appropriate – if someone is suffocating there is no point forming a committee to discuss it) Manageable problems (like building a house – it isn’t easy to fix, but we’ve done it lots of times before and we know how to fix those sorts of problems) and finally there are wicked problems. Wicked problems are like the question, how do we solve the life expectancy gap between white and Aboriginal peoples in Australia? This is not a problem that will be fixed by being ‘managed’ or by authoritarian decrees – but needs real leadership and a willingness to understand that what looks like the same problem over and over again is actually complex and different every time.
I don’t doubt for a moment that Noel Pearson sees the problems of Aboriginal people as wicked problems and ones that need all of our intelligence and tact and goodwill for us to ever hope of our moving towards solving. I just don’t think that finding ways to produce teachers that are not too different from automata who fill the empty buckets that are young Aboriginal kids with the 3Rs is ever going to be enough. I think perhaps there still is a place for more than just the 3Rs and that critical literacy has much to recommend it. As always, this is a challenging read.
Noel Pearson is Aboriginal. His land is Cape York – far North Queensland – and he is a remarkably controversial leader of his people. I first heard of him a few years ago when he proposed methods of reducing welfare dependency in Aboriginal communities. As a loony left-wing type that sort of talk makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. It smells of the sorts of things people say about single-mothers. If there is something that really makes me sick to the stomach it is people who are very comfortable (with an abundance of everything) denying the necessities of life to other people in the name of ‘helping them to help themselves’. I assume there is a particularly warm part of hell reserved for people who punish the victims of this world.
And that is where Noel comes in. For he is very concerned with the problems of Black Australia and not the least in that he believes that welfare, as the sole means to sustain life, is destroying any possibility of really sustaining his people as a people. A people with dignity, or as he himself says, a serious people.
For this is the central question of this essay: “Are we Aboriginal people a series people? Do we have serious leaders? Do we have the seriousness necessary to maintain the hard places we call home? Do we have the seriousness necessary to maintain our languages, traditions and knowledge?” It is a question he faces with, at times, brutal honesty – it is clear that he is a remarkably brave man, and brave not just in the sense that he is prepared to say things that are highly controversial, but also brave enough to really think about his position and to challenge people to also think about what he has to say.
It would be too easy to say that he is right-wing – and I have to admit that I’m very prone to using such labels as a convenient way of not having to counter certain arguments – however, it is also clear that he is keenly interested in improving the lot of Black Australia and that his saying that what we have been doing as a society to date is not working for anyone. Something needs to change – and if his solution does not sound appealing, then the obligation is on those opposing his solution to come up with something better – because status quo isn’t a solution and has been tolerated for far too long.
This essay focuses on education – he is very hard on people like Pablo Freire and his ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ He admits to having read this book on more than one occasion, of being repeatedly told how wonderful it is and of finding it virtually incomprehensible. He believes that rather than being a handbook for the liberation of the oppressed, it would more accurately be defined as a guarantee that the oppressed will remain oppressed. Pearson clearly feels that gaining the tools of the master is the first criteria for being able to overcome the oppression by the master. I have some sympathy with this idea.
However, I also have some sympathy with Freire – not least when he says that education is essentially a process of explaining to people how they fit in the society they are a part of and of making sure they stay within that structure. I’m also fond of his ‘learn to read the word and the world’ idea. We like to think of education as being about teaching reason and teaching people to think ‘outside the square’ – but in fact people tend to become much more conservative as they receive more education (our liberal party - the conservatives in Australia - is dominated by lawyers and doctors, clearly not the uneducated people here) whereas every movement for social change is generally dominated by people who have had much more limited educations. As ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’ points out, one of the first priorities in most revolutions is to have a campaign to educate the masses, and why? Because educated masses are much more compliant.
Pearson is faced with a problem. Aboriginal kids come to school – if at all – with a deficit that makes catching up almost impossible. If one of the best ways to overcome deficits in education is to have wonderful teachers, the problem is that in the remote regions of Australia where many of these kids live it is incredibly difficult to get any teachers at all. The teachers you do get are generally only there for a very short time and even then their ‘quality’ is often (what’s a good euphemism? Questionable?)…
For this reason Pearson has become a very strong supporter of Direct Instruction – I’ve gone from never having heard of this style of teaching before to hearing about it all of the time. Essentially it is a form of instruction that takes the teacher out of the equation. What the teacher says in any class is fully scripted – they teach ‘back to basics’ 3Rs and pretty well nothing else. As someone who has become quite fond of Dewey and his notion of educating people to become active citizens, this direct instruction stuff makes my skin crawl. But Pearson sees it as the only hope Aboriginal kids will have to a future that is not the same as the devastation that is their present. Essentially he is saying, give the kids the basics and at least then there will be some hope.
Something else I’ve read recently said there are effectively three types of problems: Crisis (where authoritarian responses are the only ones appropriate – if someone is suffocating there is no point forming a committee to discuss it) Manageable problems (like building a house – it isn’t easy to fix, but we’ve done it lots of times before and we know how to fix those sorts of problems) and finally there are wicked problems. Wicked problems are like the question, how do we solve the life expectancy gap between white and Aboriginal peoples in Australia? This is not a problem that will be fixed by being ‘managed’ or by authoritarian decrees – but needs real leadership and a willingness to understand that what looks like the same problem over and over again is actually complex and different every time.
I don’t doubt for a moment that Noel Pearson sees the problems of Aboriginal people as wicked problems and ones that need all of our intelligence and tact and goodwill for us to ever hope of our moving towards solving. I just don’t think that finding ways to produce teachers that are not too different from automata who fill the empty buckets that are young Aboriginal kids with the 3Rs is ever going to be enough. I think perhaps there still is a place for more than just the 3Rs and that critical literacy has much to recommend it. As always, this is a challenging read.
October 27, 2015
Well written but ultimately a piece of neoliberal ideology masquerading as they so often like to as rational, logical, scientifically truths
January 16, 2012
Interesting book by an inspiring author. I was most interested in the disastrous outcome of Project Follow Through in the US and the findings of Prof Kevin Wheldall that the bottom quartile of students will not learn to read unless a phonics-based approach is competently taught (the more advanced students will learn no matter what method is used) (p71).
January 29, 2017
A good read!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews