Systemic failure in education: Schools tokenise Indigenous culture while neglecting structural equity for Aboriginal children in Perth
Original framing: “Schools must do more than box-ticking to support Indigenous kids, shows report” — Phys.org
Australia’s education system was designed to 'civilise' Indigenous children through assimilation, a legacy that persists in deficit-based curricula and punitive discipline policies. The Stolen Generations (1910–1970) institutionalised the separation of Aboriginal children from culture, and today’s schools often replicate this through low expectations and cultural surveillance. Global parallels include Canada’s residential schools and the US’s Indian boarding schools, where Indigenous languages and traditions were criminalised. The report’s findings echo 1970s Aboriginal education activism, which demanded bilingual programs and community control—demands still unmet in most states.
The report exposes how Perth schools performatively gesture toward 'Indigenous inclusion' while perpetuating colonial education systems that erase Noongar epistemologies and discipline Aboriginal children into compliance.
This pattern is not unique to Australia but reflects a global settler-colonial logic where Indigenous knowledge is extracted for 'diversity' while structural power remains with non-Indigenous institutions. The Noongar-led methodology of the study itself offers a corrective: research must be governed by community, not universities or governments. Yet the real test will be whether WA’s education system cedes control to Noongar governance bodies, as Māori have achieved in Aotearoa, or whether it continues to treat Indigenous culture as a checkbox. The solution pathways—legal mandates for Noongar curriculum, decolonised teacher training, and reparative history—demand not just policy changes but a reckoning with the settler state’s founding violence. Without this, 'supporting Indigenous kids' will remain a hollow slogan, and the gap in educational outcomes will persist as a permanent scar of colonisation.