EDUC 6201 Education - Culture and Diversity : Multi Racial Society

Introduction

Australia has a number of aboriginal races and tribes living there for over forty forty five thousand years. Europeans first arrived in Australia in the 17^th century. Since, then Australia has observed a sea of changes; urban transition, connectivity through railroads and immigration of more people from all around the world. People from the Sub-Continent, China and all other European and African nations have migrated to Australia in search of new job opportunities (Moran 2016). Education system of such a diverse multilingual, multicultural and multi racial society is challenging for any government (Banks 2015).

• The difficulty to deal with the multi lingual students from different economic background is a challenge for the Australian government. To introduce various forms of techniques and facilities to help students is very important (Scarino 2014).
• The introduction of the neo-liberal policy has become another hindrance in educational sector. As the commercialization of education can create havoc problems for the many low-income groups. The low-income groups are identified among the new migrants of the country (Walsh 2014).
• In a society like Australia, there is an ardent need to create a diverse education system for various cultures yet should be equipped enough to provide everyone with equal educational facilities (Watkins, Lean and Noble 2016).
• The education system should offer trained faculties and teachers with the ability to address teach the students from different cultural, linguistic and racial background. It is the responsibility of the teachers to act on this cultural diversity (DANIELSON, 2014).
• The anti-discrimination laws according to the legislation should be implied properly (gov.au. 2017).
• I found out that about 60 percent schools in Australia are government based but the major concern is the growing number of private religious institutions, which are not controlled by the Government (Kemp 2014). These schools can affect the demography of Australia and can hence result into racial tensions.

The Resource

The resource of this report highlights the entire situation of the cultural diversity in the education of Australia. The multicultural education system provides classes of anti racism and community harmony (Walsh 2014).  Along with many other issues, this is a issue which should be addressed for a better future of the country. In Australia, a controversy on the treatment of immigrants has reached news headlines in the country. I believe that the increased racism towards the Muslim community has raised question marks on the secular atmosphere of Australia. This further resulted into negative reactions towards the Muslim school, which was built in the South-West Sidney in 2005. Following this, the communal rights in Cronulla beach in 2007, the situation became worse in Australia (Markus 2014).

According to Campbell, the journey of secularizing education in Australia began with the abolition of the “White Australia policy” in 1966 followed by the transfer of responsibility of Indigenous people in 1967 (Campbell and Proctor 2014). In 1972 the newly elected government of Whitman made specific changes and addressed issues like race, ethnicity and gender. Despite the fact that the Australian Government took up the issue of the indigenous people, these percentage of aboriginals in higher education is very low in compared to the European descendants (Studyinaustralia.gov.au. 2017). The number of drop outs among them in the 11^th or 12^th year of their school education is a common fact. In recent times, the subject of immigration and equal rights for education has come back to be a priority of the Australian government. The demography of Australia is changing with the immigrants and this has led to a need to re-emphasize and rethink on certain issues. I believe that the social change of Australia should be addressed properly in the educational institutions in order to integrate the immigrants, who are coming from different cultural backgrounds. The initiatives like Fitzroy Valley Aboriginal Trust have played a significant role in integrating the indigenous people into the government schools along with others is quite understandable by me. Fitzroy was an unsuccessful venture in long term but other initiatives like Clontarf Aboriginal College and Australian’s governments’ sports initiative Sporting Chance became successful in the long term (Moran 2016.).

I believe that multicultural Australia addressed education in a secular vision. The education system of education was based on choice, community involvement and diversity. Bilingualism was introduced in Australia. Multiple languages were uplifted to the statues of ‘community languages’ (Grossman 2017).

Experiences

The resource is a highlight of the problems that the Australian education system faces due to the multi-cultural Australian society. My idea is to understand the resource design according to the grass root situation in Australia. The resource will offer an insight view to the limitations of the Australian education policy and challenges for the Australian Government. I have tried to understand the entire scenario in comparison to the entire world.

Problems

In 2011 census report 27 percent of the Australians are born in the overseas and at least 20 percent of one of the parents are born in the overseas (Ashman 2014). According to me the problems to enhance the multi-cultural issues in the Australian education system are:

• I saw the reports that 15% of the Australian population does not speak in English at home. As, the medium of teaching in most of Australian schools is English, they often face problems to follow their teachers.
• I believe that the people from various backgrounds study in the schools and colleges of Australia. Hence, it is important acknowledge and respect each other’s culture. However this has not been the case in Australia.
• According to me the immigrants of Australia are not well educated and neither are they well acquainted with Australian culture. The education rate among the aboriginals is also o comparatively low than the Europeans.
• I have to say that the negative community attitudes to study and learn are also a big problem in Australia.

 I read that there has been no religious education unit in the Governmental education curriculum in Australia but the growing private educational institutes, lion share of which are religious can cause a problem in the multiculturalism in the educational area. This is not the case around in the European countries (EDWARDS, 2015).

• According to various organizations, the immigrants have different social norms, which might affect Australia. I believe that to contemplate the situation it is necessary to introduce religious education to grow in an exchange of cultural ideas, since religion plays a big role in the culture of an individual. The organizations also argue that the religious education would help them understand different perspectives and that would cause tolerance among all religions.
• I know that these organizations claim that Europe has introduced multi-faith teaching to expose the students to different cultures. As Europe is also facing the same immigration problems as Australia, it can be instrumental.
• I have observed that along the last century, Australia has shifted from being a Christian society to more of a secular culture. In this case, the growing number of religious institution can be a problem in the country.
• After analyzing the reports I understood that Australian education system needs more allocation of money. The funding is required to enhance the education system of the neglected aboriginals in Australia. A special education system is working to bring back the aboriginals to the mainstream society.
• Many of the immigrants are coming from a third world background. I have observed that people from the Sub-Continent, the Chinese, the Arabs and the Africans come from a culture which is pre-dominantly patriarchal. Therefore, gender equality also becomes an important issue to address in the Australian education system.

Challenges

The challenges of the Australian Government to create a better education system to integrate the diverse cultures in the institutions are:

• I believe that in multicultural Australia, bilingualism is the need of the time. So it should be universally introduced in Australia to facilitate every immigrant to study their own language along with English. The Australian education system already needs a huge amount of funding because of its poor infrastructure.
• To me the cultural exchange programs in the Australians schools and universities are required to negate the future possibilities of cultural or racial conflicts. There have been incidences of deaths with many students from Indian and Asian communities due to racism.
• I think that the increase in number of the private and religious educational institution is a major concern and hence, the Australian Government should try to nationalize the entire education system to regulate it properly and to create a better society in the future.
• I have to say that the development of better teaching skills can also help in this process. More recruitments and better training programs for teachers can help to address a problem of an aboriginal or immigrant student at least in the school level. The teacher framework classes can also help a lot in this(VERGER, NOVELLI & ALTINYELKEN, 2012).

Conclusion

According to me the Australian Government has nowhere to go but to deal with the issue of immigration and cultural integration and education is the best tool for this. Australia has been successful in the integration of Chinese and Asian communities to a large extent in the last 50 years. I believe that various national educational initiatives run by the Australian government need urgent funding to enhance their activities and fasten the reach of education across all classes, races, and language barriers, cultural and religious differences. Australia should try to emulate the education policies of Scandinavian countries like Finland and Denmark, where free education is a public policy. The expenditure for education in the GDP should also increase in order to imply the important plans  to address such an important issue.

References

Ashman, A., 2014. Education for inclusion and diversity. Pearson Australia.

Banks, J.A., 2015. Cultural diversity and education. Routledge.

Campbell, C. and Proctor, H., 2014. A history of Australian schooling. Allen & Unwin.

Forrest, J. and Dunn, K., 2013. Cultural diversity, racialisation and the experience of racism in rural Australia: the South Australian case. Journal of Rural Studies, 30, pp.1-9.

Grossman, M., 2017. Re-Thinking ‘Vulnerability’in the Context of ‘Diversity’: Cross-Cultural Reform in Policing Education and Training in Australia. In Policing Encounters with Vulnerability (pp. 119-143). Springer International Publishing.

Kemp, D., 2014. Review of the demand driven funding system: report [Kemp-Norton Review]. Department of Education, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.

Markus, A., 2014. Attitudes to immigration and cultural diversity in Australia. Journal of Sociology, 50(1), pp.10-22.

Moran, L., 2016. Constructions of race: symbolic ethnic capital and the performance of youth identity in multicultural Australia. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(4), pp.708-726.

Scarino, A., 2014. Situating the challenges in current languages education policy in Australia–unlearning monolingualism. International Journal of Multilingualism, 11(3), pp.289-306.

Studyinaustralia.gov.au. (2017). About Australian education. [online] Available at: https://www.studyinaustralia.gov.au/global/australian-education [Accessed 22 May 2017].

Walsh, J.P., 2014. The marketization of multiculturalism: Neoliberal restructuring and cultural difference in Australia. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(2), pp.280-301.

Watkins, M., Lean, G. and Noble, G., 2016. Multicultural education: the state of play from an Australian perspective. Race Ethnicity and Education, 19(1), pp.46-66.

DANIELSON, C. (2014). The framework for teaching: evaluation instrument.

VERGER, A., NOVELLI, M., & ALTINYELKEN, H. K. (2012). Global education policy and international development: new agendas, issues, and policies. New York, NY, Bloomsbury Academic

EDWARDS,M.(2015).Globalchildhoods.https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=980516