Humanity as Australian aborigines

By Lyman McLallen

Lyman McLallen

Schools and colleges everywhere constantly strive to create good curricula so they can endow their students with the best opportunities to study and develop themselves to become valuable citizens. Ideally, teachers lead students along the curriculum but not too fast because it takes patience, diligence and unquenchable curiosity to study what is worth knowing.

Good schools and colleges enable teachers to cultivate students and help them become enthusiastic about their studies. With a well thought-out curriculum teachers learn more than they teach and students master what they never dreamed they could. Good curricula lead both students and teachers to want to study and do more.

In the first chapter of Teaching as a Conserving Activity, Neil Postman writes that an education philosophy should inspire a curriculum that will “produce the kind of people needed to live effectively within the conditions of their culture.”

Showing that an education philosophy should also inspire a curriculum that would teach people to anticipate changes in the conditions of their culture, Postman describes the fate of the Australian Aborigines. The Aborigines “effectively lived within the conditions of their culture” for more than 20,000 years. In the time they lived undisturbed by the outside world, their curriculum ― the initiation of their young into their ways of knowing and working within their world ― served them well.

Their culture, remarkably, had remained pristine all that time, but then came the incursion of British settlers who, bringing 18th Century science and technology with them, changed Australia beyond anything the Aborigines could recognize.

Had the Aborigines been invaded from outer space, which in a sense they were, it couldn’t have been worse for them. The invading aliens ― mostly petty law-breakers the British cleared from their prisons ― put new pressures on the Aborigines as they tried to make sense of the changing world around them.

In this new condition brought from beyond, the Aborigines could no longer sustain themselves with their pre-Neolithic oral culture and its ways of knowing the world that so ably served them through the millennia they enjoyed undisturbed by outside forces.

To overcome their crisis with the mechanical world the new arrivals built in their native land, the Aborigines were faced with doing one of two things: either they would have to examine their ways of perceiving the world so they could maintain their cultural continuity, or they would have to give up their culture and embrace that of the invading settlers.

So far, they have been able to do neither and have yet to find a way out of their social dysfunction brought on by the inadequacies of their ancient curriculum, and they’re the poorer for it.

Today, all of us find ourselves in a similar fix as the Aborigines found themselves in. Though we are in no danger of being invaded from outer space as Australia was invaded by the British, we are living in a completely transformed and continuously changing world wrought by our own creations.

Like the Aborigines, we too are in need of examining our education philosophy and rethinking and reshaping our curricula so we can teach our children how they can live effectively in this era of profound change.

From its beginning, the industrial world has constantly been changing. With the unceasing proliferation of new inventions and applications of new technology happening now, how we live and what we must do so we can continue to live well is changing rapidly.

In our era, more changes occur in a year than occurred for the Aborigines during the whole of their undisturbed millennia. The need for new curricula and different ways of knowing ― not just so we can survive but so we may be able to live the best lives possible for us to live ― is crucial.

In the 1890s, American scholar John Dewey observed in one of his lectures that the best education for all is the education the wisest and best parents want for their children. This is a broad prescription and to us in 2017 may seem ancient, but it is still a good place to start. What we must determine, and then consider carefully, is who these best and wisest parents are, and what makes them so?

McLallen taught at Korea University and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. He works as a copy editor at The Korea Times. For nine years, he attended Orchard School in Indianapolis, Indiana.