Mary Merkenich
NSW Premier Morris Iemma says he has a plan for eradicating racism, hooliganism and thuggery. Students, he says, should be taught the "Australian values" of respect and responsibility. Schools should teach Australian identity, history, culture and an understanding of our national symbols, and it should be compulsory for the national anthem to be sung at school assemblies.
PM John Howard's Australia Day speech underscored the complete bi-partisan agreement on this approach, and acting federal education minister Gary Hardgrave expressed his "delight" that NSW Labor is "finally catching up to the leadership that the Australian government's been providing in this regard".
Iemma's call for the singing of the national anthem to be compulsory in all public schools is a "do nothing" response when you want to be seen to be doing something. If eradicating racism was as simple as forcing school students to sing a song, it could have been wiped out years ago, especially since the anthem is already routinely sung in primary schools.
The national anthem, "Advance Australia Fair" is itself racist. It begins, "Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free". The "young" refers to the popular myth that Australia is a young country, a myth that obliterates Indigenous Australians from our history.
Australian society cannot deal effectively with racism if it does not acknowledge, understand and teach about its racist past — about the invasion of Australia, the dispossession and subjugation of the Indigenous population, and their struggle against this.
Only when there is a serious, rather than tokenistic, approach to teaching Aboriginal history and the impact of white settlement can racism and how to deal with it today be adequately examined. Indigenous languages should also be much more prominent in school curricula.
Far from tackling the root causes of racism, forcing students to sing the national anthem might actually cause resentment and fuel racism. Beginning the school day with music is a sound idea, but perhaps a more appropriate and inspiring song to sing might be John Lennon's "Imagine"?
The very idea of "teaching the Australian values of respect and responsibility" reflects and reinforces a racist — or at least xenophobic — assumption that other countries and cultures do not advocate respect and responsibility. It suggests that Australian society is superior and that problems like those at Cronulla last year must come from elsewhere.
Australian politicians themselves have demonstrated certain values by their actions, including cutting funding to state education, thereby reducing life opportunities for students from working-class backgrounds compared to those whose parents can afford to use private schools.
The major-party politicians' "values" also include locking up refugees for trying to escape starvation and repression, refusing to simply say "sorry" for past injustices to Indigenous Australians; giving Kerry Packer, well known for his tax avoidance, a tax-payer funded funeral; scapegoating Muslims and dismantling democratic rights; and destroying secure employment and decent wages and working conditions, to mention a few.
Such values have nothing to do with "respect" or "responsibility". Educating students not to use violence to settle differences is made very difficult when Australia's political leaders carry out military invasions of other countries and murderous attacks on their populations.
To help teach respect and responsibility, school curricula should include lessons about the valuable contributions of migrants — especially non-Anglo migrants — to Australian society. Some schools teach such units, but it is left to chance and, in general, the appreciation of other cultures and how they can and have enriched our society, is not given a high priority in school curricula.
Australia, along with Britain and the United States, has a very bad record of promoting languages other than English and studies about other countries and cultures. Languages other than English teachers are in short supply and the subject has been downgraded, especially by current state Labor governments.
Schools are not islands: they reflect the values that are fostered in wider society. In order to counteract racism and intolerance, school education must be accompanied by other community activities that encourage and model positive, anti-racist behaviour. As well, schools must be adequately funded so they have the teachers and resources to deliver the high quality education that everyone in our community deserves.
[Mary Merkenich is a teacher and Australian Education Union state councillor in Victoria.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 1, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.