Technology of the future preserving indigenous past (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Technology of the future preserving indigenous past
Cairns
December 10, 2003

High-tech wizardry is replacing billy can and damper-style oral
cultural transmission for a Cape York indigenous community.

The Noel Pearson-driven Computer Culture project at Coen trains
students to record their elders' stories and culture onto websites, CDs
and digital video.

Pearson said the pioneering project, one of many he is rolling out
across the cape, aims to make children's education the town's number
one priority.

The project would also ensure the preservation of culture, both through
its documentation and in the minds of the young people who document it.

"Education is absolutely critical to cultural survival in the long
term," Pearson said. "We're not going to survive as a culture without
education in the long term. We have to make a decisive connection
between education and cultural survival.

"The people who will speak Aboriginal languages in 50 years time will
be literate in English, they'll be literate in their own language,
they'll be highly educated.

"Our focus here in the Computer Culture project is education, it's
using culture as a culture has got to involve literacy," he said.

Also launching the Coen Education Strategy, which focuses on
encouraging hook to bring the elders and families in to support their
kids in education."

Pearson said indigenous people needed to decisively move to literate
transmission of culture because oral transmission was not enough in the
modern world.

"We're moving away from the billy can and damper cultural transmission
of the bush tucker trips in the bush to one that stresses even your
inquiring minds and high-quality schooling, Pearson warned of the
danger of surrounding children with low expectations.

"One of the real dangers I'm waking up to in terms of secondary school
education is too many schools have got a kind of two-stream program,"
he said.

"One for the kids they have expectations of and the other for the kids
they have no expectations of.

"My alarm is at the fact that schools are already pre-determining the
two streams these kids enter into ... I don't like the fact it's all
the black kids who are going down the B-grade stream."

AAP

This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/10/1070732247518.html
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