481
The crucial need lies in structuring an independent school
striving for academic excellence, opening opportunities to
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higher education, making possible real choices of status occupations,
providing people to give leadership and coherence and direction
to the construction of an Aboriginal identity.
This is not the sort of independent school Aborigines have
been subjected to in the past. Segregation on a reserve resulted
in child-minding by untrained personnel, or in the hit and miss
education offered by station managers or their wives.
If high quality independent schools are available for
Aboriginal urban people, and are structured as community schools,
then the possibility is provided for the exercise of some degree
of autonomy in the school situation.
It is posited that it would be to those who exercised leader-
ship roles within the microcosm of the school that the
Aboriginal world could look to exercise Aboriginal leadership
roles in the wider community.
At the present tim¾ unbearable pressure is put upon educated
Aboriginal community leaders by the demands made on the small
pool of people available for responsible positions.
Aboriginal university graduates can be counted on one's
fingers, a group so small as to shame the social structures of
mainstream society.
, It could be seen as one of the functions of an Aboriginal
independent school to prepare as many Aboriginal students as possible
for tertiary studies, and to enable them to enter tertiary studies
on the same basis as other students without needing special
entry requirements.
There is the further problem that the educated Aborigine
has often had to become part of white society as part of pursuing his
education. It has been seen that the Strelley Mob rejected this