Una’s Blog

“The Department of Immigration historically has been less active than they should have been with settlement patterns. It needed to ensure that school populations were more diverse.” — The parliamentary secretary for multicultural affairs, Laurie Ferguson.

I just read an article from the Sydney Morning Herald, titled “Education of refugees key to white flight: MP” (Anna Patty, Education Editor, March 22 2008)

There are concerns that the NSW Department of Education needs to consider more closely where it educates refugee children in Sydney. There is growing concern that there is a spread of ‘white flight’ from schools across Sydney. ‘White flight’ is explained as when students from Anglo-European background leave schools that have a high concentration of students from other racial backgrounds. For example, the increasing African presence in the suburb of Blacktown. A ‘confidencial survey’ done in NSW in 2006 raised concerns about white flight “undermining government schools and threatening social cohesion.”

I observed a situation similar to this one while I was in Guatemala. There was an English speaking international school there, that was taking in beca (scholarship) students into grades K and 1, from the local indigenous community, for the purpose of learning English. After a couple of years however, the spanish speaking beca students far out numbered the English speakers, and so the students were not learning the language, and nearly all communication was done in spanish. I know this situation is slightly different, but i can see that it is a potential problem that could happen here too, as well as many others of course.

Apparently, there were 30 or 40 schools in western Sydney which are dealing with this problem.

“We need to ask ourselves what kind of society will we be in 10, 20, 30 or 50 years’ time if we continue down the path of state-sponsored segregation and education by class, religion and ethnicity.” — The president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos.

I just watched the youth video from the 2020 summit. It was very comforting and encouraging to realise that the youth of Australia are taking these issues so seriously, that there are those that are inspired to work towards the goals that we believe in. I hope the students that I will be teaching one day will develop this same energy, and consciousness.

From watching the introduction to the summit, and from hearing the PM Rudd speak about what he is trying to achieve with this summit, it is obvious that we are starting to think globally. Not only on a business and economic level, but also on a personal, educational, environmental and political level. It struck me that Australia’s politics has turned a corner, a very BIG corner. I couldn’t even imagine Howard doing something like this. Rudd is opening the doors to discussion, questions, creative ideas, and creative solutions to some of the key issues that are facing us as a nation. The most important part of this summit to me is that he is opening the nation up to communication. This is demonstrated by the thousands of blogs and forums that have been created and commented on in the last month. The Internet has been a perfect forum for all the people not one of the 1000 invited to the summit to express their views, ask questions, and generally start the ‘conversation’ around these issues. See the Blogocracy for one example.

Video from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp-F7diymq8