The unashamed shoot first and argue later attempt by the Anglo-elitist dominated Northcote High School leadership to kill the long- standing, highly-successful and most certainly, community-needed teaching of Greek and Italian languages is a matter of the outmost significance not only for the school community of Northcote but for all those concerned with the teaching of languages in our government schools, where the great majority of students of all ethnic backgrounds do their learning.
This school leadership breached even its own guidelines of not consulting with all those who have a stake in what happens and should happen at the school, especially when terminating the teaching of languages, a pillar of Australia’s multiculturalism.
Under some pressure it may now go through some kind of consultation. Any fair dinkum consultation must have terms of reference, starting with the importance language teaching, the demographics of the area, the feeder links with primary schools and the actual and potential support by the local and wider community. And this work must be led by a school community representative body, including teachers and their union, much wider than the current closed-shop school council, without even a single ethnic minority parent.
The ethnic minority communities, and especially the Greek Australian, have played a leading role in promoting the values of multilingualism, of state and national languages policies so essential in reinforcing the multicultural foundations of our poly-ethnic nation and the responsibility of the nation’s day schools to meet the needs and challenges of language teaching.
It is not in the best interest of the fundamental values of education, of language learning, of the local Northcote High School and wider community for community languages to be axed in government schools and in this case in Northcote, with a very large Greek Australian and Italian Australian population.
The proposition that ‘ethnic languages’ can be taught in after-hours, ethno-specific private or community fee-paying schools serves in fact the divisive and discriminating policies of segregation and marginalisation the very opposite of integration and inclusiveness.
The ethnic after-hours schools, instead of being for historical reasons supportive of the mainstream government schools, are given the role of being the main and in many respects the sole provider of a second-class teaching of languages accessible only to a small minority of ethnic minority background students and certainly no other.
Yet language learning is not solely a concern for the ‘ethnics’ but for the whole nation, as is multiculturalism and reconciliation.
The claim that Victoria is the most multicultural state in the nation is a bit hypocritical and hollow when the state’s schools continue to exit community language teaching, a vacuum that has never been ‘filled’ by the gallop now to total privatisation of an important component of education, the ethnic minority culture and language, not withstanding some government subsidy to facilitate this.
The state government has the major responsibility to ensure its schools don’t source out the teaching of languages with all the detrimental consequences, nor should it stand as an observer in the battle to save the Greek and Italian languages in Northcote High School.
It is, after all, about the rights of ethnic minorities to their culture and language a subject to which schools still have a responsibility to include.
The Greek and Italian ethnic and other minority communities, and indeed Victoria as a whole, must win the battle of Northcote High School and begin to reverse the wiping out of community language teaching in the state’s government schools.
As always, it is a combination of mass activity and campaigning by the Northcote School – primary and secondary – community and all those promoting ethnic minority rights that will make the difference.