Nothing's changed

A long time ago, before internet, faxes and even before disco music there was a Torres Strait Islander boy who so wanted to go to boarding school.  He wanted "to get an education".  He knew that with education came choices and job security.  An education meant he didn’t have to labour in the hot sun on building sites or work as a deckhand like the men in his family had done.  He begged his parents to send him to boarding school and they did.  He started in year 9.

     Things didn’t work out the way he expected.

     He had grown up speaking Broken English so he struggled with written and spoken English.  English was his worst subject.  He loved PE and manual arts. They were practical subjects.  He tried with the academic subjects, he really did.  He asked the teachers questions, but they often rolled their eyes. 

     So he stopped asking questions and sat at the back of the class.  When the teachers asked questions and the other boys put their hands up, he felt safe behind the shield of hands in the air.  Teachers didn’t notice the boy kept his hands under the desk.

     The boy didn’t understand the questions, let alone know the answers.  He slipped further and further behind, except in PE and manual arts.    

     The boy was embarrassed about what he didn’t know in the main subjects. 

     He excelled at football, but that didn’t help him learn what he needed in English or Maths or Science.

     There was the small problem of his fighting.  That landed him in the cane room, getting the cane from the brothers each time he was busted fighting.  He became known as "Master of the Cane Room".  What he couldn’t tell the brothers who caned him was he only fought (and flogged) the boys who called him and the other Islander boy in his class “dumb blacks”.  He was too "shame".

     It seemed it was acceptable for some boys to call the black boys dumb, but it wasn’t acceptable for him to flog those boys for being racist.  He couldn’t cope with being called “dumb” and he couldn’t cope with the cane.

     By the time he was sixteen, he was so far behind he left school.  He found work labouring and later as a deckhand.

     He became angry at his inability to read and write and angry when people implied he was dumb.  Leaving school didn't change that. He hated, more than anything, being called "dumb”  He hated that.  It made his blood boil and churn.  

     He fell into a life of alcohol and drug abuse.  It was only after a life-threatening event, he gave up abusing his body.  By that time he was a man.

     Over thirty years after he went to boarding school, the man sent his son to boarding school in year 8.  He was determined his son would get the education he didn’t.  Things were different in the modern world, he thought. His son did well in year 7 in the Torres Strait.  He would do well.

     The man’s son got a shock when he started school.  The work was much harder than he was used to.  He wanted to give up.
     "I can't do it," he cried to his mother on the phone.  "It's too hard."
     "That's why we've sent you to boarding school," said his mother, fighting her own tears, "to get an education."
     The boy agreed to stick it out till the Easter school holidays.

     He came home for the holidays with his report and handed it to his mother.  The boy had failed several subjects.  His mother wanted to cry and it wasn't just because he had failed.  

     “Are black people dumb, Mum?” he asked.

     “What are you talking about, Son?” His mother looked up from the report, confused.

     “Well,” said the son, “the white kids can do the work, but the black kids can’t.”

     “Go and get your father,” said the mother.

     The father came into the room.  The mother held up the son’s report.

     “Nothing’s changed,” she said.