Stolen Generations member supports boarding schools

Tracker Tilmouth, aboriginal leader, a member of the Stolen Generations, an adviser to the Northern Territory mining company Compass Resources supports boarding schools for remote indigenous students as one solution to the crisis.

As do indigenous leaders Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Noel Pearson

Mr Tilmouth said the problems in indigenous education ran deeper than the chronic lack of resources. He condemned cultural approaches to education that sought to fetishise Aboriginal culture.

"We've got to move away from these socialist policies that 'Through your poverty you remain pure' ... this idea that this Aboriginal group is some strange lot of people from the Kalahari or somewhere like that," Mr Tilmouth said.

"We've got to get away from the idea that the best place you can see Aboriginal people is on a postage stamp, to be amazed and wondered at, licked and then stuck on an envelope, which is what the case is at the moment.

"If a child does not have access to education and is unable to go to school in a comfortable, reasonable manner and be trained accordingly, then you are sentencing that child to a life of unemployment, of dysfunction, of alcoholism, of drug abuse and substance abuse."
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