Australia, Multicultural Education in

Immigration and Assimilation

Since the late 18th century, immigration has been critical to Australian population growth and development. This role was strengthened after World War II when the government announced an immigration policy to increase the population by 1% per year as part of major postwar reconstruction projects. To ensure continuing public support for this policy, the government assured people that new arrivals would assimilate and would not change the Australian way of life. Indeed, the government prioritized immigration from the traditional source countries of the United Kingdom and Ireland. However, as European countries rebuilt after the war, they became reluctant to have their citizens emigrate. Australia had to search farther afield for immigrants from Western, Eastern, and then Southern Europe. By the late 1960s, despite its historical commitment to “European” migrants, immigrants were also arriving from Lebanon and Turkey. Now many immigrants come from Asia. The expansion of source countries resulted in increasing numbers of immigrants who did not speak English and often had only limited education. Without proactive policies to assist them, many new arrivals were experiencing severe social and economic disadvantages that made assimilation difficult, despite the government's assumption that assimilation would be easy and relatively rapid.

In Australia, as in other countries where there was extensive 19th- and 20th-century immigration, such as Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, the expectation was that immigrants would assimilate and that education would contribute to this. Where Australian schools catered to specific immigrant groups, their existence was tenuous as illustrated by the closure during World War I of the German schools in South Australia.

Migrants and their children confronted problems in school that were evident both to the migrant families and to teachers who found themselves coping with students who, lacking English, became disruptive in the classrooms and all too often failed to achieve their educational potential or dropped out of school. The initial response was to blame the pupils and their families for these outcomes; however, educators increasingly became aware that the schools contributed to the problem. Large class sizes and school governance practices discouraged a focus on the needs of individual students. Responsibility for education lay not with local communities but with the Australian states and two territories that controlled a curriculum that was oriented toward individual exams. In this environment the needs of migrant children dovetailed with more general concerns about educational inequality.

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