"Are Aboriginals really less intelligent?"

was a question I was faced with today. Why I am asked such questions is beyond me. Yes, I studied psychology and still read about psychology - among many other things. It does not mean I can answer every silly question flung at me but I think I can say something sensible about this one.

Let's first imagine something. You are lost "in the bush".  You have no idea where you are or where to find water or what is safe to eat. The idea of building some sort of shelter occurs to you but you don't know how to set about it. 

Along comes an Aboriginal family from three hundred years ago. They are talking to one another in a language you do not understand but they are concerned for you. They look at your attempts to care for yourself and then set about building a shelter. They find food and water. The next day they lead you to a creek and indicate you need to follow it down stream to find the 21st century and what you regard as civilisation.

Who is the "less intelligent" person here? They have all the skills they need for survival. It might not be a very comfortable survival but they survive where you would almost certainly not.

Put those people into a modern city and they would be as lost as you would be in the wild. Ask them to do a modern "intelligence" test and they would almost certainly "fail". It would not be a lack of intelligence but a lack of experience that would cause them to fail. 

I have said elsewhere in this blog that I once taught a child who had been diagnosed as being of very limited intelligence. He was profoundly physically disabled and he came from a family where English was not spoken at home. He could "answer" you with his eyes and that was about it. A psychologist had "assessed" him and said he couldn't even follow simple instructions that would allow him to "point" with his eyes. 

Of course he could not do this because he did not understand what was being said to him. He was having to learn English by no other means than listening to what was going on around him at school. By the time I met him he had begun to understand everything that was being said, often far more than he should have heard. He was actually highly intelligent but the circumstances under which he had been tested had made him a "failure".

And so we do the same thing with many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have not had the same contact with the items used in tests. Their children may not have been playing with the same brightly coloured blocks they are asked to place on top of one another but they can build a tower with a heap of stones and know that they need to go in order of size if it is going to be stable. They may not be able to copy a simple geometric shape but they can draw the shape a snake makes moving across the ground. 

A culturally appropriate intelligence test will reveal intelligence. It is also why we need to ensure that those children have the sort of experiences which will allow them to succeed on other "intelligence" tests. They also need experiences which allow them to succeed in learning the skills they need in order to live in the 21stC. 

A former federal MP has been heavily criticised for saying Aboriginal people should learn English. It is an unpopular view point among those on the "Yes" side of the campaign for the upcoming referendum but there can be no doubt he is correct in saying this. The experience of our migrant community has taught us this. Those who set about learning English, people like Middle Cat's father-in-law can become highly successful. He came here on his own at sixteen without having finished more than primary school and not being able to speak English. He left this world almost seventy years later having built a business, bought three houses and put four children through school and higher education. He worked very hard all his life but without English none of this would have happened here.

It is why we cannot persist in trying to "preserve language and culture" which does not provide the knowledge and skills required for full participation in the modern world. Policies like that simply and deliberately prevent Aboriginal people from using their intelligence to the full.