knowledge for all without selling your culture

I've always looked at the education system as part of the answer for our children, in terms of self-determination, self-management and breaking the cycle of poverty. Yet if you look at Aboriginal achievement in primary and secondary school, retention and graduation statistics are very low. Is it the curriculum? Is it the environment in which those children are learning? Do our kids want to be there?It is a fundamental human right for all people of the world to be able to access free education, and the mainstream system is supposedly offering education to Aboriginal people. Yet it is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole - there is no place for our cultural values, our languages to be fostered.
I often ask myself whether the education system really changed from when I was going through. Look at the texts of those times - the 50s, 60s and 70s. We were made to feel shame about our culture. The history of Australia was Captain Cook, Burke and Wills, the early explorers and ...