The decline of education

There is no doubt that higher education in Australia is in transition – some would call it crisis – as the pressure mounts for universities and their equivalents to be “relevant to modern society” and produce the workers who will “fuel the 21^st century economy”.

The words in inverted commas are not mine but ones I have seen in innumerable media releases churned out by Federal and State Governments – and because these Governments hold the purse strings, the places of higher learning have to take note.

I really wish however, that there was a little more “push back” from the leadership of the these institutions, pointing out that education should go beyond cramming for qualifications that will earn the right kind of job.

Sadly, many key figures in academia seem eager to acquiesce in this trend. The Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra, Professor Stephen Parker, looks forward to the day when a great deal of his institution’s infrastructure will be redundant because students will come on to campus less often and for shorter periods.

In his vision students will do increasing amounts of their learning online, working with videos and text “reserving every minute of personal time of the teacher to smaller group encounters where students defend and discuss their work”. 

This sausage-machine mentality may produce the short-term results that politicians want, but there are so many flaws. One being the assumption that by 18, all young people know exactly what they want to do with their lives and therefore the courses they should follow.

I quote an academic from an American university who believes that in addition to providing its students with qualifications, higher education should be equipping them to answer four questions:

What is worth knowing? What is worth doing? What makes for a good human life? What are my responsibilities to other people? 

If the trends in Australian higher learning continue their answer to the first question would be: The information that gets me a job; to the second would be: My job; while the third and fourth questions would probably not be answered at all.

Higher education should be shaping a person to make a worthwhile contribution, not just to an employer, not just to the economy, but to the community, locally, nationally and globally. Above all it should teach that minds should be open to all influences, and to develop the maturity to judge them, to accept them, or to reject them.

It should teach them about compassion about justice and yes, about a fair go; it should point out to them that the society they have been raised in is just one among many on this earth. Part of that knowledge doesn’t come from the internet or even from the lecture hall, but from interaction on campus in all sorts of contacts, formal and informal. It comes from debate and discussion, not just about work, but about the world in general. What’s right; what’s wrong, what should be preserved; what needs to be changed.

If we don’t do that, we deserve to be judged as the generation that for its own, selfish, materialist ends sought to impoverish its young people by denying them the basic knowledge of what it means to be human.