A few weeks ago I heard some voices on the radio telling us that the political conversation that followed the release of the federal governments policies on tertiary education was missing the point. The argument was over the details, while what was truly significant was the whole. What is occurring is the privatisation of Australian education.
Brendan Nelson -once the earring wearing president of the Australian Medical Association, and a person regarded as being on the left of the Liberal Party- was now, as education minister, going to be the chief engineer of the privatisation of Australia’s education system. He will now complete the destruction of a socialised education system. It must always be remembered that this process was begun by John Dawkins, an education minister when the Australian Labor Party was in government.
I find it an interesting phenomena to see people and group whole could be described as small ’l’ liberals so involved in the process of privatising social life. It seems that this is occurring with what seems like a complete lack of self awareness about what is being done. Consider this. A year or to ago I had a brief lapse of reason and I started wasting my time reading Murdoch’s ‘Australian’ newspaper. The paper had been promoting a large social survey of Australian society which showed that social inequality was a worsening problem in Australia. The editors of the paper seemed to cry buckets of tears over these facts. Never the less, the editorial line continued to promote the very social and economic policies that were creating the problem in the first place. A similar attitude seems to occur in the Liberal Party. John Howard wisely choose his meat grinders after the last federal election. Many of his barking neo-con dogs were moved from the spotlight and replaced by sweetly smiling members of the left of the liberal party, people once marginalised and who would now do anything for a bit of power. The price they (we) had to pay was to slaughter what they once thought was worthwhile.
My own views about the Australian education system are as follows. I think that universities are too big. Universities are institutions that should be used to train our elites to the very highest standards. They should be free and based on merit. Our society is going to be, in the foreseeable future at least, be run by elites. A publicly owned free university system should be used to educate those elites.
The greatest blunder committed by federal Labor governments was the abolition of Colleges of Advanced Education and their integration into the University system. The result of this was to give enormous power to administrators and managers whose primary focus has become the further accumulation of power, resources and autonomy from decision making systems of the state. It is these managers who are the driving force of the privatisation of education. Just like Eastern Europe... bureaucrats want to become capitalists. In the modern university money is king.
Not all high school graduates want a wide ranging university education and the chance to ponder the big issues. Most want a job. They want training that will get them some well paid work. In my experience there is nothing more depressing than seeing young people at tutorials who don’t really want to be there but who have been pushed into the University system by their ever anxious parents and teachers. Sunday, May 25, 2003
4:18:59 PM 
|
