A couple of years ago a story appeared on the ABC’s website about the study of Indonesian at secondary schools in Australia, which had fallen to levels that were lower than they had been 40 years earlier. In the same year, there was a story in the Sydney Morning Herald about dismal numbers of students studying Chinese at Australian secondary schools.
This kind of story will continue to be read on news websites that Australians use as long as we continue to treat tertiary education as a place where you go to get a qualification for a job. Both sides of politics are as bad as each other in this regard but the Labor Party started it with the Dawkins reforms in the 1980s which saw fees for university reintroduced after a sublime period when tertiary education had been free for the student.
University should be a place where you go to learn how to think and to reason, not just to get a qualification for employment. With the exception of a few jobs – such as medicine (including veterinary science, psychology, and dentistry), law, accounting, and engineering – where you need to know certain concrete things in order to profess competence in your job, for most jobs you just need to be able to think effectively and interact meaningfully with colleagues.
Languages will never be treated as being equal in value to a business degree (which is arguably useless) until fees are removed from the equation and the bias toward getting a qualification is moderated in the system of education we use.
All knowledge comes from the arts. In the Renaissance, where science and technology has its roots, all we had to progress the development of knowledge was the vernacular, moveable type and (in certain countries) a male population that was taught to read and write. The last of these innovations was adopted in countries where Protestant denominations were predominant, so that men could read their Bibles in the vernacular.
The process of nominalisation took care of the rest. Nominalisation is where sentences and phrases and distilled into nouns that can then be deployed in other sentences. This process led to the explosion in scientific discoveries after the publication of ‘Novum Organum’ by the English statesman Francis Bacon in 1620. The popular journals in England that flourished in the 18th century disseminated the new knowledge to the furthest corners of the realm. The industrial revolution (that started in the 18th century in England) and the invention of the steam engine was a direct result of the Humanist project that started in the 14th century in Italy.
A d the entertainment industry tells us how badly we need better-educated consumers. While Millennials are quick to complain about the fact that they now have fewer options than they had in the past when it comes to late-night drinking in Sydney, they flock to see the schlock that giant Hollywood corporations spew out year after year. Such as the Star Wars franchise, which has well-and-truly jumped the shark, where you have proven tropes decorated with tiny modifications designed to mimic originality. A better-educated populace would be less likely to mindlessly consume rubbish like this. It might also be the only thing that stands between a successful, pluralist democracy and the disaster of autocracy and totalitarianism. Capital and the demagogues it funds love nothing more than exhausted, stupid and ignorant workers.
More time dedicated to learning how to express yourself might result in more people ending up being more discerning consumers of popular culture, instead of mere cashed-up drones the big studios love to milk. Undertaking study in written expression might help in this regard, as well as making people happier by giving them ways to achieve the agency that they seem intent on regretting as they consume illicit substances that serve to dull the nagging pain of existence under a soul-destroying capitalism.
This kind of story will continue to be read on news websites that Australians use as long as we continue to treat tertiary education as a place where you go to get a qualification for a job. Both sides of politics are as bad as each other in this regard but the Labor Party started it with the Dawkins reforms in the 1980s which saw fees for university reintroduced after a sublime period when tertiary education had been free for the student.
University should be a place where you go to learn how to think and to reason, not just to get a qualification for employment. With the exception of a few jobs – such as medicine (including veterinary science, psychology, and dentistry), law, accounting, and engineering – where you need to know certain concrete things in order to profess competence in your job, for most jobs you just need to be able to think effectively and interact meaningfully with colleagues.
Languages will never be treated as being equal in value to a business degree (which is arguably useless) until fees are removed from the equation and the bias toward getting a qualification is moderated in the system of education we use.
All knowledge comes from the arts. In the Renaissance, where science and technology has its roots, all we had to progress the development of knowledge was the vernacular, moveable type and (in certain countries) a male population that was taught to read and write. The last of these innovations was adopted in countries where Protestant denominations were predominant, so that men could read their Bibles in the vernacular.
The process of nominalisation took care of the rest. Nominalisation is where sentences and phrases and distilled into nouns that can then be deployed in other sentences. This process led to the explosion in scientific discoveries after the publication of ‘Novum Organum’ by the English statesman Francis Bacon in 1620. The popular journals in England that flourished in the 18th century disseminated the new knowledge to the furthest corners of the realm. The industrial revolution (that started in the 18th century in England) and the invention of the steam engine was a direct result of the Humanist project that started in the 14th century in Italy.
A d the entertainment industry tells us how badly we need better-educated consumers. While Millennials are quick to complain about the fact that they now have fewer options than they had in the past when it comes to late-night drinking in Sydney, they flock to see the schlock that giant Hollywood corporations spew out year after year. Such as the Star Wars franchise, which has well-and-truly jumped the shark, where you have proven tropes decorated with tiny modifications designed to mimic originality. A better-educated populace would be less likely to mindlessly consume rubbish like this. It might also be the only thing that stands between a successful, pluralist democracy and the disaster of autocracy and totalitarianism. Capital and the demagogues it funds love nothing more than exhausted, stupid and ignorant workers.
More time dedicated to learning how to express yourself might result in more people ending up being more discerning consumers of popular culture, instead of mere cashed-up drones the big studios love to milk. Undertaking study in written expression might help in this regard, as well as making people happier by giving them ways to achieve the agency that they seem intent on regretting as they consume illicit substances that serve to dull the nagging pain of existence under a soul-destroying capitalism.
Starting at the end of your argument, I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the idea that sending everyone to university to do a degree will fix our democracy. More and more people go to university every year so if lack of education was a problem, then things should be getting better. And they don't seem to be.
ReplyDelete"University should be a place where you go to learn how to think and to reason, not just to get a qualification for employment."
My first response to that is: that's great if you have a nice job lined up afterwards due to parental connections but if you don't then what do you do? You go along, learn the awesome stuff, and then go back to your serving the counter @ Maccas.
Before WW2, university was very much the preserve of the upper classes. And now we have opened it to a a lot more people - but university attendees still lean middle class. I am suspicious of completely free degrees for everyone because I think that will mostly benefit specific groups in society who don't really need to help.
Where I agree with you is that the arts have value for their own sake. Altho I personally teach on a vocational masters - and I have no shame in doing that. My goal to ensure that my students leave the course more capable than when they come in.
However I am not convinced that a three or four year degree is right for most people. I think we should be supporting learning across the lifespans of our citizens ( and that includes financial support). And that learning should come in many forms. For some, it will be a trad degree (and for some subjects or careers, that model makes sense) but for most it will not.
This is a somewhat extreme argument against education: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html - I don't agree with Caplan's answers but many of his questions are valid ones that those supporters of education need to at least consider.
Actually we discussed that book my blog didn't we?
ReplyDeleteThe bias has to be pushed more in favour of doing degrees that don't necessarily have a job as the desired outcome. And the only way to shift that bias is by making all degrees free for the student.
ReplyDelete"The bias has to be pushed more in favour of doing degrees that don't necessarily have a job as the desired outcome. And the only way to shift that bias is by making all degrees free for the student."
ReplyDeleteSo my first question to you on this is: why is a degree the optimum format for the outcome you are trying to achieve here?
We have to get more young people to study languages at school. That should be the goal. To do that, we have to make the acquisition of general learning (rather than vocational training) the goal of tertiary education.
ReplyDelete