|
Workers' Liberty
the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class Workers Liberty Australia |
|
|
|
A proposed restructuring of the Arts Faculty at the University of Queensland has so far provoked several student rallies, a brief student occupation, and the appearance of a much-read lampoon sheet, The New UQ Financial Review.
Driven by cost-cutting - and probably also by the desire of Faculty Dean Alan Rix to have a "successful restructure" on his CV - the new setup would merge "loss-making" departments into profitable "schools" on lines so outlandish as to expose the scheme's authors as having no conceivable interest in education, knowledge, or anything but the bottom line. History, German and Russian would be one school; English, Art History, Spanish and French another. The New UQ has suggested that the second combination might be renamed "The Sarino Russo School of Finishing and Deportment".
No wonder that one of the most-displayed books at the university bookshop is Tony Coady's collection Why Universities Matter . Written mostly by academics from Melbourne University, the book won unexpected fame when Melbourne University Press reversed its decision to publish it, citing the lack of "clear and sufficient representations from the proponents of countervailing views". Or, as the director of Melbourne University Press would have put it if such university officials could still write English, it was too one-sidedly critical.
The book itself is no bombshell. Some of the contributions, like Peter Karmel's on university funding, are quite orthodoxly market-minded. In others elderly professors chunter on about "the life of the mind" as if academic life meant vows of poverty and chastity and no-one without a university job could be interested in anything more intellectual than lots of food and beer.
The offices of Allen and Unwin, who eventually published the book, must be quiet and dreary indeed for a blurb-writer to describe the book's contributions as "passionate". The subtitle, "A conversation about values, means and directions" fits better. Much of it might serve as conversation for a High Table sleepy and peevish after a heavy dinner, but it is not rigorous research.
It does not take rigorous research or passionate prose to reveal the big picture. Knowledge as commodity extinguishes knowledge as emancipation. Competitive scrabbling for research grants, commercial sponsorships, articles and books pushed through to publication, and student throughput is elbowing out cooperation to seek truth and enlist others in the search for truth. It is not just that Business Management and Hospitality become more important areas, because more lucrative, than Philosophy or Physics. It is also that Philosophy and Physics themselves are reshaped with an eye to the commercially viable course, or the research project likely to get commercial or government sponsorship.
The most interesting piece, to me, was Stuart McIntyre's and Simon Marginson's on the history of Australian universities. They show that there was no golden age. The early universities were dim and small affairs, with no great freedom of inquiry. Professors were sacked or censured for offending the Church in medical lectures, writing immoral poems, opposing the Boer War, being German during World War 1, or criticising that World War.
"Traditional" academic freedom was not won until the 1930s, and then in the 1950s university administrations, with the help of ASIO, clamped down on it again. Australia is not exceptional here. In 19th century Germany a law was passed specifically to ban Social-Democrats from university posts after a young physics lecturer at the University of Berlin was found to have left-wing sympathies. In Britain most of the important intellectual figures of the 19th century did not and could not get jobs at universities, and in the 1950s Trotsky's biographer Isaac Deutscher found that though his explicit revolutionary Marxist views did not deter the conservative weekly The Economist from employing him, they did bar him from university jobs. Yet there has always been a margin in which universities provide space and comfort for critical thought. That space is being narrowed, not by overt red-baiting and witch-hunting, but by a stifling commercialisation.
Contact: Thenewuq@hotmail.com
Christian religious education was such an integral part of our state primary school's program that when we arrived last year, less than 20 children out of 400 did not attend it. Even my tough atheist daughter felt awkward about refusing to attend, and my younger child did not want to be the only boy who left his classroom during Christianity classes. To make matters worse, the handful of children who did not attend, were an inconvenience to the school, shunted into backrooms and corridors, barely supervised, or else sent into another class.
This year there are at least 80 children not attending Christian classes, and they are grouped with classroom teachers, who work through a planned educational program with them, in topics around cultural and social issues. What has made the change? Religious education in the school was reviewed last year, and the review attracted hot interest from the band of Christians who came to classrooms to present the Christian program, and equally hot interest from a smaller handful of secularists, and people interested in non-Christian spirituality. The school had a new Principal, who was keen to listen to all opinions, to try to satisfy all interests, while avoiding a breakout of religious wars amongst the parent body. What a challenge!
The Christian activists by taking on such a dominant role in the school catalysed a number of parents into speaking strongly against the Christian education program. The end result of the review has definitely improved things for children who do not want to attend Christian education, Yet, we did not persuade the parent body to support secularism, or to recognise that religious education does not belong in state schools at all. The policy is still that parents must withdraw (opt out) their children if they don't want them to go to Christian education, rather than Christian parents having to choose that they do want their children to attend (opt in). Here are a few of the hurdles we struggled with, so that anyone contemplating campaigning for separation of church and state, in our schools, can try to avoid tripping over them. The Christians were an organised lobby group, already used to networking about presenting their program.
We were persuaded by the Principal to accept her frame of reference for the review committee (onto which she placed the three most ardent activists against the program) that we were gathering opinions from the parents, not agitating for our own views. We needed our own support network, but we failed to develop it. The key issue in defining religious education is not that it is about religion, but that it can only be presented by a believer, someone who holds the faith. We didn't perceive this essential point in time and clearly enough, to be able to get it expressed in the questionnaire that went out to parents from the review committee. We think that many parents are quite happy for their children to learn about religions, but do not want them educated in a faith. We have to concede that even if we had understood these points in time to use them, there is a very strong Christian component in our school, and we probably wouldn_t have had a majority vote against the religious program. But I think we could have strengthened the vote against it, and made it an 'opt in' rather than an 'opt out' program. And we could have developed a progressive network to take up other issues of equality and social justice in the school.
The specific changes brought about by the review, that have multiplied the non-attendees numbers by around four, are:
In our previous school, in a different state (NSW), I had contemplated in a distracted way, that religious education should not be run, or at least that there should be a parallel education program for non-attendees. I never got around to taking up the issue, partly because there was no pressure from the school to attend religious education.
A friend of mine whose older children had attended a different state primary school in Sydney found that when several parents sought a non-religious alternative for their children, during the religious education period, the main resistance was from the teachers, who welcomed the brief opportunity to do other work, while the priests and believers came in to teach their classes. I'd be curious to know some secular teacher views on whether the scripture period is officially calculated as teacher time out of the classroom, and what they would recommend for children not attending scripture. Resistance to religious education in state schools does not seem widespread, so long as there is some sense of choice about attending it.
Yet it's not much of a choice if children who do not attend religious education do not have a constructive alternative. Religion really doesn't belong in state schools anyway. Getting rid of it altogether is a bigger job, which might be tackled if we start by working with parents and teachers to ensure that there is a competitive alternative.