With the news today that the Australian Government has decided to double the fees for courses in the Humanities, specifically targeting philosophy, and urging future students to choose subjects more attuned ‘the job market’, I am simply appalled. All of this comes from a far too narrow sense of the question, ‘What’s the use?’
What is the use of an education? Well we might ask.
Today, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Divinity, Professor Peter Sherlock, explained to us that the Government’s plan is to change the way it funds courses, so that some students pay a much higher proportion of the cost of delivering their degrees:
The outcome of this process is that courses in social sciences, philosophy and history, behavioural sciences, communications, management, commerce, law and economics will see significant increases in the student contribution required, to around 90% of the total course cost.
This means that from 2021 undergraduate degrees in arts, theology or counselling will cost new students around $14,000 per annum, an increase in most cases of over 100%.
(This statement does not apply to the University of Divinity, which sets its own fees.)
There can be no doubt that there is an ideologically driven purpose in this policy shift, right at the time when our universities are ‘on their knees’ financially and many are facing huge job losses. The Minister said straight out that students should choose units of study on the basis of what will meet the job market. This is the Government’s response to the universities’ appeal for increased funding: make the students pay.
Education is so much more than satisfying ‘the job market’—and for those at university today and in the years to come, whatever is meant by that phrase is surely one of the great challenges. It is estimated that students today will probably have as many as 5 or 6 careers during their working lives and most of the jobs they will undertake do not presently exist. So one wonders how students will be able to decide what courses really will meet ‘the job market’.
That leads, then, to the fundamental question of how people make decisions, which in turn leads to precisely the question of what education really is about and for. Education is so much more than qualification for, or training in, a task, even a profession as skilled as (say) medicine or scientific research. To engage in such professional activity, one needs also to be able to think beyond the immediate, into issues of methodology, epistemology (how we know and what it means to know), the values and markers that define ‘progress’ and ‘success’. In other words, one has to think and explore beyond the immediate use into wider questions of usage, meaning and value. Rarely does anyone engage with this wider thinking alone: it is usually and is best undertaken collaboratively. Research and reflection require relationship skills as well as ‘know-how’. This is why for the last decade or more universities have been talking about the formation of people for professions, not just their qualification. The word character has featured in these discussions. A degree in Engineering is as much about the formation of a person who can go on learning, analysing, working with others to discover problems and possibilities, as it is about getting the maths and physics and skills in design and planning. Of course they are essential, but in addition to that the graduate needs to be a person who knows what to do with them: what really is their use. Those educational-philosophical questions apply in every discipline and will do more and more as the pace of change, including in ‘the job market’ increases.
In short, philosophy, people skills, areas of the social sciences actually undergird all these areas of education. It it the tragic failing of our situation that those who have found their way into our national leadership failed to realise this during their years at university and since.
We who care about the human spirit, a civil society and the future of our civilisation, not just ‘the economy’, have a profound struggle on our hands. Perhaps we are indeed ‘reaping the whirlwind’ of the culture we have allowed to develop, imagining for too long that these matters would look after themselves. If anything, this is an even more threatening reality than the Covid-19 pandemic.
What we must not do is retreat into our private worlds. We must continue to value discussion, public debate wherever we can manage it, and the practice of the values of critical thinking, the nurture of character, the enjoyment of things that cannot be bought, and the affirmation of human life, including those different and differing.