Trinity Papers No. 28 - 'Education for Our Times'

EDUCATION FOR OUR TIMES by PROFESSOR DONALD MARKWELL A lecture delivered by Professor Donald Markwell, Warden of Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, for the Academia Sanctae Agnetis and the Royal Society for the Arts, St Agnes’s Church, Glen Huntly, Melbourne, 30 August 2005

TRINITY PAPERS NUMBER 28 – SEPTEMBER 2005

Education for our times

Donald Markwell

EDUCATION FOR OUR TIMES1 A lecture by Professor Donald Markwell, Warden of Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, for the Academia Sanctae Agnetis and the Royal Society for the Arts, St Agnes’s Church, Glen Huntly, Melbourne, Tuesday 30 August 2005.

It is a very great pleasure to be with you tonight, and to speak under the auspices both of the Academia Sanctae Agnetis, of which I have the honour to be patron, and of the Royal Society for the Arts, of which I have been a Fellow for about a decade.

Both the Academia and the RSA exist for the purpose of disseminating knowledge – and that is a central purpose of all education. So it seems very appropriate to discuss important educational issues in a lecture here, and appropriate also to seek to encourage you to discuss these and other issues in the discussion after this lecture.

But what on earth was I thinking when I settled on the words ‘education for our times’ as the title of tonight’s lecture and discussion? For one thing, this implies that I will talk about education generally, when in fact I am not competent to do so, and – while referring to a range of educational issues - will then especially discuss key aspects of higher education. And to say that this is ‘education for our times’ is, I think, to risk misconceiving the purpose of education, which – while it is in our times – is actually, or should be, directed for the future. What we do in education today or tomorrow is about what kind of individuals and society we want to have in the future.

Tonight I’d like, first of all, briefly to survey a spectrum of issues topical in education today, and then to say something about the importance of education to Australia as a competitive economy and civilised society, the importance of higher education in this, and the exaggerated dichotomy between higher education and vocational education, and then briefly to consider what graduates need for the economy and society of the future, the attributes of the finest higher education in the world, how first-rate higher education can be financed, and the implications of our aspiration to world-class education for the government’s proposal to outlaw student amenity fees.

ISSUES IN EDUCATION TODAY Education is very topical in Australia today. Last Wednesday (24 August), for example, when I sat down to prepare tonight’s talk, front-page stories on education featured widely in the newspapers – be it The Herald-Sun and The Age featuring the new school report cards the State Government is introducing in the wake of, but not 1

This lecture draws on, and builds upon, two previous papers: Undergraduate education for the 21st century: Australia at the crossroads (Trinity Paper no. 20, September 2002), and University education: Australia’s urgent need for reform (Trinity Paper no. 27, August 2003). Most, if not all, the quotations or references in this lecture can be readily located by Google search.

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fully meeting, the demands of the federal education minister, Dr Brendan Nelson, for changes in reporting. Or The Age featuring discontent among teachers in one prominent school about their principal. Or The Australian taking as its lead story the new policy of the federal opposition that university students not be required to belong to a student union, but may be required by universities to pay a student services and amenities fee; and a second front-page story in The Australian about a teachers union leader criticising the federal government over values – a remarkable statement, implying that teachers needed to be on the so-called ‘progressive’ rather than ‘conservative’ side of politics, that played into the hands of conservative politicians who accuse teachers of pushing their own political values.

Truly education is in the news. There are many live issues in public discussion. Let me say a little more about some of these.

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We are encountering recurrent forms of the old argument that our primary schools need to get ‘back to basics’ – to focus on the core skills of ‘reading, writing, and arithmetic’. The argument is often not put as simply as that, but that it is what it is. One form of it is discussion of how reading should be taught in schools. In some cases there is criticism of efforts to stretch students’ minds to think critically about what they are reading. Some of these efforts – for example, those that encourage students to consider texts as being creations by their authors in a political and social context – are lambasted as ‘political correctness’.

More generally, of course, there is a major debate about the teaching of values in schools. Last year the Prime Minister caused a stir by saying that many parents were attracted to non-government schools because they had a much greater focus on values than state schools tended to have. To this it was responded that state schools also taught values, including values of tolerance in a socially and culturally diverse context. More recently, a national framework for values education has been agreed between state and federal ministers, and a set of nine values to be taught in schools has been published.

While these values are unexceptionable, the requirement that the poster they appear in – featuring Simpson and his donkey – be displayed in schools as a condition of funding has aroused concern that this poster does not necessarily capture the values that most need promoting in Australia today. Simpson and his donkey, combined with the requirement that schools to get federal funding must have functioning flagpoles, are seen to represent a particular, and not a universally appealing, presentation of Australian values. The federal Treasurer has recently argued that school teachers are encouraging antiAmericanism, perhaps under the guise of anti-globalisation, among school students. There has been an implied suggestion by some that some Islamic schools are not teaching core ‘Australian values’, or indeed may be encouraging values at variance with them. Others argue that our schools, and indeed our universities, have important roles to play in encouraging intercultural understanding, one of the great necessities of our age and beyond.

It is argued that our schools do not give sufficiently clear indication to students and their parents as to how well they are doing, including how well they are doing in comparison with other students in their school. So there is pressure on state governments to ensure that clearer report cards are issued, including an indication of students’ ranking by comparison with other 3

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students. Against this it is argued that such rankings undermine the selfconfidence of students and that it is better for motivating students to compare their work with the standard of work expected at that stage than to rate them in comparison with other individual students.

The growth in number and popularity of independent schools of various kinds has attracted much comment. An issue of some importance in last year’s federal election campaign was the proposal of the Labor Party to reduce the federal funding for a significant number of non-government schools – a proposal that was widely criticised as reintroducing the politics of class warfare into Australia, but which was defended on the basis that too much money was going to those not in need, and too little to those in need.

Renewed interest in selective state schools has been encouraged by, amongst others, the federal Treasurer, Peter Costello.

Co-education issues have been topical. In recent years there has been much focus on boys’ education, and debate about whether or not boys do less well than girls at school, and if so, what should be done about it. The responsibility of educational institutions for encouraging genuine equality between girls and boys, and to encourage a society of genuine equality of women and men, has perhaps not received as much attention as it should. The move of many formerly all-male institutions to accept girls or women as students in the 1970s means that many such institutions are in this decade marking the 30th anniversary of co-education, and I think it is timely for them to review whether they are truly co-educational, or whether in significant ways they remain male-dominated institutions which have still not made the full transformation to genuine co-education.

It is argued that Australia has a shortage of people with key skills – for example, but far from only, skills in technical trades. This leads on the one hand to moves to import skills – to expand actively our search for people overseas, including expatriate Australians, to come to enter the Australian workforce – and to calls for greater focus on technical education. And so we have statements such as the Prime Minister’s saying that technical education has been under-emphasised by comparison with getting a degree, and proposals for the creation of technical schools by the federal government. I will return to this.

Around Australia, governments are seeking ways to increase the proportion of young people who complete secondary school, continue with study and training after leaving school, and make a successful transition from study to work. While this is often referred to as ‘post-compulsory education’, one currently-controversial aspect is the move in several states, opposed by the federal government, to raise the minimum school leaving age.

One part of the current debate on education in Australia is what should be the relative power and role of the states and the federal government. The actions of the present federal government to, as it sees it, raise educational standards involves an exercise of federal power, including the placing of conditions on federal government grants of money, which are seen by state leaders as cutting across the role of the states. Last year the federal government promised to make funds available to schools on the basis of proposals from parent bodies, in conjunction with school principals, going straight to the federal education department rather than the state education departments. In the tertiary sector, there has been talk about the fact that our universities are 4

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mainly creations of state parliaments, existing under state Acts, but which receive a good deal of funding from federal government, and so are regulated both by state and federal governments. There has been the suggestion that our universities should become subject to federal jurisdiction only. The apparent growth of federal ministerial interventionism has not been well calculated to make this attractive to university leaders who might otherwise welcome deregulation under a single jurisdiction.

There are, in fact, many live issues relating to our universities. For example, how much of the costs of higher education should be met by the federal government? What conditions should it place on Commonwealth grants?

Aspects of this complex topic include the proposed allocation of some funding to select universities on a basis of the ranking of teaching performance by each university, this ranking being extremely controversial.

Another aspect is the argument for indexation of government grants for universities, so that they keep pace with inflation. Another aspect is the government’s making grants conditional on universities agreeing to particular terms for workplace relations, as well as, less controversially, for governance.

How much of the cost of higher education should be met by the students themselves? And what should be the terms of this? I will return to some discussion of HECS, fees, and loans.

How should federal government funding of university research be distributed?

At present there is a great deal of discussion about the development of a socalled Research Quality Framework, a basis for assessment of the quality of research undertaken in each field in each university, influenced by the British Research Assessment Exercise, and this assessment guiding the allocation of federal research funding. In July, the federal education minister, Dr Nelson, announced the abolition of the Board of the Australian Research Council, the country’s principal research funding agency. This abolition was widely seen as enabling a minister who had already – remarkably – vetoed some individual research grants approved by the ARC to have yet greater power over research funding decisions.

There has been much debate this year about what the defining characteristics of a university should be, with the federal government rightly keen to encourage diversity in our higher education sector and opening up the question of what institutions might reasonably be allowed to call themselves ‘universities’. There is a growing sector of private higher education providers alongside our public universities, and there are voices saying that it is not necessary for a university to be a research-intensive institution; teaching-only institutions should be recognised as universities, it is argued. There is no doubt that there is far greater diversity in the university and college sector in the United States than there is in Australia, and the pressures to break out of our conformist mould are strong.

It is not possible tonight to traverse all these issues in depth, even if I were capable, as I am not, of doing so. I therefore propose to discuss a subset of these issues.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION TO AUSTRALIA AS A COMPETITIVE ECONOMY AND CIVILISED SOCIETY

It seems to me that educational issues are so topical in Australia today because, amongst those who seek to influence public attitudes and public policy in one direction or another, there is a general realisation that education is crucially important for the two things we – most Australians – recognise as desirable: a competitive economy and a civilised society.

Even to use that phrase – a competitive economy and a civilised society – is to invite disagreement and questioning. But if we regard it as a widely acceptable pair of goals, we still face the fact that there is so much debate about education because people disagree both about the ends and about the means to them. Do we attach greater weight to a competitive economy or a civilised society? Do we therefore place greater weight on skills training or on educational institutions as the critics and consciences of society? What, indeed, needs to be done in education to promote a competitive economy, and what needs to be done to ensure a civilised society?

Two years ago, during the debate on the so-called ‘Nelson reforms’ relating to Australia’s universities, it was possible to argue that there was a consensus among political, educational and other opinion leaders on the need for reform – indeed urgent reform – to make possible a much higher quality of university education in this country. The consensus reflected widespread agreement around a number of propositions: •

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That we live in a world of increasing global competition in which the key determinants of the success of societies and economies will be the knowledge and high-level skills of their people – so-called ‘knowledge workers’ in a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘knowledge society’.

That in this global knowledge economy, there is a direct link between the quality of Australia’s higher education – its chief high-level knowledge generation and transmission mechanism – and its economic and social performance.

That Australia’s universities do not have the resources at present to compete with the world’s leading universities, and that there has been a significant deterioration in this position over the last decade.

That a very significant increase in resources, and perhaps significant other reforms, were essential to rectify this.

That to fail to make significant – perhaps very radical – change was to risk Australia’s failing to achieve its economic and social potential, and falling behind our international competitors.

In my view, these propositions remain as true today as they were two years ago. Yet they appear to have been eclipsed in public debate by other emphases, and this concerns me a great deal.

Two years ago, Labor and the Democrats argued that our universities were in ‘crisis’.

The federal education minister, Dr Nelson, argued that they were at the ‘crossroads’.

Dr Nelson described it as an ‘incontrovertible fact’ that ‘universities need longer-term access to more resources – both public and private’.

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No serious commentator seemed to dispute that two decades of under-funding and (more contentiously) over-regulation of our universities had seriously damaged the strength of our universities. The facts spoke for themselves, and I will give some facts about one depressing aspect – staff:student ratios – somewhat later in this lecture.

Rupert Murdoch in 2001 had made a vigorous call for the revitalisation of Australian higher education. He said that ‘without urgent support for our centres of learning, Australia is at risk of becoming worse than globally disadvantaged: it is no exaggeration to say we are threatened with global irrelevance.’

In 2002, the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Professor Alan Gilbert, said: ‘There is a resource crisis in Australian universities that should be a matter of deep public and political concern… The findings of international benchmarking are arresting and disturbing. In resources-per-student or resources-perresearcher, Australia has no university in the first 100 in the world, and its competitiveness is slipping. Australian universities are not sufficiently resourced to be internationally competitive at the highest levels. That is a bedrock premise for higher education policy development.’

The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Ian Macfarlane, followed this up. Citing Alan Gilbert that Australia has no university in the world’s top 100 by per capita resources, Mr Macfarlane said: ‘What [this] suggests is that, although we have made great progress in the breadth of our education system, we cannot make the same claim about the depth. At the highest level of higher education we are not keeping up.’

Mr Macfarlane urged that something be done about this – radical action so that Australian higher education does not continue to ‘slip further behind world best standard’.

At the end of 2003, the Government succeeded in having adopted the Nelson reforms • • • •

that included some, though highly conditional, increase in federal government funding for universities, that enabled universities to increase the HECS (higher education contribution scheme) charge in most subjects by 25%, and most universities have done that, that enabled universities to increase the number of Australian undergraduate students paying fees for their university course to 35% of the student cohort, and that combined these HECS and fee measures with more generous loan provisions for students, so that in most cases Australian students did not have to pay either HECS or fees up front for their degrees.

In my view these reforms were necessary and desirable, and a significant and overdue step forward in a process of reform than needs to continue.

The passage of the Nelson reforms, the key aspects of which have come into effect this year, has made it possible for universities to increase the resources contributed to the cost of their university education by Australian students – but those students generally do not have to pay this money up front, but can borrow it through the government’s higher education loan program and pay it back when they are earning a 7

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reasonable income. Unfortunately, there is a limit of $50,000 on what students can borrow for their university fees, and some university courses in fact cost more than this. In my view, this is the greatest problem with the Nelson package, and it is a real equity – fairness – problem; and I urge the Government to make the loans scheme markedly more generous, as part of a wider review of student finance which I will urge later.

A paradox with the Nelson reforms is that, while in some respects they were deregulatory, in other ways they represent an increase, what appears to be a continuing increase, in federal government regulation of our universities. One of the difficult balances in higher education policy is between the accountability of institutions for receiving public funds, and other legitimate grounds for regulation, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the crucial importance of the autonomy of institutions. It is no exaggeration to say that the autonomy – the freedom – of universities from government control is, in the modern age, one of the essential bulwarks of a free society. And such autonomy is an essential prerequisite for universities fulfilling their education, research, and community service functions as effectively as they can. The march of ministerial interventionism is not something to be welcomed. It is extraordinary, and indefensible, that the detailed government regulation of universities has increased precisely as the government share of funding our universities has declined.

While the Nelson reforms are enabling universities to gain further much-needed resources from Australian students, it would be wrong to think that our universities are suddenly awash with cash. Apart from other factors, there has been considerable volatility in the recruitment of overseas students coming to Australia – just as there has been considerably volatility in overseas students going to the US, New Zealand, and the UK – and this has caused real budgetary headaches in many Australian institutions.

The passage of the Nelson reforms at some real political cost to the Government, the publication of some international league tables of universities that suggest – wrongly in my view – that there are Australian universities that are ‘elite’ by world standards, an emphasis on the importance of technical or vocational education rather than university education for meeting skills shortages, and the diversion of energy into the side-show of so-called ‘voluntary student unionism’, have all contributed to reducing the sense of urgency in various quarters about the need for further reform to enhance the quality of university education in this country. I say this notwithstanding the continuing flow of ministerial reviews.

Having said that, let me cite a couple of important recent instances of advocacy of the role that enhanced higher education can play for Australia’s economic prospects. The Business Council of Australia has this month issued an important report entitled Locking in or Losing Prosperity: Australia’s Choice. The report, based on detailed economic modelling by Access Economics, arose because the Business Council believed it important that Australians understand better the benefits already received from economic reform, and the importance of further economic reform to ensuring Australia’s continuing prosperity. Amongst other areas for further reform that were identified as essential for ensuring Australia’s continuing prosperity was ‘increasing education and skill development’. The report argued this:

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People with higher levels of educational attainment and skills have higher participation rates and tend to stay in the workforce for longer. Raising the average level of educational attainment (and ongoing skill development) can also deliver higher levels of productivity.

The study for the Business Council suggested that increasing the shares of people achieving university degrees and non-university diplomas by 5 percentage points each over the next ten years would contribute usefully to increasing the average annual growth rates that Australia could achieve over the next 20 years.

It is not only the Business Council of Australia that is arguing along these lines.

Earlier this month, the Labor Premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks, issued a paper entitled A Third Wave of National Reform. It identifies five areas that should be at forefront of the next generation of reform aimed at enhancing Australia’s economic performance and also social cohesion: reform of regulation, infrastructure, health, education and training, and work incentives.

While the Howard Government criticizes the lack of emphasis here on industrial or workplace relations reform, it is instructive that this Labor reform package – like the Business Council of Australia’s – places such emphasis on education. This, of course, is not surprising given the emphasis the Labor Party has given to the notion of Australia as a knowledge economy or knowledge society.

One thing which is very interesting in the Bracks Government’s national reform agenda is that it places strong emphasis on higher education – that is, university education. I quote: Maximising Australia’s economic potential will require a greater focus on developing people with the advanced skills that are critical to higher productivity, and the introduction of new ideas, technologies and processes.

An immediate concern is to address current skills shortages, which are of both a ‘vocational’ and a ‘professional’ nature. The National Skills Shortage List (DEWR, 2004) for Victoria identifies shortages in 12 significant professional areas and four trade areas.

There are growing skills shortages in a number of occupations filled by university graduates. While the Australian higher education system has expanded rapidly in recent decades – with participation among school leavers doubling from 15 to 30 per cent between 1983 and 1999 – there are worrying signs for a nation needing more workers with advanced skills. Since 1996, there has been limited growth in domestic undergraduate commencements overall, with declines since 2001 in important disciplines such as management and commerce, IT and engineering courses (Birrell et al., 2005).

Given the importance of advanced skills which support the introduction of productivity-enhancing ideas, technologies and processes, under-investment in higher education will prove to be a false economy in the decades ahead.

The focus in this passage from Steve Bracks’s Third Wave of National Reform is on the role of higher education in Australia’s economic prosperity. It is important that it makes the point that many of the current skills shortages in this country relate to

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professional skills – subjects taught in universities, from accounting to civil engineering to a wide range of health professions and even in some places some kinds of lawyers! This is clear from looking at the National Skill Shortage List published by the Federal Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.

In thinking about education, we should not, of course, be overly pre-occupied with today’s specific skill shortages: tomorrow’s will be different, and governments are not well placed to know what they will be. Yet the point that many of our current skill shortages relate to university-taught subjects is an important response to a line of thinking which goes like this: Australia has major skills shortages; these are of a vocational or technical kind, and require vocational or technical education; there has been a tendency to downgrade the status of vocational or technical education over recent decades as there has been more emphasis on the value of a university education; we must therefore redress the balance by raising the status of vocational education and reducing the status of university education.

He may not have meant exactly this, but statements by the Prime Minister, John Howard, have been taken to mean or imply this. During the campaign for the October 2004 election, Mr Howard said such things as this – and I quote from his speech to the National Press Club on 7 October last year: We will immediately set about … to tackle the chronic skills shortage in this country. Unless something is done about that skills shortage it will represent a growing threat to the maintenance of our higher levels of productivity. We need to change the culture. We need to have an Australian nation in which a high quality technical qualification is as prized as a university degree. We need to recognise that we made a mistake decades ago when we began to assume that the only way a young person could have a hopeful career, was to go to university. I don’t seek to denigrate or reduce the quality in any way of a university education rather I seek to elevate the quality and the prestige and the standing of technical education and that is why we are so strongly committed to a comprehensive plan of reform in this area, including the establishment throughout Australia in areas of skills shortage and high youth unemployment, of 24 federally run Australia Technical Colleges.

They will be answerable to boards, they will be run by their principals. The staff will be recruited from the best available and they will be given performance based pay and they will be designed to encourage people in years 11 and 12 to focus on the quality of technical education as the basis not only of a long term career as an employee, but also with the option importantly of starting your own business.

We’ll be funding the provision of careers advisers to go into the schools to encourage people about the advantages of technical education. We will be providing more help and support for apprentices, importantly the extension of the youth allowance now available to a university student, but not available to an apprentice and we’ll provide Commonwealth learning scholarships to make apprenticeships in traditional trade areas even more attractive.

In a radio interview on 3 March this year, Mr Howard said, and I quote again In the last election campaign the best applause line I had on a policy issue was when I said I wanted an Australian nation where a high grade technical qualification was as prized as a university degree. And I really mean that. I think

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we did make a huge mistake around the time you’re talking about of denigrating skilled tradesmen, and we did it as a country, and there were plenty of parents who encouraged their children to stay at school longer than either their ambition or their ability for a particular type of study justified. And, as a result, we downgraded the importance of trade skills in our community and we are paying the price for that now.

Labor’s Lindsay Tanner has referred to this approach by the Prime Minister as ‘the devaluation of learning’. Amongst other things, he argues, such statements encourage children and their parents in families of modest circumstances not to value highly their obtaining the best education they can. Education, as we all know, is a great creator of opportunities for individuals, and the creation and seizing of educational opportunities is a great force for social mobility.

It was interesting that on 9 March this year, just days after Mr Howard made that statement on radio about his ‘best applause line’, a Liberal Senator from Queensland, Senator George Brandis, made a speech in the Senate which was also an implicit response to Mr Howard’s emphasis. Senator Brandis said: … at a time when so much of the focus of public debate is, for understandable reasons, upon vocational education, I also want to say a word in defence of pure learning – the pursuit and advancement of knowledge for its own sake – because, without a philosophical and institutional commitment to the advancement of learning as an end in itself, there will not be the beneficial application of that knowledge to the advancement of mankind, nor will there be the intellectual excellence for which Australia’s elite universities are internationally respected.

Senator Brandis continued, and I quote: In making that case, I am in good company. My party’s founder, Sir Robert Menzies, of all the Prime Ministers this country has had, was the one who valued scholarship most highly; who regarded the aspiration of people of modest background, such as his own parents, to see their offspring achieve a university education as one of the noblest aspirations which a parent can have for a child.

Senator Brandis quoted from the speech which Menzies made on receiving an honorary degree at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1941, during the Second World War. Menzies, addressing the Chancellor of the University, said: I have a life-long interest in the work of universities. I have, Sir, and I say it without shame, an almost passionate belief in pure learning. I have never been able to accept the view that a university is a mere technical school…

Why, Sir, do I defend pure learning? Because to me pure learning, the freeing of the mind from the inhibitions of ignorance, is one of those great moving forces that distinguish the civilized world from the uncivilized world, one of those great underlying things for which this war is being fought. And because I believe that, because I believe that this precious thing, this scholarship for which universities stand, is an essential ingredient in the freedom not only of the human mind but of the human spirit…

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Senator Brandis also quoted a speech Menzies had given in the House of Representatives in July 1945. Menzies said: The university is not a professional “shop”… As the word [‘university’] implies, the university must not be narrow or unduly specialist in its outlook. It must teach and encourage the free search for the truth. That search must increasingly extend to, but is not to be confined to, the physical resources of the world or of space. The scientist is of great and growing importance, and what we propose to do will, I believe, enable many more scientists to be trained in proper circumstances. …

Let us have more scientists, and more humanists. Let the scientists be touched and informed by the humanities. Let the humanists be touched and informed by science, so that they may not be lost in abstractions derived from out-dated knowledge or circumstances. That proposition underlines the whole university idea. It warrants and requires a great variety of faculties and the constant intermingling of those who engage in their disciplines. To perform those vital tasks our universities must be equipped …to meet the challenges which, both in quality and quantity, become more urgent and insistent every day.

Senator Brandis stated that ‘in his second term in government, Menzies did more for Australian universities than any Prime Minister has done before or since’. Senator Brandis also quoted from another Liberal figure of distinction, Sir Paul Hasluck, who in 1973 as Governor-General gave a speech at the University of Queensland simply entitled ‘On Learning’. Sir Paul said, and I quote: We live in a period when all manner of men are expressing views about education and advancing ideas about the best ways of spending more money … on education.

An industrial and commercial society is demanding that the education system be an assembly line to produce a regular supply of skilled hired hands. Various persons who customarily speak in the name of the nation talk of the nation’s need for this or that kind of expert or specialist.

It is a long time since I heard anyone make a speech about any need for learned men. I have an inkling that if our universities or any other tertiary institution or research centre did produce a few men and women of great learning, the nation would be proud of them just as it is proud if some other course of training, in which the nation has taken little part, produces a youngster who can swim a hundred metres faster than anyone else in the world…

Yet learning is important. It is important, not so that we can do some national boasting at the number of medals we get in some Olympic Games of scholarship, but so that we establish the quality of the whole of our educational endeavour in Australia. It is important, too, so that we shall have in Australia a body of learned men and women whose standards of judgment and level of knowledge will be such as to create an intellectual environment in which all that is cheap, shoddy, glib, ignorant, ill organized, and unverified will be revealed in its ugliness and pettiness and rejected and so that our people will become accustomed to and require a better level of learning from those who purport to instruct or to lead them. It is important, too, so that we shall be a country in which scholars in all disciplines will be recognised for their assiduous search for truth and that search will continue with constancy and faith.

How do we achieve this? I do not suggest that it can be done by selecting this or that educational institution and describing it as a hall of learning. I think rather that

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it can be done in all institutions and that the basic need is personal and group loyalty to the ideal of learning and devotion to the search for truth.

And so I come back to the proposition I put much earlier – that an emphasis on education, and not least on university education, is important both for a competitive economy and for a civilised society.

I would like to argue that in seeking to ensure an appropriate level of respect and encouragement for vocational or technical education, we should not – even implicitly – denigrate university education. We need high-quality technical education. But we also need the highest quality university graduates.

WHAT GRADUATES NEED FOR THE ECONOMY AND SOCIETY OF THE FUTURE What sorts of attributes should our top university graduates have?

Mr Mark Goodsall of the Australian Industry Group said in an interview on 17 August this year: What employers want interestingly, when we survey our members, as much as they’d like kids who have got some technical knowledge of maths and science and have say a qualification or heading towards a technical qualification, they’re also strongly interested in kids’ employability skills, which is their communication skills – written and oral – their ability to work in a team, … their ability to solve problems.

The skills of communication, written and oral, ability to work in teams, and the ability to solve problems are central to the key attributes which high-quality university education should help students to develop. The comments by this spokesman for the Australian Industry Group resonate with those of other employer groups in Australia and overseas about the sorts of qualities they seek in graduates.

These are the qualities which many employers and which many educational leaders have traditionally recognised as being encouraged through a liberal education – • • •

an education that encourages intellectual and personal breadth, including learning through wide reading and debate about a diverse range of human experience and the clash of great ideas; an education that, through such learning, encourages the key intellectual skills of thinking for yourself, expressing yourself clearly, and interpreting the nuances of words and other things in their context; and an education that encourages a student to be an active citizen in society, who has thought carefully about his or her values and beliefs, and who has wide and humane international and inter-cultural awareness and understanding.

There are some signs of a modestly growing, if still small, interest in Australia in moving in the direction of the American university system, where students generally undertake a liberal arts education in their first few years of tertiary study – often giving them a wide if not deep understanding of science, history, literature and 13

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perhaps the arts more generally, social sciences, a language, and moral reasoning – before either entering the workforce or going on, as post-graduate students, to study for the particular profession they wish to enter, say medicine or law. Those who enter the workforce will gain, often with the help of their employer, whatever vocationallyspecific education or training they need.

I believe that Australia would gain immensely from moving towards such a system of widespread liberal education preceding professional or other vocational study. In all that could be said about this, let me just make these points: •

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in a world of rapid change, such an education should help equip students with the skills they will need of being able to master new and changing bodies of knowledge and expertise which they have not previously mastered, and so to be able to respond effectively to the change and growth of knowledge which is and will be one of the hallmarks of this 21st century: in other words, liberal education will help us with the skills needs of the ever-changing future; liberal education, combined where appropriate with specialist and professional or vocational study, should help students to understand their specialty in its wide context, rather than simply being swamped by the details of their specialised field; such liberal education encourages, if not requires, undergraduates to think about issues of values, and about moral reasoning, and this seems to me desirable for society as well as for each individual; and it is striking that, in the United States, which is (for all its faults) such a dynamic and innovative society and economy, it is accepted by political, professional, business and other opinion leaders that such a liberal education is so worthwhile as to be worth the investment of years of students’ time and of immense money.

The return on the investment is great.

Amongst scientists and technologists who this year have been urging breadth of study and of intellectual interests, somehow combining scientific and humanities awareness, I would mention three in particular: • •

•

Lord Broers, the Australian engineer who has served as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, in his fifth Reith Lecture for the BBC on ‘The Triumph of Technology’; Professor Peter Doherty, the Australian Nobel laureate and immunologist, whose charming book, published last week, entitled A Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize, repeatedly refers to the value of wide reading, such as in history and biography, and endorses liberal undergraduate education; and the Governor of Victoria, John Landy, an agricultural scientist, whose James Darling Memorial Oration, also last week, urged the value of broad education.

Apart from anything else, a greater shared intellectual understanding between research scientists and venture capitalists – who very often do not understand each other, I suspect, coming as they tend to do from two very different cultures - should considerably increase the likelihood of successful commercial development and application of research, for example in such fields as biotechnology.

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THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE FINEST HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE WORLD A top student in the United States has the opportunity to get an outstanding education at universities such as Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, or a leading liberal arts college, such as Amherst or Swarthmore. A top student in the United Kingdom has the opportunity to get an exceptional education at universities such as Oxford and Cambridge.

Although Australia’s leading universities provide a reasonably good standard of education by broad international standards, it seems to me irrefutable that even our best universities do not offer an education of the quality offered in the leading universities of the world. Australian students do not have the opportunity to get such an education in this country; and this country does not get the benefit – economic and social – of their being so well educated. It is a thankless task to point this out, but it is true, and it is an important truth.

Let me simply list the attributes that I identify in the finest undergraduate institutions in the world, such as those I have named. They have concentrations of the very best students from around their country and indeed from around the world. Generally these students come together in a residential college community. They benefit from individual mentoring or advising from senior academics. There is a high quality of academic instruction and staff, with an emphasis on small group teaching and individual attention. This teaching stresses genuine mastery of material, independent thought, and clear communication. The focus is generally non-vocational, providing some form of liberal education. In such institutions there is a sense of engagement in a rich intellectual and public debate outside the classroom, strong attention to student welfare and pastoral care, concern for the development of character and values, and indeed often some encouragement to spiritual reflection. There will be rich opportunities for extra-curricular activities of a high quality – be they in sport, culture or community service – from which students gain much in their personal development. All this will generally be in a university or college considerably smaller than the typical Australian university.

Please forgive the advertisement, but these are attributes to which we, in my college of the University of Melbourne, aspire. But the reality is that, outside such a situation, most of these attributes are rarely to be found even in Australia’s best universities.

Let us take one of those attributes of the world’s best universities: emphasis on small group teaching and individual academic attention. This depends on a relatively small number of students to each member of academic staff. In Australian universities, we have moved from 12 students per staff member in the 1970s to roughly 21 students per staff member in 2003. The range for the top eight US universities is 6 to 8 per staff member – compared with our average 21 per staff member.

What follows from Australia’s adverse student:staff ratios is • •

the crowding of lectures, and the effective abolition of the tutorial in many subjects in many Australian universities, the limited availability, or unavailability, of academic staff for private discussion, and 15

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the high and increasing unlikelihood that students will get to know academic staff, and that academics will get to know students – relationships which are at the heart of the finest university education.

Our students go from secondary schools where there are 12 and a half students per teacher to universities which used to have such a ratio but which today have 21 students per academic staff member. No wonder the transition from school to university, which has always raised difficulties, is now of such particular concern in universities.

HOW FIRST-RATE HIGHER EDUCATION CAN BE FINANCED The resources needed to restore Australia’s past staff:student ratios, let alone to achieve the world’s best standards, are, of course, immense.

The resources per student in Australia are far lower than in the world’s leading universities. The Productivity Commission reported in 2002 that ‘Harvard University’s assets alone … are larger than the combined assets of Australia’s 37 publicly funded universities’.

The leading US universities – with their strong focus on liberal undergraduate education – are financed by student fees and supported by philanthropic alumni, companies, foundation, and others. There is also a strong focus on ensuring, through what is called ‘need-blind’ admission and scholarships and financial aid, that the ablest students can obtain this high quality education regardless of their means.

We are a very long way from achieving the financial capacity of the leading US universities. Some people respond to this by saying that we shouldn’t even try to compete with them, or to compare ourselves with them. This is rather like wanting to do well at sport in international competition, so long as we don’t compare ourselves with those who keep winning all the time!

I would argue that seven major changes are crucial for our universities (focussing here, as in most of this lecture, on undergraduate education): • •

• •

first, while I think a number of our universities have made real progress in this, we need a much sharper focus on ensuring the highest quality of teaching and learning, and on the overall student experience; secondly, as I have argued, a stronger emphasis on liberal undergraduate education, aimed at developing skills of thinking and communication and a broad understanding of the world around us, rather than premature specialisation in narrow vocational courses; thirdly, a further serious boost to public funds for our universities, at least in the form of genuine indexation of Commonwealth grants to universities; fourthly, something I believe will both provide universities with greater resources to raise quality and will force them to focus on the quality of education – further significant deregulation of the capacity of universities to charge HECS or fees to students, crucially supplemented with loans and scholarships so that students are able to get the highest quality of education regardless of their means; 16

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•

•

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fifthly, in my view, equity – fairness – requires that there be a comprehensive review, nationally as well as within each institution, of how university students who are rightly being called upon to contribute more to the cost of their university education can actually be enabled to do so – that is, I am calling for a comprehensive review of all aspects of student finance, including scholarships, loans, employment opportunities for students, financial assistance, living allowances, and the like, including for students undertaking university-level studies in private as well as public institutions; sixthly, we need the restoration of an independent body such as the old Australian Universities Commission as a buffer between universities and government, to allocate public funds and advise on what should be minimal regulation in a way that preserves the independence of universities from political interference, while promoting excellence and equity in our university system, and seventhly, we need the development of a much deeper culture of philanthropy towards our universities and colleges.

I am deeply honoured that we have with us tonight one of the great leaders in educational philanthropy in this country, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF OUR ASPIRATION TO WORLD-CLASS EDUCATION FOR THE GOVERNMENT’S PROPOSAL TO OUTLAW STUDENT AMENITIES FEES The view I have outlined on what constitutes world-class higher education stresses the sense of students belonging to an academic community in which there is a rich array of extra-curricular activities – cultural, sporting, community service, and so on. Such activities, and other student services, are an inherent part of what a university should be. They need to be paid for, and all Australian public universities have done this by requiring students generally to make a financial contribution to them. This is like ratepayers’ or taxpayers’ money being used to ensure that a local community has sporting and other recreational facilities, which may be made available at a charge or free to their users. In our universities, sporting and other amenities and services have generally been provided by student unions, to which students have been required to belong – just as traditionally they have been required to belong to ‘common rooms’ or other student associations in the great collegiate universities of the world. Australia’s student representative bodies, with their fiercely contested elections, have been training grounds for many political, business, and other leaders over the last century in this country – Sir Robert Menzies not least among them! They have provided a context in which many students – though still too few – have been encouraged to engage as active citizens in the university community, a training in active citizenship for their later lives. The sporting facilities they provide have been the training ground for many leading Australian sportspeople – many Olympians among them.

Motivated, I believe, by long-held hostility to requiring people to belong to unions or associations, and by the use of a small proportion of student union fees for political activities, the government proposes to make it illegal to require a student to belong to a student union. But more than this, it is proposed to prohibit universities charging students a comprehensive fee for non-academic amenities and services. The effect will be to devastate extra-curricular activities, such as sport, in our universities. This is precisely the opposite of what should be done to encourage world-class universities 17

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to offer a world-class student experience. Moreover, if we damage the quality of student experience by diminishing the provision of amenities and services in our universities, we will reduce our capacity to attract and retain full fee-paying students from overseas, who make such an important contribution to the budgets as well as to the cultural diversity of our universities.

I urge Coalition senators to support the reasonable compromise which, at the price of some criticism, the Labor leadership adopted last week – of saying that universities may not compel students to belong to a student union, but of allowing universities to charge an amenities and services fee.

CONCLUSION One of the reasons for being so critical of the government’s fixation with so-called ‘voluntary student unionism’ is that it diverts attention from what really matters in higher education: how Australia’s universities can be improved so that they, and our schools, play their fullest possible role in promoting in this country what I have called a competitive economy and a civilised society.

Although there is much of which we can be proud in our universities, and in our schools, there is in both great room for improvement, and I think it is desperately important that we who care about education and the future of this country do all we can to work for this improvement. I hope that the Academia and the RSA in Australia will play active roles in this.

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Education for our times

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Trinity Papers: This paper represents the twenty-eighth in a series published from time to time by Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, which focus upon broad issues facing the community in such areas as education, ethics, history, politics, religion and science.

Further Copies: Copies of this and other Trinity Papers are available upon request from: Tutorial Office Trinity College Royal Parade Parkville VIC 3052 Australia Telephone: Facsimile: Email:

+61 3 9348 7100 +61 3 9348 7610 enquiries@trinity.unimelb.edu.au

Trinity Papers can also be found on the College’s website at: www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/publications/papers/ About the Author: Professor Donald Markwell has been Warden of Trinity College in the University of Melbourne since 1997, and is a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Political Science and Centre for Public Policy in the University of Melbourne. Rhodes Scholar for Queensland in 1981, he was Proctor Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in 1984-85, a Research Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1985-86, and Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Merton College, Oxford, and a lecturer in the University of Oxford from 1986 to 1997.

Copyright © Professor Donald Markwell 2005

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