Education

Dr Johnson wrote in his review of Soame Jenyns’s A Free Enquiry into the Nature of the Origin of Good and Evil: ‘The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ One could argue, in the context of contemporary scholarly writing, that increasingly the only end is to satisfy the evaluative demands of research councils and university administrators. The controversial use of quantitative publications figures, as in the 2012 Sydney University assessment of individual researchers, reflects the fact that scholarly behaviour, more than ever, is being shaped by the reward trail, one that is almost as dependent on where and how you publish as it is on the actual content.

J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999) dramatises a cynical middle-aged professor of literature reduced to teaching communication skills at a university whose great rationalisation has turned scholars into mere clerks. Richard Hil, in his Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University, does what Coetzee’s jaded character could never do: write a socially responsible book about the robotic processes of over-administration that academics have come to endure. Hil describes a ‘turgid rationalist’ and ‘capitalist market’ system that has transformed universities from being centres of teaching and research into nightmare factories of marketing and bureaucracy.

For a young academic in need of a job, 1964 was a lucky time. After three pioneering years with small enrolments, Monash University was bracing itself for the first big influx of postwar baby boomers. Above the flat and muddy stretches of Clayton farmland, where Wellington boots had been the footwear of choice, the first tall buildings were emerging. The Arts wing of the twelve-storey Robert Menzies School of Humanities was in pristine state when I moved into Room 727 in the department of English, on the seventh floor.

What are we to do about education? Few other human enterprises are discussed more often – family, money, sex, and politics, perhaps – but the practice of education never comes close to satisfying us.

Even at the age of eighty-four it appears that our censors of old possessed a moral clarity that no longer exists. Censorship was carried out by the state as a force of moral purpose, protecting the population from the consequences of reading banned literature: to wit, moral decline and subversion, particularly among the powerless. This was pertinent to children whose innocence entailed a lack of knowledge of moral turpitude and who were seen as particularly vulnerable.

What happens if we take seriously the metaphor of a marketplace of ideas? Philosopher John Armstrong and economist Carsten Murawski recently tested that question in an article on theconversation.edu.au, by exploring the implications of a market logic for higher education (20 March 2012).They argued that student choice would remodel the teaching and research agendas of our universities – not instantly but over time, much as water carves out shapes in sandstone. The online response was instant, and unambiguous. Academics and doctoral students rejected the language of markets as profoundly hostile to their vision of a university. If students start paying for instruction, said one respondent, institutions will soon pander to ‘the lowest common denominator amongst student interests’.

A quiet revolution has been occurring within the humanities over the last decade: the emergence into mainstream scholarship of new methods and approaches that exploit digital tools, electronic infrastructures, networks of data resources and the sheer computational power of modern technology. This renaissance builds on decades of pioneering work – well before its time and largely unacknowledged – performed by committed visionaries who perceived the possibilities for textual scholarship years before desktop computers and the Internet enabled the rest of us to see how our research could be informed, assisted, extended and even revolutionised by new technologies.

Virginia Lowe has carved an academic career in the area of ‘childist criticism’ based on the responses of very young children (particularly her own) to books. Shortly after their daughter, Rebecca, was born in 1971, the Lowes began to read to her. Virginia recorded the process in a daily journal. Three years later, when their son, Ralph, was born, she recorded his reactions as well, and continued the journal in detail for about eight years. It comprises some 6,000 pages covering almost 2,000 books and the children’s engagement with them, and it formed the basis of her PhD thesis, of which Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two Children Tell, is a reworking.

This books has a number of admirable qualities. In times when open subscription to a social justice agenda runs the risk of ridicule, it is a brave book. It does not shy away from identifying the universities – specifically, the sandstones – as integral to any explanation of why Australian secondary education is inequitable. And both authors work in one: the University of Melbourne. The book also builds a compelling case for curriculum and structural reform. Through the careful analysis of issues such as retention and dropout rates, the relation between poverty and achievement, and between gender and achievement, it argues potently that our education system is disturbingly riven by persistent inequalities of opportunity.