Education

One of the most durable myths about education is that it can be separated from politics. It is a myth which has allowed people to believe that education in general and schools in particular can and should be insulated from that unpleasant world in which people disagree violently about human rights and needs and social values and just about everything else. Perhaps – but one cannot be sure – the seventies will mark the death of this myth. If Ted D’Urso and Richard Smith’s collection of readings does, as the authors believe, indicate the kind of problem which will be significant in education for some time to come, then its publication is a further recognition not merely that issues in education should be considered in a social context but rather that they are themselves political and social issues. In fact, the education system seems to provide one of the principal theatres in which the central conflicts of a society are played out.

In 2011, when businessman David Gonski was reviewing education funding in Australia, he visited two primary schools in Sydney’s west. At the first, he found the principal dealing with glass from a break-in the night before. As he sat in the school’s reception, he observed that the children arriving for school were from non-English-speaking migrant backgrounds. When they toured the school, the principal told him of the challenges he faced: homes without books; scant parental involvement. The second school, just a few minutes by car down the road, seemed a world away. The children were in school uniform, Gonski was greeted by a concert of beautiful singing, the buildings were perfect. The school served a different group of students. Truancy was not a problem.

Kim Rubenstein’s biography of Joan Montgomery, the venerable former principal of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), has been thirty years in the making and is the definition of a labour of love. It involves Rubenstein, a distinguished and worldly legal scholar and human rights campaigner, revisiting scenes from her own life. She was a pupil at Montgomery’s PLC. As a first-year law student, she addressed the remarkable public meeting in April 1984 that opposed Montgomery’s defenestration by Presbyterian reactionaries, who were avenging the formation of the Uniting Church seven years earlier by asserting control over the school. Rubenstein’s subsequent career has been that of a distinguished old girl following the tenets of a liberal education.

International education, we are told, is Australia’s third-largest export industry; in 2019 it was valued at more than $32 billion annually. But it is now also one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. The publication of Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne’s history of Australia’s universities, one of the principal institutional drivers and beneficiaries of that industry, is thus timely, even if it went to press before Covid-19 was detected. Government policymakers and higher-education institutions alike will need to respond to the present crisis not only with fresh thinking but also with a clear understanding of how the university sector got itself into such a vulnerable position in the first place.

During the 1960s and 1970s, student radicals protested that their places of learning were getting too close to industry and government. In 1970, Monash University students occupied the university’s Careers and Appointments Office to oppose the use of the university as a recruiting ground for companies ...