The End Of Enlightenment

The Dark Ages Beckon Once More

I've been thinking that maybe one of the things the Abbott government wants the Federal government to do is get out of education; And as with such ideas, it always is worth asking what one might mean by 'out' and 'education'. The growing trend in Australian society since the reintroduction of fees in the early 1990s has been to measure the value of a course against the earning capacity of the graduates. Then, trying to figure out "if it is worth doing the course." Unsurprisingly, a great many courses cease to commend themselves once you apply the Return-On-Investment line of thinking and if one is truly driven by money alone, it is easy to suggest arts courses are not worthwhile. Why would somebody do Fine Arts if it were about earning capacity? How many jobs can there be, in something like curating for a gallery?

There are any number of courses for which graduates would find an inordinate amount of difficulty in placing themselves in employment in that field. Like, graduates in music or archaeology or theatre or literature or philosophy. In fact there is a vast shortage of jobs that specifically require arts education and pay well enough. The dirty secret of the stat that approximately 90% of graduates do not work in the area of their tertiary study is that the jobs simply were not there to absorb those graduates.

The great irony is that in trying to put a value on education, we've managed to destroy the worth of education. It didn't exactly start with Tony Abbott's current horror budget. It started when we started conflating vocational training with getting an education - and for that we can lay the blame at John Dawkins and his reforms where they started to hand out bachelors  degrees for test-tube washing. With the Dawkins reforms came the vast delusion of mass professionalism in the workforce when really, the politicians just wanted to keep Gen-X off the unemployment statistics.

The legacy of it is the expansion of tertiary places accompanied by the devisement of fees to off-set the expense. While it might have been the smart move at the time it commodified the education into a grand vision for vocational training for everybody. It was 'Educating Rita" on a grand scale as part of that bargain. And with it came the unfortunate other irony that you can put a price on the education through projected future earnings. It was a crock - but for some reason we all bought it. Maybe we didn't choose to look too closely lest it reveal the fundamental asymmetry that the education you get has very little to do with the money you end up making.

The thing that really stands out with this notion of  deregulating the universities so they can charge whatever they like, is that it squarely places education out of reach from people. The only way in which you can successfully assess the worthiness of a course hinges on it vocational merits. And if our society were to commit to that vision of education, then we may as well kiss the enlightenment goodbye. Of course, this would suit the fear mongers and hate mongers of the Murdoch press; They keep baying for this kind of vision that locks in inequality.

IPA Stands For 'Ideological Propaganda Agency'

If you watch 'the Drum' like I do occasionally, you'll notice they always aim to get some commentator to explain just what is good about the so-called *thinking* of the Liberal Party. They usually get some right-wing toad from this 'Think Tank' (and you would have to use the term 'think' very loosely when it comes to these people) called the Institute for Public Affairs to parrot the official line. It's often unapologetic Thatcherite pap that it makes you scream at the television set the way Sophie Mirabella used to make us scream whenever she was on TV.

The IPA is full of terrible suggestions and explanations it makes you wonder if they actually grew up on the same planet as the rest of humanity, let alone in this country. Just how crazy are these people? You should look at a sample. Walk-Off HBP was kind enough to send this link today and well... it's pretty self explanatory.

Top of their list is abolishing the 'Carbon Tax', followed by abolishing the Department of Climate Change and the Clean Energy Fund. Clearly they're climate change deniers. What other possible explanation could there be? And this is an important point. Climate Change deniers have no science to back them up except for those soul-less sell-outs in the employ of the oil lobby who cherry pick stats to make it look like the world is cooling. It's not a scientific position. So it really makes me wonder why 'The Drum' has to invite such intellectually deficient cretins to argue this kind of insane oppositional view just to make it look balanced. Especially when the same said cretins are calling for funding cuts and breaking up the ABC. Why give this bunch of Morlocks any airtime at all? Would the ABC give a Holocaust denialist or KKK member 'equal time'?

No.

Then why this mob? The only thing that makes them respectable enough to talk to is the fact that they haven't hurt anybody - yet. But if they had their way, they would hurt a whole bunch of people. If we were to follow their pan-Galactically stupid recipe, it would cause so much damage to our society we may never recover. I don't know why the rest of Australia is being made to take this cretinous collective seriously.