Developing Better Asian Capability Education in Australia

Australian article from the Conversation on ‘Supporting our Schools to Develop Asia Capable Kids’ to develop Asian capabilities not just on China, but neighbours in the Asian century. 

It’s the opposite of UK PM Sunak’s policy idea of mathematics till the end of secondary school, due to issues with maths literacy in society, amongst adults, who also need education.

However, on Asian capability, school is important along with general society, especially our influential middle aged elites in media, politics and the corporate world of ‘skip’ or Anglo-Irish heritage of the past decade, many seem to have shared antipathy towards the region?

An example is how many Australians have been to Bali, but neither understand that it’s part of Indonesia, nor the significance of the Indonesian economy now and in future i.e. it is expected to become the 7th largest economy in the world by 2030.

For Australia’s influential elite cohorts, many seem more interested in the ‘Anglosphere’ of UK and USA, than Australia’s role in our region?

‘SUPPORTING OUR SCHOOLS TO DEVELOP ASIA CAPABLE KIDS

Asia capable initiatives that only target adults and young adults leaves it far too late – it has to start in our schools

By Chris Higgins, University of Melbourne

As the world becomes progressively more connected and interconnected, it’s increasingly important for all people to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to engage with different cultures and countries.

This is particularly important for our young people who are growing into an increasingly complex and dynamic world.

More than ever, they need to possess the capabilities to navigate a fast-changing and diverse world and work together to overcome complex global challenges.

For Australia, the world’s largest island, physically located in the Asia-Pacific region, this is of paramount importance.

Our Indigenous peoples have more than 60,000 years continuous connection, histories and culture, and have been trading with international partners for many thousands of years.

These deep economic, social and cultural ties to other countries continue today.

We are one of the most multicultural countries in the world, with a diverse population made up of people from over 200 different countries with a long history of immigration, shaped by successive waves of migrants from different parts of the world.

Today, almost a third of Australia’s population was born overseas, and more than 400 different languages – including 167 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages – are spoken in Australian homes.

Our diversity is reflected in our cities, towns, communities and homes, where people from diverse cultural backgrounds live side-by-side, sharing traditions, customs, languages and experiences.

The Australian government has long recognised our multiculturalism, the benefits of social cohesion, respect for cultural diversity and our place in the Asia-Pacific region.

In 2012, the Australian Government released the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, which outlined a vision for Australia to deepen its engagement with the Asian region and the advantages of the region’s growth and rising influence.

The White Paper called for a comprehensive approach to developing Asia capability across all sectors of Australian society, including government, business, education and the community.

It also highlighted the need to increase language skills and cultural awareness as well as knowledge of Asian markets and regulatory frameworks across the ‘whole-of-nation’.

Since the release of the White Paper, the Australian Government continued to support development of Asia capability in many areas including initiatives like the New Colombo Plan, which provides funding for Australian university students to study and undertake internships in the Asia-Pacific region.

But, all too often, initiatives like this focus on economic priorities and adults in tertiary education or the existing workforce.

Rarely do they support our young people who will become our adult learners and workforce of the future.

Despite recent references from the Australian government to strengthen ‘whole-of-nation’ Asia capability there has been almost no support for Asia capability in Australian schools since 2012.

Asia capable initiatives that only target adults and young adults leaves it far too late. There needs to be support for our young people to develop Asia capability.

Australian schools and classrooms reflect the very multicultural and diverse nature of our nation. Our students and teachers represent a broad diversity of cultures, languages, experiences and perspectives – which are becoming more diverse each year.

Students need the support to develop these essential skills.

Often economic explanations are cited as the main arguments for developing Asia capability

The Asia-Pacific region is one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic regions in the world, with significant economic, political and cultural influence.

Young people who develop Asia capability will be well-placed to take advantage of the opportunities to collaborate and prosper from shared regional growth and influence.

Another well-worn reason is that Asia capability is essential for promoting national security and diplomatic relations.

As Australia’s relationships in the region deepen, it’s important for our students to develop an understanding of the strategic and geopolitical dynamics of the region, as well as the cultural and linguistic skills necessary to engage with people and organisations.

However, these explanations miss the far more relevant and immediate benefits. Asia capability promotes cultural understanding and social cohesion. By developing an understanding of different cultures and languages, our young people can develop empathy and respect for different ways of life – building bridges between different communities and promoting social harmony.

It’s essential our students and teachers are supported to have the knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes to create cohesive, inclusive, diverse schools. In turn, they will become adults who have the capabilities to support cohesive communities, societies, nation and a shared, prosperous Asia-Pacific.

The means to deliver this already exist.

The Australian Curriculum recognises our diversity and includes several Cross-Curriculum Priorities and General Capabilities all educators and schools are expected to support for students.

The Cross-Curriculum Priority of Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia and the General Capability of Intercultural Understanding that all teachers are expected to support, regardless of subject areas taught, are crucial components of the Australian Curriculum.

But they are often perceived as add-ons, the responsibility of other discipline areas like languages. Many teachers don’t have the resources or time to embed them in their classrooms or don’t feel they have strong Asia capability.

Investing in supporting our Asia capability, by making teaching knowledge and resources available to the entire Australian school education workforce is crucial to achieving the intention of the Australian Curriculum and the Australian government’s priority of whole-of-nation Asia capability and strengthened ties with the region.

The Asia Education Foundation has released a Pre-Budget Submission to the Australian Government calling on the Commonwealth to support Asia capability in all schools.’

For more related articles and blogs on Adult Learning, Asian Century, Cross Cultural Communication, Media, Pedagogy, Soft Skills, Teaching in Australia and Younger Generations click through

Australia: Return to the Future of an Asian Century vs. the Anglosphere Colonial Past

Australia Return to the Anglosphere – Ignoring the Australian Eurasian Society and the Asian Century

Asian Century Starts 2020?

History of Globalisation and 21st Century

China PRC – Fertility Decline – Peak Population?

Media on China and Wuhan Virus – Critical Analysis or Political PR?

University versus Vocational Careers & Financial Outcomes

Interesting article from NPR US on how many high paying vocational or trade jobs are vacant due to deference towards higher education, college or university, but often uncertain employment outcomes and lower salaries from the latter?

Why? Too many middle class see university as a path to upward mobility, but may indicate that some occupations guarantee employment and high salaries whether vocational or university? 

Conversely, many university or college graduates struggle to find related employment and reasonable salaries versus many trade or vocational occupations, in demand.  Meanwhile many developed nations have unskilled and skilled worker shortages made worse by ageing and decline in the working age population that has passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’, but compounded further by many deferring to higher education.

From NPR National Public Radio:

High-paying jobs that don’t need a college degree? Thousands of them sit empty

Like most other American high school students, Garret Morgan had it drummed into him constantly: Go to college. Get a bachelor’s degree.

“All through my life it was, ‘If you don’t go to college you’re going to end up on the streets,’ ” Morgan said back in 2018. “Everybody’s so gung-ho about going to college.”

So he tried it for a while. Then he quit and started training as an ironworker, which is what he was doing on a weekday morning in a nondescript high-ceilinged building with a concrete floor in an industrial park near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Morgan and several other men and women were dressed in work boots and hard hats, clipped to safety harnesses with heavy wrenches hanging from their belts. They were being timed as they wrestled 600-pound I-beams into place.

Back then, the demand for ironworkers was rising – and it still is: the sector is growing 4% annually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ironworkers earn, on average, $27.48 per hour, or $57,160 per year. Morgan was already working on a job site when he wasn’t at the Pacific Northwest Ironworkers shop. At 20, he was earning $28.36 an hour, plus benefits.

Five years later, he’s on the job full time, working “six-10s” — industry lingo for 10 hours a day, six days a week. He helped build the Rainier Square Tower in Seattle and a data center for Microsoft. “I’m loving it every day,” he said. “It was absolutely the right choice.

As for his friends from high school? “Someday maybe they’ll make as much as me.”

Raising alarms

While a shortage of workers pushes wages higher in the skilled trades, the financial return from a bachelor’s degree is softening, even as the price, and the average debt into which it plunges students, remain high.

But high school graduates have been so effectively encouraged to get a bachelor’s that high-paid jobs requiring shorter and less expensive training are going unfilled. This affects those students and also poses a real threat to the economy.

“Parents want success for their kids,” Mike Clifton, who taught machining for more than two decades at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology before retiring, said in 2018. “They get stuck on [four-year bachelor’s degrees], and they’re not seeing the shortage there is in tradespeople until they hire a plumber and have to write a check.”

The Washington State Auditor found in 2017 that good jobs in the skilled trades were going begging because students are being almost universally steered to bachelor’s degrees. Recent labor statistics suggest that’s still the case – in Washington State and around the country.

President Biden, in his State of the Union address this month, spoke of “jobs paying an average of $130,000 a year, and many do not require a college degree.”

Among other things, the Washington auditor recommended that career guidance — including choices that require less than four years in college — start as early as the seventh grade.

“There is an emphasis on the four-year university track” in high schools, Chris Cortines, who co-authored the report, said after it was issued. Yet, nationwide, nearly three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven’t earned degrees within six years, the most recent figures from the National Student Clearinghouse show. At four-year private colleges, that number is nearly one in five.

“Being more aware of other types of options may be exactly what they need,” Cortines said. In spite of a perception that college “is the sole path for everybody,” he said, “when you look at the types of wages that apprenticeships and other career areas pay, and the fact that you do not pay four years of tuition and you’re paid while you learn, these other paths really need some additional consideration.”

And it’s not just in Washington state.

Today, nearly 90% of construction companies nationwide are having trouble finding qualified workers, according to the Associated General Contractors of America; in Washington, the proportion is 88%. Ironworkers remain in particularly short supply, along with drywall installers and sheet metal workers.

The $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure plan – Biden’s signature legislation passed by Congress in 2021 – will create 1.5 million construction jobs per year for the next 10 years, the White House says, boosting the share of all jobs that are connected with rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure from 11% to 14%, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Median wages for construction jobs are higher than the median pay for all jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

“The economy is definitely pushing this issue to the forefront,” Amy Morrison Goings, president of the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, which educates students in these fields, said in 2018. “There isn’t a day that goes by that a business doesn’t contact the college and ask the faculty, ‘who’s ready to go to work?’ “

In all, some 30 million jobs in the United States that pay an average of $55,000 per year don’t require bachelor’s degrees, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.

Yet the march to bachelor’s degrees continues. And while people who get them are more likely to be employed and make more money than those who don’t, that premium appears to be softening; their inflation-adjusted median earnings were lower in 2018, the most recent year for which the figure is available, than in 2010.

“There’s that perception of the bachelor’s degree being the American dream, the best bang for your buck,” said Kate Blosveren Kreamer, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, an association of state officials who work in career and technical education. “The challenge is that in many cases it’s become the fallback. People are going to college without a plan, without a career in mind, because the mindset in high school is just, ‘Go to college.’ “

It’s not that finding a job in the trades, or even manufacturing, means needing no education after high school. Most regulators and employers require certificates, certifications or associate degrees. But those cost less and take less time than earning a bachelor’s degree.

Tuition and fees for in-state students to attend a community or technical college in Washington State, for example, came to less than half the cost last year of a four-year public university, and less than a fifth of the price of attending the cheapest private four-year college.

Washington is not the only state nudging students into education for the trades. At least 39 states have taken steps to encourage career and technical education, and many have increased funding for it, a 2017 Brookings Institution review found.

At the federal level, legislation introduced in Congress in January would make some short-term workforce programs eligible for federal Pell Grants. “For too long, the college-for-all mentality drove Americans toward expensive and often ineffective education pathways,” its sponsors said. “As our country stares down a historic worker shortage, fewer Americans are getting the skills they need to be successful.”

The branding issue

Money isn’t the only issue, advocates for career and technical education say. An even bigger challenge is convincing parents that it leads to good jobs.

“They remember ‘voc-ed’ from when they were in high school, which is not necessarily what they aspire to for their own kids,” Kreamer said. Added Kairie Pierce, apprenticeship and college director for the Washington State Labor Council of the AFL-CIO: “It sort of has this connotation of being a dirty job. ‘It’s hard work — I want something better for my son or daughter.’ “

The Lake Washington Institute of Technology, about 20 miles from Seattle, changed its name from Lake Washington Technical College, said Goings, its president, to avoid being stereotyped as a vocational school.

These perceptions fuel the worry that, if students are urged as early as the seventh grade to consider the trades, then low-income, first-generation students, and students of color will be channeled into blue-collar jobs while wealthier and white classmates are pushed by their parents to get bachelor’s degrees.

“When CTE was vocational education, part of the reason we had a real disinvestment from the system was because we were tracking low-income and minority kids into these pathways,” Kreamer said. “There is this tension between, do you want to focus on the people who would get the most benefit from these programs, and — is that tracking?”

In a quest for prestige and rankings, and to bolster real-estate values, high schools also like to emphasize the number of their graduates who go on to four-year colleges and universities.

Jessica Bruce enrolled in community college after high school for one main reason: because she was recruited to play fast-pitch softball. “I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life,” she said.

But she “couldn’t quite figure it out,” she says today. She was an apprentice ironworker in 2018, making $32.42 an hour, or more than $60,000 a year, while continuing her training. At 5-foot-2, “I can run with the big boys,” she said at the time, laughing.

Five years later, now 46, she’s starting a job installing 500 tons of rebar for a Boeing hangar near Seattle, working mostly outside, which she likes. She’s also back in school, of sorts, taking online courses to get her certification to become a fitness instructor as a side gig. And she’s bought a Harley.

Bruce says she has “absolutely no regrets,” herself. As for her own daughter, who’s 15, “if it’s college then it’s college,” she says. “I fully support that.” But students now in high school “are becoming maybe a little bit more aware” of the potential for making good money in the trades, she added. “I know my daughter is aware. I’ve told her there’s every kind of trade out there.”

The original 2018 version of this story was co-reported with Ashley Gross of KNKX.

For related blogs and articles on adult learning, career guidance, demography, economics, industry based training, VET vocational education & training and younger generations click through:

University Higher Education or VET Vocational Training?

Soft Skills for Work and Employment

Study Advice for Starting University

University Graduate Employment

International Education – National Political Challenges – Return of International Students and Education in Australia

Article in The Conversation Australia titled ‘COVID halved international student numbers in Australia. The risk now is we lose future skilled workers and citizens‘ about the prospects for universities with international students returning, but in much lower numbers. This would also affect the skilled permanent immigration system by decreasing the available pool of potential applicants onshore.

However, there are several related points including the broader sector, neither countering nor rebutting nativist PR in media/politics addressing ageing monocultural voters, backgrounded by local and global demographic decline.

The latter is a contentious point as Australians have been subjected to decades of imported fossil fuel supported ZPG spruiking ‘nebulous’ NOM net overseas migration representing short term churn over (inflated by the UNPD in 2006) demanding more visa, border and immigration restrictions to halt population growth for environmental hygiene; ‘greenwashing’ and ‘dog whistling’.

While most comments reflect the zeitgeist of demanding more support for locals, a comment from Conor King, a Melbourne based academic, elaborates and explains better:

‘The article is a very narrow emphasis on a major achievement of providing education to a great number of people.  With over 80% of students leaving Australia to return to home country or go to another, the residence outcome is both useful but far from typical – 80% figures comes from Immigration-Treasury study of Australia’s population and immigration from early 2000s to mid 2010s.  

That was before the massive expansion in Chinese students in a few unis (far from all) – with Chinese students preferred by Immigration because they do return home in large numbers and otherwise tend to obey visa requirements.

What is interesting is the comments that seem to forget that humans wandered out of Africa through some mix of need, whimsy and opportunity, and have not stopped wandering since.  

For various periods some places experienced less, and the folk there suffering physical, cultural and philosophical isolation turning them inward and inbred. Reflected in current day nationalisms and their appeals to modern day stories of times past.

A national border should be like a state or local government border – an indicator of a set of ever developing local customs and rules, not a barrier to movement of people, ideas or goods.

In sum – Australia’s education institutions educate people – lots of them.  That’s good.’

King points out a misunderstanding that has been encouraged by ‘Australia’s best demographer’ informing media i.e. at times suggesting ALL students are eligible for automatic permanent residency when it’s only a minority who are eligible and then only another minority actually gain residency under the permanent cap.

Further, the sector is much broader than universities, even if they look down their noses, but also includes schools, English colleges and the vocational sector; who are also important for lower skilled pathways but also act as ‘net financial budget contributors’, why is this important?

Although the Anglosphere puts much trust in suboptimal UNPD data analysis, the OECD population data gives a much more stark graphical presentation i.e. all cohorts in most nations are in decline but increasing dependency ratios of pensioners and retirees to be supported by public services, but fewer tax payers?

‘COVID halved international student numbers in Australia. The risk now is we lose future skilled workers and citizens

The saying “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” reminds us not to take things for granted. It is often when we no longer have something or someone that we recognise the value of what we’ve lost. This is true of international students in Australia whose numbers halved during the pandemic.

Can hindsight help us understand what we had and help to guide our future? That question lingers as tens of thousands of new and returning international students arrive back in Australia now that borders have reopened.

Students pursue international education for a variety of reasons. The main one is to improve their employment prospects.

International students are looking for high-quality, relevant curriculum and credentials that will best serve their career plans. While studying, they also seek social connections that help them to navigate local education and employment systems.

The pandemic created chaos and uncertainty about enrolments, border closures, flight availability and quarantine requirements. Over the past two years, many international students had to put their plans on hold. They hung on to the possibility of studying and working in Australia.

Let’s not forget, they can choose other countries that will be seeking highly educated and skilled graduates. Some have already moved on to countries where borders were open, such as Canada. These countries offered access to high-quality international education with fewer complications and greater certainty about transitioning to work visas.

Their absence hit us hard

Consider what Australia lost when so many international students were gone. In 2019, they contributed an estimated $40.3 billion to the economy. International education supported about 250,000 jobs in Australia.

Border closures reduced enrolments by up to 70% in some parts of the higher education sector.

The financial impacts on Australian universities have been smaller than originally predicted, but the loss of billions in revenue should not be discounted. Universities were exposed to the risks of depending on a never-ending flow of new international students and their tuition fees. The pandemic’s impacts on university finances led to the loss of as many as 35,000 academic and professional jobs.

Local communities and businesses also missed the consumer power of international students and visiting family members who purchased goods and services. Employers have struggled to find enough local workers for job vacancies that these students would fill.

Australia must extend the welcome mat.

The Australian government recently announced incentives for international students to return soon to help overcome labour shortages and stimulate market growth. Visa fee rebates and relaxed restrictions on allowable working hours are aimed at recovery in the international student market, while filling gaps in the workforce. What remains to be seen is how well entry-level and part-time jobs in service and hospitality will translate into future employment opportunities that match these students’ qualifications.

The fall in international student numbers also meant losing key resources for intercultural learning. Although many of us are longing to travel abroad for a dose of intercultural exposure, learning at home between local and international students is a relatively untapped resource. Increasing the numbers of international and local students studying together is part of the solution identified by the Australian Strategy for International Education.

Many international students will need extra support to develop social capital – the friendships, community contacts, mentors and networks that help to build a sense of belonging now and in the future.

International students have been treated like commodities for higher education and the labour market. But they are people, whose choice of international education is connected to their hopes and plans after graduating.

The global pursuit of talent will increase graduates’ opportunities to decide which country they choose for education, for employment and for permanent migration. Not every international graduate will choose to stay in Australia. Fluctuating immigration policy makes it difficult to predict who will be allowed to stay and who will not.

This is not a short-term issue

Many countries, including Australia, need to attract talented graduates to make up for low birth rates, low immigration due to the pandemic and skilled worker shortages. International students are preferred immigrants because they combine experience from their home countries with experience studying and living locally.

As international students return to Australia, the welcome mat needs to stay out longer. It matters how we support them, not only upon arrival, but throughout their academic programs and as they prepare for their future employment.

International students invest in their education and the country where they study. We in turn need to recognise their many contributions and invest in their potential.

The longer-term view requires strategy for supporting them as students, employees and future associates, within and beyond Australia’s borders. Let’s think carefully about what can be improved as international students return to Australia.’

For blogs and article related to international education and demography click through:

Demography, Immigration, Population and the Greening of Hate

Population Pyramids, Economics, Ageing, Pensions, Demography and Misunderstanding Data Sets

Population Decline and Effects on Taxation, Benefits, Economy and Society

E-Learning for University Students in Africa

International Education – Foreign Student – Value

Immigration is not Cause of Unemployment

Immigration Population Growth Decline NOM Net Overseas Migration

EU Tourism Skills and Employment with Coronavirus

While Covid-19 has caused much unemployment with lock downs and related economic issues, tourism and hospitality vocational skills are key in developing and driving short term to long term employment for youth and women especially, for broad economic recovery in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

 

From CEDEFOP The European Centre for Development of Vocational Training:

 

‘Tourism at a crossroads: skills and jobs demand in the coronavirus era

 

As EU Member States struggle to revive their tourism sectors in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, skills are emerging as the deciding factor for successful economic recovery.

 

Tourism is a key employer of the EU economy. Employing some 13 million people, it contributes to substantial spill-over employment effects in other sectors, especially in construction, retail and healthcare. From 2000 to 2017, more than 1.8 million new jobs were created in the sector.

 

People working in tourism are vulnerable to coronavirus-related challenges and skills development implications. Almost one quarter of them are seasonal and temporary workers. The sector also attracts young workers, acting as a first entry point to the labour market for recent graduates, as well as a response to youth unemployment. It also offers easy employment access to vulnerable groups, such as women (almost two thirds of the workers in the sector), and migrants….

 

Economic Impact of Tourism (Source: CEDEFOP)

 

….The sector also suffers from negative perceptions regarding working conditions and career prospects. Offering targeted and high-quality training opportunities could be a way to attract more and better-prepared candidates. Reskilling and upskilling of existing employees is necessary to respond to the emerging and persisting new trends in the sector, such as provision of services to targeted groups of visitors (for example, elderly or with disabilities).

 

Understanding the business and societal challenges and opportunities that affect employment levels, occupation tasks and, consequently, skill profiles in tourism is paramount for designing and offering relevant high-quality vocational education and training.

 

Read the full Skills developments and trends in the tourism sector analysis for in-depth information.’

 

For more articles and blogs about adult learning, career guidance, COVID-19, digital marketing, economics, EU European Union, industry based training, small business, soft skills, tourism marketing, training delivery, VET vocational education & training, work skills and younger generations click through.

 

Higher Education – University Funding – Course Delivery Threats

Presently we see results of neo-liberal policies in education, including higher education and universities having budgets cut, with research, course content and study choices manipulated through favouring STEM over liberal arts of humanities.

 

One does not think it’s a coincidence that seemingly disparate issues and groups, whether focused upon climate science denial, low taxes, immigration restrictions or white nationalism seem influenced by underlying ideology of radical right libertarians joined at the hip with eugenics, wanting to influence education, research and student outcomes.

 

Excerpts from Inside Story Australia:

 

The four-and-a-half-decade higher education squeeze

 

Rodney Tiffen 17 JUNE 2020

 

‘Calls for universities to reduce their reliance on international students ignore the incentives created by successive governments

 

‘It’s a long time — forty-five years in fact — since government funding of tertiary education peaked in Australia at 1.5 per cent of GDP. These days, the government contributes 0.8 per cent, or just over half that proportion. Back in 1975, around 277,000 students were enrolled in higher education; by 2016, the number had increased fivefold to 1.46 million.

 

Those figures capture the essential story of Australian universities over the past forty-five years: massive growth combined with declining public investment.

 

The suddenness of the Coronavirus pandemic has hit Australian universities very hard, but the acuteness of their problems has been greatly exacerbated by trends that have been building for decades. The federal government has offered much less support to universities than to other deeply affected parts of the economy, and many conservative commentators have used this as yet another occasion to criticise the sector.

 

Backbench Liberal senator James Paterson (graduate of the Koch affiliated IPA), for instance, says that “universities have not done themselves many favours in recent years,” as if reacting to the diminishing level of public support, especially from his own party, has not been a central driver of the strategies for survival universities have had to adopt.

 

Over the period 1989 to 2017, domestic student enrolments more than doubled, according to former Melbourne University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, yet the federal government’s contribution to operating costs rose only by a third. Between 1995 and 2005, when OECD governments increased their contributions to tertiary education by an average of 49.4 per cent after inflation, the Howard government provided no real increase at all.

 

As Glyn Davis wrote before the pandemic, “By withdrawing public funding, government has deeded Australia a university system that relies heavily on the families of Asia. If our neighbours tire of cross-subsidising Australian students, the number of local places would shrink rapidly.”

 

The pandemic has thrown university budgets into chaos. No other sector so badly affected by the coronavirus has been treated with so little sympathy, let alone tangible support. It seems the government’s cultural antipathy to universities overrides all else…..‘

 

There has been an ever present battle over universities and education, not just in Australia on funding, nor recently but in the past e.g. Milton Friedman in 1955 essay “The role of government in education” for the minds and wiring of students.  

 

In some places it is normal for fringe right wing parties new to a governing coalition to request seemingly unrelated portfolios of defence, home affairs, and education…..  Control of the latter gives control over curriculum content and the hidden curriculum; Jane Mayer describes (in ‘Dark Money’, as does MacLean ‘Democracy in Chains) the machinations going on in US (and further) by radical right libertarian donors to not just change what people think, but how they think… (or not).

 

Over generations there has been a move to more liberal student versus teacher and authority centred learning, both overtly and via the hidden curriculum.

 

‘Hence the curriculum is based on freedom, discovery, experience and creativity, as opposed to engaging with a pre-existing body of knowledge to which the teacher is an authoritative and wise guide.‘

 

(Liberals, Libertarians and Educational Theory – Lindsay Paterson, 2008)

 

MacLean (like Mayer) has also upset the libertarians:

 

‘Stealth Attack on Liberal Scholar? Historian alleges coordinated criticism of her latest book, which is critical of radical right, from many who have received Koch funding.

 

Collusion, alternative facts, shadowy billionaires: the words sound ripped from the political headlines, but they also describe the controversy surrounding Duke University historian Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking)….

 

…..Some nevertheless say they worry that swarm-style attacks on progressive scholars’ works — especially in an era of online harassment of professors and plummeting public trust in academe — could become a new normal. MacLean, they say, is the victim of just such an effort.‘

 

But taking advantage of student centred or liberal approaches can go both ways.  Such antipathy towards the humanities and scholarship does not preclude the likes of Kochs promoting their own ideology through funding academic schools’ programs or research, think tanks and lobbying MPs to promote their ideology e.g. George Mason University, many GOP politicians and think tanks (globally) affiliated through their Atlas Network, e.g. IPA Institute of Public Affairs in Australia promotes climate change denialism. (from Crikey Australia).

 

One does not think it’s a coincidence that seemingly disparate issues and groups, whether climate science denial, low taxes, immigration restrictions or white nationalism seem influenced by underlying ideology of radical right libertarians joined at the hip with eugenics, wanting to influence education, research and student outcomes, into the future…..

 

For more blogs and articles about Ageing democracy, Australian politics, career guidance, climate change, conservative, Covid-19, critical thinking, curriculum, demography, economics, environment, fossil fuel pollution,  government budgets, higher education teaching, instructional design, international education, international student, learning theory, nativism, pedagogy, political strategy, populist politics, science literacy, soft skills, student centred, VET vocational education and training, work skills and younger generations.