School….

A Mackellar Girls’ (public) School student protesting about her cancelled Yr 10 2022 graduation ceremony, in which she was to be awarded a dance award. The ceremony was cancelled because a number of girls turned up to school with fake nails/manicures, thus violating the uniform code.
Our local, regional public high school often experiences multiple lockdowns per week due to extreme violence.

I live in regional Australia and my kid goes to a private, independent school. The entire debate around private schooling in Australia is oriented around urban schools and urban children. This makes sense – most people live in urban areas, so they’re the biggest chunk of the demographic.

I’m a strong proponent of the public school system, but the reality is that where I live, the difference between sending your kid to a public school, and sending them to a private school, is having a teacher in the classroom. Many kids at our local public high school don’t have access to a maths teacher, for instance. I know two teenagers who didn’t have a maths teacher for an entire year (year 9). This actually makes quite a difference to your education, unsurprisingly. Other classes are supervised by teacher aides, but no teachers. The purpose of school teeters towards ‘childcare’ once you remove teachers from the equation.

For ‘gifted’ children the public school offers an online school, hosted in a small, dark computer lab, where the nerds run the gauntlet to slide in the door before getting hammered. For everyone else, there’s no ‘online’ option.

Our local public high school has a unit at the back of the school where children with behavioural problems are housed. This is effectively a lock up. It is known as, ‘the cage’. It holds approximately 90 students, one third of the school’s student body. There’s no teaching going on in there, obviously, but these kids are removed from the rest of the student body.

Half of the high school aged children in our area attend private high schools, compared to about 40% in NSW. Our region is characterised as a low socio-economic area and I would strongly suspect that regional areas would have the highest level of kids at private schools, despite having the least ability to pay the fees.

Our local public high school (one of two in the region) has facilities that put the private schools to shame. Multiple rounds of ‘capital funding announcables’ provide periodic upgrades. The problem of course, is that there aren’t enough staff. Teachers are paid relatively well, but not well enough to subject themselves to endless violence from adult sized children, and certainly not well enough to afford to buy a house in the area. Like everywhere, the housing crisis is acute.

Add to that the reality that many children arrive at high school completely uneducated. And, many of the teachers themselves are poorly educated. This is not their fault – we’re now looking at two generations of under-resourced education. This makes for a really, really tough job. It enrages when I hear politicians shift the blame for poor education outcomes onto teachers. The problems are almost entirely structural. Well-paid. educated and supported teachers can do excellent work.

When I hear smarmy toffs like Jane Caro suggesting that everyone who sends their kid to a private school is a boater-donning wanker, all I see is the staggering privilege of a woman can’t imagine that a public high school with 300 kids might not have a maths teacher for a year or two. Jane Caro sits in her lounge room surrounded by houses that cost upwards of 3 million dollars and sneers at regional parents playing 5k a year for private school fees. If I lived in Warringah I’d send my child to the public high school too. I bet they have a maths teacher.

In many smaller regional areas the Catholic schools specifically provide education services that the government simply won’t. The Catholic archdiocese cross-subsidises regional and remote schools with income from the urban counterparts. In terms of utility, that is, ‘bang for buck’, Catholic schools in remote areas probably provide more educational improvement than any other school in Australia.

Of course, this is deeply problematic – this is the church’s ongoing attempt at inculcating generations of young people into the faith – but it is also motivated by charitable intentions. In a Good Australia, schooling would be completely secular.

Next time…..how Foucault changed my view on chaplaincy (and I’m still a left-wing atheist)

School motto: Abscinde eam et sanguinem; Snip it off and let it bleed.

We are all subject to fanciful narratives that upholster our own sense of self belief. From childhood, we’re told that if we work hard at something we will inevitably improve. Malcolm Gladwell cheerfully informed us of the 10000 hours maxim – that if you spend 10000 hours doing something, you will achieve mastery. What this overlooks is the vastly divergent levels of mastery. Some people, for example, really get the hang of failure.

Mastery can be defined as excellence or competence. Natural or innate talent is the final arbiter of whether we attain excellence or even competence, it is the necessary catalyst for achievement. Almost everyone, however, can put some distance between themselves and their starting point, regardless of their attributes, through simple practice alone.

What we never discuss is the cost.

I am uniquely positioned to observe the myths of mastery. This is because, unlike almost everyone my age, I have never mastered anything, despite applying thousands of hours of effort. I’ve attained some degree of improvement in some things, for sure, but this achievement is infinitesimal. For my entire life, both as a child and an adult, I have taken the orthodox approach – that applying oneself would yield results, and that there would be a linear relationship between the two.

As the years have worn on, I have applied literally thousands of hours to learning languages, sports and music, with breathtakingly unimpressive results. In my 40s I came to realise that perhaps the one thing I am really good at is doggedly working on my latest divertissement in the face of compete failure. The futility of my determination borders on the absurd.

Our culture informs us that this is a laudable thing. Eventually, if we try hard enough, we will improve. Hard work is honourable and productive, an antidote to our presumed feckless moral turpitude. We’re constantly told that we should improve ourselves, but the utility of this – the bang for buck – is discounted or ignored.

There are children at schools across the country who struggle to read. These children are nonetheless forced through the entirety of the school system, humiliated at every turn, constantly cajoled into ‘trying a little harder’ to improve their skills, with minimal results. Time, effort and humiliation are enormous costs, and yet we discount them entirely. We need to think more clearly about counterfactual. What would happen if that kid learned the bare minimum, instead of the theoretical maximum?

I realise of course that there are vast differences in opportunity represented as ‘ability’, and that it is important to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake. Laboriously teaching a young kid to read is important, even if there’s nothing in your mental toolbox but sandwiches, because there might just be more than sandwiches. In other words, your circumstances have an impact on your ability, and the education system should recognise that.

But at some point, usually in the teenage years, it becomes apparent that not everyone is good at everything, and for some, the work involved in a small improvement is simply ludicrous. You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but we seem to think there’s something uniquely moral in the attempt, regardless of the amount of time, effort and heartache involved. At the end of the day, the silk purse becomes a polished artefact of one’s hard work, rather than an intrinsically valuable sui generis.

We never talk about giving up, let alone celebrate it. At what point should you give up? In engineering, you would make some kind of cost benefit analysis and make decisions accordingly. In every day life, on the other hand, we give things up with a kind of resignation. We subject ourselves to tech-bro jingoism, we ‘fail upwards’ – which means we’ve also failed to comprehend gravity. We drift away from things, we find other ways to spend our time, we lose interest, we make excuses, we ‘change direction’. We never say things like, ‘I tried really hard to master this, spent thousands of hours on it, and I still suck, therefore, I will stop’.

If there is one upside to the latest iteration of late stage capitalism with its trust-fund babies, lavishly rumpled oligarchs and nickel plated presidents, it is the blatant assertion that effort does not always equal reward. In fact, there is now an entire generation for whom the distance between effort and reward is furnished with the pathos of a Greek tragedy.

My only innate ‘skill’ – stoically pursuing mastery in the face of continued, abject failure – is a representation of the culture in which I grew up, a culture of hard work, self sacrifice etc. etc. As a child I was endlessly told that I was not good at anything, and at best, my sole utility would be eventually realised as compost. This is part of the narrative. You’re supposed to hear this and think – that can’t be right! I will work hard and improve myself! It is folly, a marketing campaign on behalf of the capitalist machine, selling us slightly better images of ourselves and profiting off the effort.

This is not to suggest that everyone is in the same boat. As I said above, I’m not particularly astute, rather, I’m simply in the unique position of being functionally useless at everything, immune to the efforts of studied practice. I suspect that this is actually quite rare – everyone I know is good at something, even if they aren’t an expert. Everyone has at least one thing, usually more, that they find easy, or enjoyable, something they can attain a sense of mastery over. Maybe this will happen to me, but I’ve had a pretty varied life so far, and, as outlined above, I’ve given many things a red-hot go. So far the effort to reward ratio hovers between laughable and pathological.

Mastery, nor self improvement is not the ultimate goal, rather, it is the triumph of a cult of individualism, at once coddled and mined by late capitalism.

The cult of self improvement should be tempered with a frank discussion about the costs of such rampant individualism. As above, I’m bad at everything, but I am generally kind to people, I try hard to help those who are less fortunate, I care about the environment and my community, and I try to be a good parent. These, I think, are overlooked in our headlong rush to worship at the alter of self improvement.

So, my goal for 2024 is to not to embrace failure as a ‘learning experience’, as something personally improving or laudable in itself. It is simply a waste of time. 2024’s motto might be; Fuck This. Find Something Better To Do.

School bullshit

My kid went to our local public school. We live in a regional area, and when she started school, a good number of years ago, this place was quite a bit poorer than it is now. Gentrification, like lots of coastal Australia, is on the razzle.

That’s not to say our local school community was desperately poor, or particularly rough. Our neighbours still left their doors unlocked a lot, and although there was a burgeoning meth appreciation society, it wasn’t dire. So, off to school we went.

And that was when the violence started. My kid got bashed, every, single day . Some days she was just kicked or spat on, others she was knocked unconscious, requiring a 3 hour ambulance trip to the paediatric hospital. (That was her last day at the school). She also experienced sexual assault, from another 6 year old. She lost teeth, but also her sense of self. She could not understand why it was OK for kids to hit her, but not for her to hit anyone. ‘I guess I deserve it’ she told me once, through tears.

This is the logical conclusion for many kids who are bullied. The principal told me she was ‘quirky’, the implication being that she had it coming. It wasn’t just my kid either. Others were bashed, stabbed (rarely) and bitten (frequently). There was a special classroom for the especially violent kids, with bars on the windows and no sharp or heavy objects. This is a primary school. Many of these kids were, however, allowed ‘out’ of their enclosure during breaks, to hit and bite the other kids. One memorable child liked to pick up rocks about the size of a 2 litre bottle of milk, out of the garden, climb the tree and then drop them on the kids walking below.

To be clear, most children weren’t like this, but a few were, and if you happened to be the target (there seemed to be about 5 targets in every year), then you would cop it. One parent was attempting to get the NSW department of education to pay for her child’s physical therapy after he lost an eye during a particularly savage beating.

I was not aware how bad things were, until I pulled my kid out of school, and she felt she could tell me what was happening to her, in full. She was too scared to ‘narc’. I am ashamed to say that I let my kid stay at that school for a year and a half. Thankfully, the other local public school let her in, and although still bullied, she did not experience any more violence.

It would be easy for me to say that this was simply a better school, and it was. The principal was committed to her staff, and the school worked well. The teachers were happy, liked working with each other, and generally, things worked smoothly. The previous school was characterised by bullying, and the principal disregarded female teachers’ concerns in particular.

The fish rots from the head, as they say, but was this just a case of bad management? I don’t think so. The first school serviced a much poorer school population. There was a much higher number of kids with social and behavioural problems. 40% of the pupils’ caregivers were grandparents, not parents. A stressed, harassed and underfunded school environment is the perfect medium for growing lateral violence and workplace bullying. Every P&C meeting was completely dominated by discussions about violence, and how to manage difficult students. At the second school, every meeting was dominated by endless discussions about why the canteen wasn’t breaking even.

So, when it came to attending high school, we had two options – the online, ‘Aurora college’ (a selective school for regional kids, where my kid would sit in one room with about 10 others kids, and look at a computer all day, only leaving for lunch and recess, where these ‘nerds’ are relentlessly bullied, including physical violence. Or, I could send her to one of the two local private schools.

I chose to send her to the private school. And I’m not alone. Our local public high school is rapidly emptying, as its problems become more entrenched. People often say things like, ‘Oh it’s a shame when the good students leave because the poor students don’t have the company, help and inspiration of the good students’. This criticism is like lamenting the lack of oat milk in Goulburn SuperMax.

Not wanting to be bashed every single day is positioned as a boutique lifestyle choice.

I said to my kid’s previous principal,

‘If I had a boyfriend who bashed my child badly enough to knock out her teeth, or send her to hospital, I would be complicit in a crime. And yet, somehow everyone thinks it’s acceptable when it happens within the bounds of these four chain link fences?’

The reason that our two closest local public schools are losing students to the private schools isn’t because people are getting richer, or because they’re choosing a wholesome religious education, or because they’re snobs who think their child will ‘grow up with the right connections’ (the last one is particularly laughable – the kids all know each other here anyway). The majority send their children for two reasons; safety, and the ability to have a teacher in the classroom.

Until a few years ago, our local public high school had a program where violent students attended school ‘off campus’, at a facility about 2km from the main high school. This worked – these kids had a small gym, a teacher who was particularly good at dealing with them, and some tailored support – including lunch. It kept the rest of the high school population safe. And we’re talking about 500 kids (on the main campus), so it’s not like it’s a small number.

This program was cut, presumably due to inadequate funding. Now, I am told that the school goes into lockdown often, sometimes several times a week.

The second is staff – some kids go an entire year without a teacher. Maths, for instance, is something that actually requires a teacher, as many parents, even relatively well educated parents, don’t have knowledge of higher level maths. So, there are entire cohorts of children who just simply miss out on a maths education. There is so much angst about how to get regional students into university, but seemingly no recognition of the fact that these kids are emerging from regional high schools with a year 5 education.

There is so much prognosticating about education – how to improve scores etc. But the biggest, most obvious thing is the violence. If a student is constantly told that it’s OK for them to be beaten, they quickly learn that this is their self worth. And everything follows on from there. Everything.

Every time a school prioritises the rights of the abuser over the victim they send a clear message to both parties. It is the ultimate ‘teachable moment’.

Yes, there are other differences between the private and public school, but again, these mostly flow from the violence. The public high school, for instance, has no functioning doors on any of the toilets now, because they are constantly smashed, so there’s no point in repairing them. There are no plants in any of the gardens because caretaking staff spend all their time (and more) fixing the damage from violent students. There are limited facilities because they all get smashed.

Teachers leave because they are fearful of the violence, and know that teachers/staff cannot physically touch any students, so the students cannot be restrained if they attack someone. There are almost no volunteers to run all the usual things that happen at school, because older women (the majority of volunteers) are too scared.

And anyone who reads this and says, ‘Oh just expel the bad students’ doesn’t understand that this is not how it works. Students cannot be expelled. And, they shouldn’t be. But equally, they shouldn’t be in an environment where they can harm others. This is why the ‘off site’ school worked.

There are solutions to this stuff, but no one is remotely interested in them, they would rather resuscitate the endless culture wars about why people who send their kids to private schools must be rich wankers etc., etc., a conversation almost entirely furnished by those who have paid millions of dollars for a house that just so happens to be located in the zone of an excellent public school that they attend for free, in postcodes so exclusive they might as well be gated communities.

Calculated Risk

Those who’re anti vaccine mandate, or anti public health lockdown provide the best support for broad scale public health measures; they’re privileged enough to be alive to prosecute their case, in spite of their ability to interpret the dangers of a dead possum in the water tank.

We’re now in the second year of endless arguments about the ‘public’ in ‘public health’, defining once and again, both the ‘precise tragedy’ and the exact dimensions of ‘the commons’. Fighting, time and again, about who has the right to swing their fist and who should move their nose.

Those who’re anti lockdown, or anti vaccine are arguing that there is no such thing as the collective, no sum that is greater than its parts. Many historians have argued that the first governments emerged as a direct response to disease – the need to organise people in accordance with a rationale that was not immediately understood by those on the ground. It required a new thing called ‘trust’.

And it’s in short supply, blah blah, we’ve heard it all before.

But the real question for the ‘freedom warriors’ is what is the endgame? What if SarsCov2 was as fatal as MERS, or smallpox? What if it only killed children? How many ‘warriors’ would support vaccine mandates and lockdowns? None? All? How many would go to their righteous graves? How many would be chastened?

This is the real question. If your answer is ‘never’ then you’ve given up on the collective altogether. For you, personal sovereignty looks like those adults in those religious sects in the US who watch their children die from the most excruciating conditions, because the government, other people, can’t intervene.

And let’s be clear, the next MERS is probably within my lifetime. We will face this question again.

Where does ‘the public’ in public health kick in?

Once again….

I haven’t written anything on this blog, or anywhere else, for months. I’m busy I suppose, but also side-lined, bright-lined and maligned by the endless task of interpreting statistics about disease and the lack thereof. Shifting paradigms.

Increasingly I’m drawn to two orthogonal poles. The first we might broadly refer to as ‘science’ – the shambling, iterative, dirty net curtain of rationality and causality. The second is more sociological or cultural – the idea that there are patterns, fashions, if you like, that characterise different intellectual epochs. These are slippery and developed in concert with their constituent technology. The best example of course, is the current one, our kind of technocratic rationalism, running on the fumes of utilitarianism with the inferred certainty of a kind of social Carnot cycle. In this model, we take scientific rationalism and apply it, writ large, to social problems.

As a fashion, we’ve been subject to this model for quite some time. Bureaucrats carefully but assuredly ‘pulling levers’, feebly adjusting the fuel mix of the economy in the vain hope that it will overcome its chaotic wobbliness. I suppose this is neoliberalism – the promise of certainty, stability in the face of an economic rationalism that perpetually threatens to end it all.

The model is anywhere and everywhere, the language of rational management, the bloodless accounting of society’s ups and downs. Consider the enormous and still flourishing network of ‘mental health’. An institution is sanctified and legitimised once it reaches a certain size and begins to upholster its processes with the baubles of ‘wellbeing’. One is ‘at risk’, then ‘assessed’ then, ‘assessed for risk of immediate harm’ then assessed for one’s ability to ‘engage with processes that might engender a meaningful shifts in outlook’ and then, and then and then. Of course, to those experiencing the pointy end of whatever institutional shafting the Random Shafting Generator has selected for them on any given day, this window-dressing is offensive. And that’s the point. It is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. It shifts blame to the victim, while assiduously ossifying the power of those who seek to create a seamless integration of professional and personal. The shiny-bummed carpet baggers.

Your personal is your political, and your political better get the fuck on board.

Examples abound. Just two days ago, the NSW state government declared a massive increase in funding for Headspace. This is a service that ‘deals with’ mental health issues amongst young people. Only, of course, it doesn’t. Being well acquainted with a former manager of Headspace, I can unsurprisingly inform you, Dear Reader, that Headspace does absolutely nothing for the mental health of those who seek its services. Because it provides nothing. That’s the point. It sits there telling young people who are distressed because they feel alienated from their lives, their families, their nature and their culture, that they have mental health problems. Young people who’re expected to find their way in the world, stumbling along on a diet of chicken salt and Fortnite.

Of course, for those who do, in fact, have mental health problems, like schizophrenia, no help exists at all. It was ever thus. The ex Headspace manager mused about the amount of money that could have been spent on young people with schizophrenia, were it not all being soaked up by the dangly-earring set, feeding teenagers a quaintly June Daly Watkins/Margaret Thatcher habitus.

I’ve digressed. Because this, ‘mental health’, was only meant to be an example of the broader style, or fashion, of thinking and talking, in which we are training ourselves. The technocratic rationality. At times is becomes visible for all – the anti vax debate is a particularly current example. On the one hand, the simple, modernist and muscular public health logic dictates the best outcome for the most people. On the other, a supreme adherence to individualism, fostered by what is now 30 years of neoliberalism, and cosseted by the rude good health guaranteed by previous public health measures based on the aggregated self, now illustrates the extent to which people grapple with the invisibility of government and their own (in)significance.

It feels clumsy to lump this way of thinking into BN (Before Neoliberalism) and after, but it is easy to delineate some key differences, through the prism of public health. We imagine the state is invisible, imagine our lives as governed by our own hard work and good fortune. Of course, this is sheer folly. The average Filipino works just as hard, if not harder, than the average Australian. Our Australian cards sit on the top of the economic deck because of our position in the ‘first world’, or ‘global north’. These benefits are almost entirely due to our government’s ability to consolidate influence within the global financial markets, either to create wealth from wealth, or to capitalise on wealth we ‘produce’ (commodities). At no point is there a direct linear relationship in which we can compare the output of an Indian, Filipino or Nepalese worker and an Australian in the same position.

I’m not going to get into a long-winded account of global currency markets, but it’s enough to say that our government’s role in our welfare and wellbeing is mostly ‘international’ rather than domestic. And yet it is the domestic politics with which we are the most familiar. This is how our governance is presented to us. Hot Mess Gladys and the endless handwringing over the intergenerational inequities in the housing market.

Public health is also invisible, unless there’s a crisis. Our wellbeing, the security of our nation in terms of ‘burden of disease’ is only relevant in broad terms.

I remember, many years ago, reading about risk and public health, from Nikolas Rose, who, ironically, is a biologist. What occurs (and this is because I can’t recall if it’s his idea, or perhaps my own that was generated through interaction with his work – suspect the former) is that risk helps us to imagine ourselves in the aggregate – it is a tool through which we might be controlled. Talking about our bodies through a prism of risk is something Foucault got hot and bothered about too. We can think of ourselves as entities disseminated through multiple strategies of risk. We’re all familiar with this way of talking and thinking about ourselves.

‘Smokers have a 50% chance of dying from a smoking related illness’

In this way, we might imagine ourselves as a collective, constantly shifting the levels on the risk amplifier we share with everyone else. Certainly, this was an element of neoliberalism – the utilitarian model applied to bodies as a means to control and moderate them, and to perfectly integrate them within a model of ‘productivity’.

And this is where fashion comes in. Because I am now old enough to recognise when this went out of favour, with the rise of identity politics. It happened with fatness. Partly, this was to do with over-reach. The model was overfitted. Risk was attributed everywhere, to everyone. The model got lazy. I remember the first debunking of the ‘Obesity Epidemic‘. Supposedly, obesity was causing high rates of diabetes and other poorly defined problems. The pendulum swung back, people began to question lazy data science. And, most importantly, there was a growing focus on the social consequences of ‘epidemics’. Who is affected and why? Who gets categorised, and what does that mean for them? What are the implications of being labelled fat?

We witnessed a shift in thinking, away from the rational, bio-deterministic models of social control, partly due to sloppy science, and partly due to the rise of the individual. Identity emerged; we began to hear terms like ‘fat shaming’ and the reclamation of physical attributes as identity (reclaiming the term ‘fat’ for instance). This is an interesting shift, a revocation and refusal of the bio medical model that sees humans as barely functioning meat-sacks on the fritz.

And then, we can trace the rise of the ‘victim’ narrative, salvation through identity. The rise of the virtuous disability, as yet another way to claim power.

Underneath it all, to me, these modes of thinking all retain one thing in common; they serve the same power that they always did.

That’s enough crapping on for one morning.

Addendum, By the way, I note that Nikolas Rose has shifted his interests to the ‘psy-disciplines’ and is, unsurprisingly, friendly with Foucault.

Getting real on university funding shortfalls.

The cost of Humanities/Arts degrees is set to double at Australian universities, while halving for STEM and medical courses.

Apparently, this is due to a huge increase in enrolments following the COVID shutdowns. Dan Tehan has claimed that changes will encourage new students into more ‘work ready’ degrees, in STEM and healthcare, in particular.

The rationale is to curb spiralling enrolments, especially in courses that don’t lead directly to a job. There’s a difference however, between reality and what we might charitably deem bullshit.

Sure, sending a price signal sounds like a good way to contain costs, and price signals are baked in to government policy. It simply assumes that rising the price will curb the demand. What the government is not saying is that the demand also reflects potential students’ opportunity costs of NOT enrolling in a degree.

In the current COVID recession, if you’re a young person with a fairly average high school education, your choices are either university or casual work/dole.

Let’s be clear, despite the focus on school leavers’ choices in the media, the main increase in enrolments will come from young people who’re over 25. These are people who’ve been casually employed, often underemployed, and are now unemployed.

Over 25s are eligible for Austudy, and, compared the alternatives, this looks like a good option. The dole, on the other hand, comes with social stigma and punitive conditions. Yes, students will pay for their degrees with a HECS debt but the repayment threshold is 45k. For many young people, earning this much money, in a casualised underemployment market, is so far away it’s almost irrelevant.

It’s worth mentioning the silliness of the debate around humanities degrees too: I giggled at Julia Baird stating that most Arts/Humanities student do in fact get a job. That’s nice, but Baird makes no comment as to whether this is related to their degree. Without that, her statement is meaningless. Most Australian adults will get a job, whether they attend university or not. Youth unemployment is high, so perhaps what we should be asking is; do Arts/Humanities students get jobs when they leave university simply because they’re three or four years older than they started? This is a classic case of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Now, back to the COVID recession. If you’re under 35 and newly unemployed, university study looks good. Sure you could go to TAFE, if you can find one that’s open and offers something sensible, but TAFE is now non-existent for many young people – it’s so hollowed out, and many of the courses so irrelevant that only the most essential, regulated and dictatorial courses remain viable (for instance, nursing, which can also be done at university).

Many young people will, therefore, enrol at university. And without a good high school education, the humanities, nursing or social work are basically the only doors open to them.

Let’s be clear about one thing, there has been a huge increase in university enrolments but it’s not a new thing. In 1989, 7.9% of Australians held an undergraduate degree. By 2018, that proportion had increased to 27.3%.

As you can see though, most of this increase comes from medicine and nursing.

Enrolment in the humanities has steadily declined, as a proportion of all fields, since 1989. So has everything else, at the ‘expense’ of medicine and nursing (which is in part due to nursing becoming a degree).

So, I would expect that there will, in fact, be an increase in enrolments in the humanities, as it will pick up newly unemployed students who otherwise would not have gone to university and who are not be eligible for other courses. However, the increase will be small, as the popularity of these courses is generally declining.

So, the government’s intimation that university enrolments are spiralling upwards and we’re in danger of being overrun with Gender Studies grads is, therefore, bullshit. The plan to double the cost of humanities degrees is not justified on these grounds. And, as Mr Tehan well knows, doubling the price will will not curb enrolments.

Perhaps the only real economic justification for cracking down on humanities courses is that they’re predominantly taken by women, who take longer to reach the HECS repayment threshold of 45k.

You can see here though that the difference is not huge.

Which brings us to the real reason they’re knocking the humanities – the culture wars. Tehan and his ilk have simply been watching too much crappy television. They’re convinced we’re on the cusp of a ‘cultural Maxist’ tea party. Or something. I can never really keep up with their paranoid, garbled ramblings about this stuff.

I should say that increasing the number of humanities students is not an intrinsically good or bad thing, in my view.  After all, I’d rather live in a society with degree educated people than not. Many of the civil liberties we enjoy today are the direct result of social and political awareness and advocacy, gleaned from and through a university education. I personally think university should be free. Certainly there’s a good economic case for it, as well as a ‘Australia is a nice place to live’ case.

Obviously, though, no government wants to pay people to ably criticise it.

 

International education; selling residency

Why isn’t the government supporting the tertiary sector? It is, after all, our fourth biggest export earner. Except it isn’t. Unless you consider residency a ‘product’.

International students come to Australia because university places are one way of purchasing permanent residency.

In order to get permanent residency you have to meet the 2 year ‘Australian Study Requirement’ – 2 years living in Australia. You then choose a job from the ‘skilled occupation list‘. Often this job does not relate to whatever you obtained your Australian qualification in.

You get points for studying in Australia, for sure. But an undergrad degree takes you three or more years and does not get you many points. A post grad, MA or PhD gets you heaps more points (I think about 20).

And, as a bonus, most MA programs are conveniently 2 years, so you meet the residency requirements.

There is, therefore, pressure on unis to ‘develop’ and provide MA courses that are 2 years in length and targeted at international students. Often these are called ‘international student products’

Below is a course I have chosen from a university at random, the University of Wollongong. There are many courses like this, at many Australian universities (but this one was easy to find because it’s got ‘international’ bunged on the end of it. I like their honest approach).

This course, called the Masters of Nursing International, is, like the name suggests, aimed at international students. Domestic students cannot enrol in it (according to the website).

You might assume that graduates of the  ‘Australian Study Requirement’ (two years at an Australian university) would use their qualification towards their ‘Skilled Occupation’ for permanent residency.

For instance, if you obtained a MA of Nursing International, you would apply for work within the Australian healthcare system that recognises your MA of nursing.

You’d be wrong. I enquired.

The MA of Nursing International is not recognised in the Australian healthcare setting. If you want a Masters of Nursing that’s recognised in the Australian healthcare system, you need to do a different course, called….wait for it…..

Masters of Nursing.

To be clear, there are TWO courses. One is a MA of Nursing for international students that happens to be two years long, and another MA of Nursing for domestic students that is a professional qualification. Only one of these is recognised as a Masters of Nursing in Australia and designed to get graduates a relevant job.

So what qualifications are required to enter the MA of Nursing International?

“International students with a recognised Bachelor degree in Nursing can accelerate their career progression by undertaking the Master of Nursing International at UOW.”

So, you need to be a qualified nurse, and have your qualification recognised in Australia. But, if you’re a qualified nurse looking to move to Australia, why wouldn’t you just apply for a skilled worker visa? After all, nursing is ‘on the list’.

Could it be that the University will recognise your Indian nursing degree as a prerequisite for entering the Masters of Nursing International, but the Australian government won’t recognise your Indian nursing degree to work in a hospital?

So, you want to come to Australia. But, you don’t have a relevant qualification, and you can’t speak English.

You need an agent.

All universities have agents. I have known one for a long time.

Agents work in source countries, selling education ‘products’. Can’t speak English at an IELTS score higher than 5? Don’t worry, for this small fee (paid for by the university) we can ‘help’ you to pass the requirements.

Don’t have a nursing degree? Don’t worry, for a small fee (paid for by the university) we can find an equivalent.

So, you’re all set! All you need now is the 60k to pay the fees. And this is where things get pretty ugly.

Let’s be clear, a two year student visa (which can be extended for one extra year) enables a student and their immediate family to move to Australia for two years. Let’s imagine a young woman moves to Australia, with her husband. One or both of them, or their families, have borrowed 60k for the fees.

The couple move to Australia and try to find work to pay off the loan. Officially, full time students cannot work more than a few hours a week, so they’re forced to work illegally for lower wages.

Again, the universities are aware of and support this model, primarily through the lack of the requirement to actually attend university.  Here’s the Masters of Nursing International, again;

“The course is delivered via weekly online learning activities in each subject over the course of each semester. It also features intensive face-to-face workshops, which are delivered on-campus each semester.” 

The courses are almost entirely delivered online. This means that students can come to Australia, be ‘enrolled’ in an online course, work many, many hours washing dishes, make money to send home and turn up to a ‘workshop’ a couple of times a year. Who completes their work? As with all online course, the work is completed by the student or whomever is paid to complete it. Not surprisingly, for this course there’s no ‘clinical placement’ component. 

It’s not hard to see how women, especially, are placed in an extremely vulnerable position. There’s literally no way out of this scenario. They can’t just ‘go home’ – their family has taken on an enormous debt to pay for the ‘education’. Tragically, this has predictable results, where women are often subjected to abuse or even murder.

The MA of nursing, by the way, looks great on paper – really thorough. And students DO complete a course of study. But it’s pretty basic.

 The real aim of the course is to gain points for a residency application.

Now, let’s be clear about a couple of things. There are international students in Australia who’re here for the education. These are usually STEM students but there are others. However, some at universities up to 40% of their student their student body is comprised of international students. Are they all here because of the ‘prestige education?’

So why does this system exist?

It exists because Australia’s growth is predicated on immigration. This can be easily seen by comparing the GDP to GDP per capita figures. But why not just open the doors?

Well, Australia wants to extract as much money out of incoming immigrants as possible and limit supply. Yes these people are young and healthy, and they smooth out our ageing demographic. But if we can charge them for residency, why not?

Furthermore, the universities themselves have increasingly supplemented their shrinking government revenue with international students’ fees. International students basically pay for domestic students to attend university. Importantly, they pay for an awful lot of young Australians to get a high school education

 Universities are increasing the number of ‘bums on seats’. This is also why the level of education has declined so dramatically in general arts courses – it’s in the universities’ interests. As the value of an undergraduate degree has declined, the only way to distinguish oneself as having a decent education is to get a post grad degree – more bums, more seats.

So, why isn’t the government bailing out universities? Because universities have tipped the balance.

The essential education ‘bit’ will roll on – domestic students will still enrol for engineering, law, science and medical degrees. The rest of it (what Americans might call, liberal arts) is paid for by international students. And they’re not coming.

In other words, the government has currently embargoed the sale of Australian permanent residency and its lack of support for the tertiary sector lays bare the truth of this arrangement.

This is not one of those, ‘in my day, university standards were much higher and young people today should all be fed through the woodchipper’ etc.,. posts. Universities provide excellent teaching and excellent learning opportunities. Staff work exceptionally hard. It’s also in no way suggesting that the non professional faculties (history etc.,.) are pointless. In fact, that’s the second reason they’re left out of funding arrangements – no government wants its citizens to have an excellent critical understanding of how power operates.

That said, we cannot overlook the simple join-the-dots above. Universities are unwillingly complicit in an economic arrangement that creates vulnerable situations, driven by economic factors, and tied into Australia’s economic growth.

Errant rubbish

Radio National is being gutted, apparently. And frankly, if yesterday’s lunchtime sample is anything to go by, perhaps a filleting might do it the world of good.

Yesterday I heard The World Today’s ‘story’ on Australians who are spending $555 million on ‘useless study’. Apparently many students obtain qualifications they don’t use when they leave university.

We were treated to the damning example of the person with a degree in tourism who then got an entry level tourism job. We were told;

‘The boss is unhappy because the employee lacks everyday customer service skills and the employee is unhappy because their degree, which covered things like management and policy) is unused’.

The interviewer, Linda Mottram responded with the theatrical gravitas of a home shopping presenter,

“How much would you expect to pay for this useless education?” she shrieks. “What’s the cost?” sotto voce – to the taxpayer

Perhaps if Ms Mottram had undertaken a useless degree in journalism, she would have instead asked questions like;

 – What is the time frame on deeming a qualification useless? How many of those with ‘useless’ qualifications go on to use them later?

 – Does the tourism grad expect to start working in the industry at a lower level, and work their way up, therefore using their degree later? 

 – If the tourism graduate is short on customer service training, how does this negate the value of their other tourism qualifications?  One thing does not lead to another, or as we simpering morons without extensive customer service training would say, this is a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy

 – If a student forgoes their tourism degree for a qualification in customer service, and then ends up running the company, do you deem their original qualification useless? 

 – You said that employers were using a bachelor’s degree as a ‘filter’, choosing candidates who had a degree. It seems to me that if a degree makes you more likely to get a job it doesn’t fit well with the definition of ‘useless’. Or are you saying that employers are so stupid they need to be told who to employ?

 – How did you judge useless? If, for instance, the student develops self discipline, or perhaps basic literacy during the course of their degree, is this deemed ‘useless’ to their entry level position? 

 –  Let’s talk about the broader context. SkillsIQ is a government research body. The Liberal government actively supports private training organisations which provide ‘skills training’ in areas like customer service (ingratiating servitude), or using a cloth and breathing at the same time. How do you respond to the claim that this is simply another example of the government attempting to undermine the university sector in favour of their well-heeled donors, the private training sector? 

And finally, perhaps the most important question;

 – Given that the university sector is currently under pressure to limit the amount of the everything it currently offers that isn’t Vice Chancellor’s reimbursements, can you tell us how this isn’t just some made-up, bullshit study intended to appeal to Liberal voting Murray and Janice who always knew that young people’s degrees were useless and students would be better off just working hard like they did in the 1970s, and also aren’t young people annoying and full of themselves?

These are just a few of the gaping holes in the four minute interview. How on earth Radio National can be considered a serious broadcaster beggars belief.

 

Wooly thinking part two

Does autism correlate with high IQ?

Or is this simply a form of reverse stigma?

I’ve mused about the apparent paradoxes in the diagnoses of autism before but I’ve yet to find anything that’s making me think that most people with autism are bloody geniuses.

There is a study which suggests that many of the genes implicated in autism are also those implicated in high IQ, but, as anyone who knows anything about genetics will tell you, it’s very difficult to identify ‘a gene for X’. Basically, this is the equivalent of searching for The Bachelorette gene.

I particularly enjoyed this article that told me that people with ASD are brainy because compared to the general population,

Nearly half of children (46 percent) who have been diagnosed with ASD have an above average intellectual ability, however, it differs from person-to-person.

That’s right, almost fifty percent of those with ASD fall above the average! Which I guess means that 54% fall below the average. Which tells me nothing except that as a population people with ASD are slightly dumber than those without ASD. It depends, I suppose, on how they define ‘average’ – for me, I take a pretty straight up mean/median approach, (the sample was 10 000) but maybe they decided that the top of the curve was actually a table top.

I see you, kurtosis, and I place a plate and some chips on top of you!

How good is science reporting? I mean, really. This shit is top drawer.

Depression and anxiety; The new racism

It’s been a hell of a few weeks. Clearly I am suffering from stress. It could lead to depression, or perhaps anxiety.

Or perhaps I’m just busy and under pressure. Perhaps I’ll just harden the fuck up for a bit and see if that helps.

First; a warning. This is just some out-loud thinking. Sorry if it doesn’t make any sense. I’m stressed etc.,.

Yesterday I heard Frank Furedi speaking about freedom of speech on Radio National. I’ve not heard of Furedi since I was an undergrad student, about 20 years ago. I liked his work then, but have shifted in other (leftward) directions since.

Yesterday, I listened to him argue that Western universities are increasingly self-censorious. This is because, under a neo-liberal consumerist model, they’re competing for students. There are prizes for the least confronting course content, according to him.

Education has become commodified, of course, but it’s happened in weird ways. University is no longer an adult stage, it is a continuation of a cosseted larval form, where endlessly fretting parents shuffle continuously build a fuzzy little ‘happy bubble’ around their children.

Every year the numbers of university students applying for special consideration on the basis of ‘stress’ or ‘depression and anxiety’ increases, as students pathologise the normal pressures of life in the adult world into an ever-expanding rubric of ‘wellness’.

Furedi often writes about this cultural turn. Furedi seems to focus on the personal elements of this; the pedestrian dog-whistle that all young people are feeble minded snowflakes. I’m unmoved by this, as it’s basically just same-old inter generational cruelty. What’s more interesting are the structural dimensions – how did we get to the point where these frailties became such an integral part of identity?

In the period of late capitalism, we are encouraged to focus our attention on ourselves so as to avoid looking at the structural inequities and problems that may affect our ‘wellbeing’. This is one of the key ways that neo-liberalism works – it is the cult of the individual; If you can’t make life work, it’s because you’ve got something wrong with you. You have an illness. I’ve moaned about how this insidious cult of wellness operates before.

There are many orthogonal structural considerations here. For just one example; all capitalist systems require a certain degree of labour market elasticity. This is what the NAIRU (Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) refers to. It is simply the rate of unemployment that can be sustained before inflation rises.

In the old days, the easiest way to secure churn at the bottom of the labour market was simply racism – you brought people in to your country and then stigmatised them so they would remain at the bottom. I’m over simplifying, but we can recognise this pattern in the Australian context, and in other places too. It’s hardly a radical observation. The decline in Empires (something that really only happened with the recession in the second half of the 1970s) has made flat-out racism more unpalatable (but still very much alive make no mistake) and immigration much harder to manage. But the market still needs a bunch of people who will buy things but can’t work all the time. I find it fascinating to see how ‘anxiety’ plays out, the structures around it, and most importantly, the intersection with the labour market. Those with ‘mental health’ (we’ve dropped the ‘problems’) are frequently cycled in and out of the labour market, and enfeebled by a coterie of ‘experts’ who convince them of their lack of self worth. It is unsurprising to me that this predominantly affects women, and has risen in lock step with the expansion of the service sector, with its zero hours contracts and predominantly women’s participation.

There’s another dimension to Furedi’s comments about education and feeble-mindedness, however. The commodification of a university education under a neo-liberal model has seen a dramatic increase in university enrolments. I’ve written about this in the Australian context before. My point is, universities are now accepting students who are completely unprepared for a university education.

One of the one hand, it’s predatory lending – inviting students to buy a mediocre education where they barely scrape through a general degree, with the help of multiple concessions to ‘stress’ or ‘depression’, is of questionable benefit. Many emerge with little more than a more finely honed sense of their acute and personal failings. There are graphs around that demonstrate the rise in ‘support services’ within the tertiary sector.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. I left school very young, with no qualifications, convinced by my family and teachers that I was so hopelessly stupid that if providence smiled upon me I’d end up in a medium security prison. It was through a series of accidents that I found myself at university in my early 20s, entering through a special dispensation – ‘you can have a crack and if you pass everything, you can stay’.

So I’m cautious about Furedi and suggesting that university entry requirements should be tightened as it may exclude those who might genuinely benefit, but it doesn’t prevent a clear eyed discussion of what the actual benefits are, or what role university education might play in a person’s life.

I’ll leave that there. Apologies for lack of coherent thought.