Education must never be a political football

Australian writer Erin Stewart has posed the question: Why should young people bother going to university when the rewards for their hard work are increasingly problematical.

She cites surveys that show teenagers are being turned off further education with only 57 per cent planning to go onto university and other training after leaving school, down from 71 per cent in 2003.

Stewart notes a report from the Brotherhood of St Lawrence which claims a 50 per cent reduction in entry-level jobs over 12 years with 16 job seekers for every vacancy. The report states that youth unemployment in Australia is at 12.5 per cent and under-employment at 17 per cent.

She rightly says that education is not the problem; rather it is a national plan “to put people who understand Wittgenstein or who can solve partial differential equations behind cash registers.”

Education is never the problem. It enriches lives, broadens thought and creates people who seek and find solutions. Education, properly directed, has the ability to solve all obstacles facing us, from climate change, to poverty and homelessness.

The problem comes when education is mishandled for ideological ends. In Australia there is a relentless push of the so-called STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

These subjects are important and there is an international need for more young people to follow them, but the sledgehammer tactics employed by the Australian and other governments is essentially relegating non-STEM subjects to the second rank, while bludgeoning young people into areas for which they are unsuited.

By all means groom and encourage those who have the potential to be new Einsteins or Hawkings, but let us not end up with unhappy and unmotivated maths teachers who might otherwise have shone as linguists or literary critics.

An even greater problem has been the recent rise of populism and with it anti-intellectualism, in which facts become fake news and expert opinion is derided simply because it is the opinion of experts.

This phenomenon was gathering pace before United States President Donald Trump came to the White House, but he has given it a tremendous kick-along and it is dangerously close to becoming mainstream thinking.

Populism purports to produce simple answers to complex problems and in doing so denigrates those who protest this can never be. It is eventually doomed, as past experiments in it have inevitably shown, but in the meantime it has the potential to do a great deal of damage.

So it is easy to see, as Stewart has shown, why young people are discouraged to the point of turning away from university and other forms of further study. Why work hard and get into debt in a world where your eventual qualification is not only undervalued but derided?

However, in taking this attitude they are falling into the trap of believing the current situation will remain, if not forever, for at least the foreseeable future. This was never the case and is less so today than at any time in history.

By the end of a three-year degree Trump may have gone, trade wars a bad memory, the essential flaw in the populist argument exposed, and saner courses charted. The figures Stewart quotes above will then be radically different.  

Students of history know it comes in cycles, and this one will surely end, probably sooner than later. Then we will need the bright young leaders — scientists and technicians certainly, but also artists and philosophers — both to clean up the mess populism created and to move on to the next stage.