Much public discussion of education in Australia is parochial and superficial. It focuses on the proportion of revenue that ought to be given to independent, Catholic and government schools, on the failure of children’s measured progress to match that of children in other nations, or on controversial details in the curriculum. Almost always, after a brief spark of attention, the fire subsides to leave the dull coals of the ordinary.
Missing from this focus on measurement, methodology and money is reflection on meaning. The question that should guide policy and curriculum is what good education means and entails for the people whom we educate. Attention is often focused on the ‘how’ and not on the ‘who’. It asks how to provide workers for jobs, how to encourage students to take mathematics subjects, how to make them patriotic and so on. It focuses on method and organisation and on the needs of the economy, and not on the human development of the persons who are being educated. In this process persons are treated as raw material for filling with acceptable opinions or as cogs to be fitted into the economic machine. The difficulty with this cheapening of education, of course, is that opinions have to be understood and owned to make a difference. The economic machine, too, will have been retooled by the time the human cogs come online, leaving them no longer fit for purpose.
People before the economy
When we see education as the servant of the economy we inevitably attend to and reward the most gifted students. Others don’t count so much. They can even be seen as a waste of time.
In our educational work through the Jesuit Community College we focus on persons, each with their own desires and gifts and adapt programs to give them confidence as they seek employment. We put persons ahead of the economy, and in this way help them contribute in their own way to society.
The International Day of Education (24 January), which in Australia comes fittingly at the beginning of the school year, invites us to ask large questions about what education means for young people and what we hope they will gain from it for their growth as human beings in all the relationships with their world and with one another. We have learned through the crises of the coronavirus and of global warming that these vital relationships are not merely local but touch people in all nations and their governments. Our young people will be citizens of the world, whether they are aware of it or not. Education is a universal good.
Personal dignity
The core reality in education is that each human being is precious and has a personal dignity. Education needs to respect each person and also help them develop their own gifts and to contribute to society in their own way. Education builds the network of relationships to other people, to the wider world which form our lives and help us to develop our full humanity. It is less about moulding people than about freeing each person to wonder at the world, to grow in confidence in knowing its history and its complexity, and to relate actively to it and to people in it in ways that are generous and informed. It should give people not only skills to fit into society and into work, but also the enthusiasm to see society in a different way and to contribute to changing it. To confine the curriculum to teaching skills, passing tests, and to confine teaching to achieve skills in passing exams and tests and passing on received ideas about the world is a betrayal of teaching and also of society. Society always needs reflective engagement both with its tradition and with new conditions and new ideas.
Universality of human connection
The International Day of Education is necessarily worldwide. Our human reality is universal. If we are to survive and thrive as individuals and as nations we need to cooperate with other people and nations to address such challenges as epidemics, global warming and gross inequality. First, we are brothers and sisters of each other, and only secondarily competitors. In our education we need to encourage respect people in their differences, to wonder at the diversity of cultures, and to commend the attitudes and institutions that build a just and cooperative world.
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