Education: an ideology free-zone

There is a political or ideological aspect to this. Dissident viewpoints that make for social change are sheltered in free spaces like art or music classes. Contributors to the 1987 book 'Art in a Democracy' (Teachers College, Columbia University) suggested that several factors contribute to this. First, free spaces offer an independent reality and existence which are distinct from the personal and the larger impersonal realities and existences. Second, they provide a forum for public debate, conflict, opinion airing, and problem solving. Third, free spaces prepare the ordinary citizen for making social change and appreciating democratic values.

Even then they did not consider the school system and the individual school units within it sites for free spaces because of their size, compulsory attendance policies, dependence on fickle funding, and consequential administrative fear of raising the public wrath. Interestingly, they felt that 'very small units within a school system can operate periodically as free spaces if given modest administrative support through active encouragement or through passive or active administrative ignorance of classroom activities.' But seldom does a "radical" school teacher or university professor go unnoticed, without their departments being defunded and classes cut.

Now Pyne is investigating the possibility of privatising $23 billion of HECS student debt (item number 11 on the IPA's wishlist). Does this mean that universities will compete on fees and perhaps financing, providing facilities for private funding by commercial credit providers (underwritten by the government, of course, so the banksters don't lose). Is the "new management" marching towards the privatisation of higher education?

Our natural environment is in ruinous or near-ruinous condition. Political "specialists" have taken us to the brink of a nuclear holocaust and the extinction of humankind, and have regularly involved us in costly and futile wars. Economics and business "specialists" have brought us to the brink of total economic collapse, and our planet and its people are paying the price of the application of their policies without proper regard to their environmental and human consequences. Financial "specialists" have extracted rather than created wealth and put nearly all of it into the hands of a very few. It is simply naive to think that these arrangements can continue indefinitely.

Young people will be left to mop up this mess and find a new way forward. To do that they need the ability to think freely and that ability can't be fostered unless the education system is reformed into an ideology free-zone. The reform needs to start from above: everything from basic items like curriculum texts and the manner in which they are selected, to more fundamental issues like funding programs, should be determined free of ideology by reference to the best possible educational outcome for students, and open to careful scrutiny by voters, communities, parents, teachers and students. The ideologues should have nothing to fear from such an approach: if their particular ideology truly has merit it should be able to withstand freethinking and informed analysis and criticism.

Schools and universities are not a place for those in power, and the people who influence them, to implement a political and economic ideological succession plan.