Higher education’s creative tension

“To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray - these are things that make men happy … The world’s prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things.” John Ruskin (Modern Painters, Vol III, Part IV, Chap XVII)

Ruskin was writing in the mid 19th century as the industrial revolution gathered steam, William Blake’s dark satanic mills describing an ugly scar across England’s green and pleasant land. Ruskin, the Pre Raphaelites and other romantic souls looked on in sorrow as modernity rudely interrupted the predictable patterns of pastoral life.

It is human nature to romanticise the past, as Ruskin did with his bucolic evocation. We academics do this all the time, fondly recalling a time when university staff engaged adoring students in Socratic dialogues and when days, even weeks, could be spent in quiet contemplation in the back stacks of the library.

In reality, such a university never existed and neither did Ruskin’s lovely idyll. Both were arcadian fantasies. Students were not always brilliant or adoring, most ploughman lived in poverty, their children doomed to die before the age of five; disease was rife, often pestilential; crops were susceptible to blight. It was not for nothing that Thomas Hobbes described life in a state of nature as “poor, nasty, brutish and short”. (Hobbes, The Leviathan.)

Ruskin and many of his readers believed that they lived in the worst of times, the hardest of times - a historic discontinuity built on coal, powered by steam, assembled by toiling wage slaves who would never again meditate on the sun-dappled corn, masterminded by stove-pipe-hat-wearing capitalists, and greedily consumed by the exploitative new bourgeois.

For Matthew Arnold, the modern world “which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams/So various, so beautiful so new” in fact possessed “neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”. (Dover Beach.)

As the French philosopher Michel Foucault has observed, it is a common conceit to imagine that the present is more challenging and more significant than any time in the past.

The “analysis of the present as being precisely, in history, a present of rupture, or of high point, or of completion or of a returning dawn etc” was a harmful habit, said Foucault, adding … “I can say so all the more firmly since it is something I have done myself”. (Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p35). And, according to Professor Frank Furedi, we are still doing it.

Specifically, Furedi claims that education policy makers adopt the rhetoric of breaks and ruptures and maintain that nothing is as it was and that the present has been decoupled from the past. Change and social transformation are represented as if unique to our times:

“The idea that we live in a qualitatively different world serves as a premise for the claim that the knowledge and insights of the past have only minor historical significance. In education it is claimed old ways of teaching are outdated precisely because they are old.”

But the language of change has become naturalised in many areas of education precisely because new technology is changing - and will continue to change - the way we live and learn.

As just one example, inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil says that the “paradigm-shift rate” - the rate of adopting new ideas - is doubling every decade. Progress in technology is exponential, not linear.

By 2029, he predicts, scientists will have reverse engineered the human brain and computers will have the recognition powers of human intelligence.

So change will be enormous, and we will have to work to ensure that we harness the new for the good of our communities.

But the answer to meeting the challenges we face is not to fetishise change, or to be locked into some kind of imagined permanent present, and neither to romanticise the past nor to ignore it.

To use another Foucauldian term, people are always “becoming”. We come from out of the past into the present, and we hope for a future.

The extraordinarily difficult task for educators is to hold past-present-future in a creative tension that honours each element.

We at Macquarie University have given much thought to this, and in 2010 we will launch a new undergraduate curriculum that respects the past, understands the challenges of the present, and which we hope will equip graduates for a fast-changing future.

Macquarie’s aim is not just to teach facts and skills but to open students’ minds to life-long inquiry. We believe higher education should not be just about developing narrow abilities, but that we should help graduates to be wise as well as knowledgeable.

Our new curriculum is designed so that students have the chance to follow the Delphic oracle’s command to "know thyself", especially to know the limits of their own competence.

We believe a university education ought to produce educated men and women who understand the world and their place in it, and so we have designed a curriculum that ensures students will be exposed to issues beyond their chosen specialisation.

As John Stuart Mill said, a university education should not just churn out a lawyer or doctor or engineer, it ought to produce educated men and women who understand the world and their place in it, who can write and speak coherently, who know what a poem is and who can tell a symphony from a jingle.

Going further, we believe such an education will give our students the skills to deal with the challenges of the present and the facility to adapt and flourish amid the upheavals of the future. In that way, we hope they can be less like the Arnold of Dover Beach, and more like Tennyson’s Ulysses who yearns to “follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”