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Last Updated: January 29, 2012
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EDUCATION DIVERSITY

On this page: Margaret Thornton; Lillian Holt

Prof. Margaret Thornton

As a feminist, it is discouraging to find the things we worked on for so long have mostly been unravelled. They seem to be simply disappearing overnight.

The people who were the products of free education at university, who have been the beneficiaries of some of the programs that were fought for, have nevertheless been silent as these changes have been effected. Some have been not just complicit, but have played an active role - such as our politicians.

I am completing a study on universities at the moment, looking on the impact of the corporatisation of universities, focussing particularly on my own discipline - law. It is quite extraordinary, from a number of perspectives.

First we see problems in terms of access - quasi-privatisation where significant fees are being paid for so-called government funded places. Universities can also offer up to 35% of places that are full-fee paying. You can be paying up to $100,000.00 for an education. When you compare that with the free tertiary education introduced by the Whitlam government just 30 years ago, it is quite shocking.

There is also the impact on the way knowledge is being constructed and what sort of knowledge can currently be produced within universities and purveyed to students.

Universities are not receiving adequate funds to do the job of being a university. They are forced to sell things to make money. What can they commodify? Their only product is education so they sell private places to domestic students and overseas students, and sell courses offshore.

As a result, we see the move away from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, a concern with objectivity, neutrality and so on, to whether the knowledge has 'use value', that is, whether it can be commodified.

So, education, like everything else in our society at the moment, is supposed to have 'use value' within the market. Social justice is not seen to be valuable. Who is going to sponsor it? A big corporation is not going to spend money funding a Chair or donating money, as universities are forced to kow-tow to big business to attract money. The sort of courses that are seen to be valuable are courses like business and management.

The shift away from social justice has meant that about 25 courses in my own university discipline have gone. Feminist scholarship has gone; criminology courses such as 'Crime and Sex' and 'Aborigines and the Law', have all gone. The focus now is all on courses such as 'How to Facilitate Business'.

This is what we find all over Australia and, indeed, overseas to some extent, including the UK and Canada, although I think the shifts there are not as dramatic as in Australia. There still is the idea of the autonomy of the university as a very significant force for the transmission of the culture of a society and the protection of the notion of social goods.

Here we see our politicians have been happy to jettison these very important public goods. It is having an enormous impact on the character of our society. It is already having an impact on what is taught in schools to young people where values are shaped. They are being brought up to believe that all that is important is the market and for them to be consumers - to buy things to assist the economy and to work to produce things for consumption, instead of learning to be citizens who are part of a polity and concerned about the good of society.

I think there has been a dramatic shift in thinking about the notion of collective good. Coming back to my point about the way social justice has disappeared, some of the phrases that appear in the corporate documents on the web are things like 'productive diversity' (a wonderful oxymoron). Everything has to have a monetary value attached to it and if you are not prepared to accept that, you are not fit to be working and should somehow disappear. You are not a worthwhile member of society.

The market has become what one commentator called 'the meta-narrative of our times'. It has taken over everywhere, it infuses everything and impacts on everything that we do. If something doesn't have 'use value' in the market, it is of no use.

The pressures for individuals to survive in the workplace has increased. Surveillance occurs everywhere, including universities, where you are supposed to enter into a contract with a supervisor that you are going to be 'productive'. The idea that one has to produce measurable 'outcomes' or 'outputs' is something that has infected the entire workplace - regardless of how ludicrous this is when applied to work such as teaching or caring for others. It means that if people don't satisfy the productivity requirements, they face redundancy.

The system operates to allow very little reflexivity about what is happening. Most people are racing from job to job, struggling to survive, struggling to be 'productive'. There is no time to think, or time to meet. There has been a contraction of civil society - the places where you met to talk about issues that were outside the market and outside government.

The Marxist idea is that things have to go right down before they start to come up again. Maybe things will have to become even more extreme so that there will be some sort of revolution.

As it is, most people have been extraordinarily complacent. There have been a few signs of life, of course. I think it is interesting in New Zealand, for example, where there was an extreme form of neo-liberalism, that there was a strong reaction against it. There is also the anti-globalisation movement.

But these movements are really minor when we consider the extent of the power that is exercised by nation-states, by the multinationals and by the superpowers, in particular, which continue to be concerned - or obsessed - with attracting business and making profits.

The view is that women have somehow made it because there are a few judges and a few managers, a few women in universities and so on. This is a simplistic notion of progressivism - that things are always getting better. This is the liberal story. It is, of course, a myth.

I think those of us who are committed have to keep on talking, even when we feel there is no-one listening. We have to critique what is happening and somehow resist being drawn into the vortex of the market that wants to drown us.

Lillian Holt

I'd like to acknowledge the ancestral spirits of the Kulan Nation on whose land we meet today. I'd also like to thank the organisers for inviting me along.

I thought I'd share my thoughts today on the theme by recalling and reflecting on my own work experience vis a vis the dilemmas and dimensions of "Being Had and Being Hard".

My insights come from my own experience of the past thirty years of working in Aboriginal adult and community education. And whilst the players may not be the same as the ones you deal with, hopefully, the spirit and principles are, given the universality of the human condition.

For that is essentially what I am talking about when sharing my own experience. The human condition. And, in doing so, looking at both the macrocosm and the microcosm of life.

So, please bear with me for a few minutes as I share some of my story which are integral to the question of "Being Had or Being Hard".

I was in the first wave of Aboriginal university graduates in the late sixties, early seventies. The backdrop of the times was the Referendum of 1967, when Aboriginal people were first counted in the census. "The Times, They Were A Calling" (to paraphrase Bob Dylan's song) and so armed with a degree and revolutionary zeal, I decided to "work for my people" as was both the want and the obligation of the times. I was idealistic. And there is nothing wrong with that, because as someone one said: "ideals are like the stars and whilst we may not reach them, we can charter our course by them".

One of my first jobs after graudation, was tutoring in multi-cultural studies at the then Armidale College of Advanced Education, in NSW. Multicultural studies courses were beginning to proliferate in the seventies and invariably included a stream called Aboriginal studies.

This particular one in which I was involved was a compulsory course for final year teacher trainees. As a compulsory course, it engendered much resistance and resentment, at times. However, despite the latter sentiments, I was determined to be "master of the situation", to coin a phrase.

I cringe when I think of a young, white, male student I helped to fail. For the final decision was left to me to pass or fail this young man in his final year on the basis of an essay on Aboriginal issues which my white colleagues thought was not written "academically" enough. This pass or fail mark was the only thing that stood between him and his graduation that year.

To my own shame, I concurred intellectually with my colleagues. I say shame, for today I would not do the same. But back then, I was essentially operating from only the head. And, today, in deciding whether to be had or be hard, I would like to think that I have learnt some lessons along the highway of life, and learnt from my mistakes. For, after all, as the saying goes: "the only mistakes we make are the ones we don't learn from"

But in those days, I was aspiring to be an acceptable Aborigine, and so I "passed the buck" and agreed with my white academic colleagues. Which went against the grain, so to speak, for intuitively, at the time, I felt it was the wrong decision for me to make.! And, as an example, of better to be had than hard, that decision has weighed heavily on my heart over the years..

Don't ask me to explain it, for I can't explain intuition.. It's something one detects rather than defines. Today, when making decisions about whether to be had or hard, I trust my intuition. My gut feeling!

Besides, intuition in Indigenous societies, as in some Eastern philosophies, always had pride of place. As much as the intellect which is so respected and honoured in our society.

And whilst the idea of intuition is often pooh-pahed, especially, in the type of institutions where I work, i.e. Universities, I learnt from a place where it was honoured and that was Tauondi, the former Aboriginal Community College in Port Adelaide.

In 1980, after returning from the United States where I did postgraduate studies, I was offered a three month teaching assignment which turned into sixteen years.

Tauondi was set up in 1973 for Aboriginal people who were behind the eight ball for multitudinous reasons, e.g. racial, cultural, educational, etc. Its founding philosophy was based on holistic education, i.e. mental, spiritual and physical. And, let me tell you, that in the early seventies, words like holistic and spiritual and intuition were considered mightily suspect!!

However, the holistic philosophy of the place helped me, as I grappled with the dilemmas and decisions of whether "To Be Had or To Be Hard". It spoke to my own condition through the honouring of the Ghandian ideal of Head, Heart and Hands.

I was soon to learn that its Holistic Approach was as much about Physician, Heal Thyself, as I was forced to look within as well as without To look at myself and not just outside to the "other" for whom I was supposedly supplying the answers as I climbed the ladder of success. (Today, I see success as "knowing oneself" and not necessarily about the degrees and titles, car, suburb, etc.).

Tauondi taught me to look within and in doing so, I seemingly returned to the holistic thinking of my ancestors. Hence, I was not just confronted with the issues of the exterior but those of the interior. That is, of myself. For Tauondi (which is the local Kaurna word for "breakthrough") was about both structure and spirit. It's philosophy was an inclusive one which implicitly implied that "there is no such thing as a no-hoper".

Tauondi taught me much as I grappled with the externals of existence, e.g. the bureaucratic structure of Aboriginal affairs and the socio-economic condition of the people we dealt with. As I said, I worked there sixteen years, the last seven as Principal.

My daily dealings with people in need were ones that spoke to me of a connectedness which contained not only weariness but also joyfulness. The College accommodated that weariness and joyfulness within the full gamut of emotions of the human condition. There was humour, happiness, sadness, joy.

Without having spent time at Tauondi, I would never have reached the realisation that "To Be Had or To Be Hard" is somewhat akin to the Chinese word for crisis, that is, it is a two sided coin representing both Danger and Opportunity. And, in discerning Danger or Opportunity; whether to be had or hard, Tauondi, taught me an holistic approach of interiority as well as exteriority .

That interiority which demanded discernment, especially about major decisions, I saw my choice being informed by discernment as opposed to merely judgement. The difference for me in the two is that one is about surface and immediacy and the other is about depth and profundity.

One is about error and one is about Truth, for as Goethe, the German writer and philosophers, aptly puts it: It is much easier to recognise error than to find Truth.

"For error lies on the surfaceand may be overcome;
But Truth lies in the depth, And to search for it is not given to everyone." Goethe.(1749-1832) German Poet and Dramatist

Along the way, I've-discovered my own culture from within and within it, my ancestral ways of thinking which meant I needed to come back and look within the spirit of the person - which is something I recall my parents and grandparents did.- and not just judge by appearance.

The latter isn't always easy, for appearance is so honoured in our type of society - so reflected in the body consciousness and image that this, essentially, materialistic and individualistic society applauds. That is, applauds for some.

In others, it wounds. The others, meaning the excluded. The others who are often very neatly packaged through labelling which employs deficit language in doing so.

So I became aware of the debilitating aspects of deficit language. I remain aware of it to this day, given that Aboriginal people are always seen as the "problem", the "other".

And, in this sense, when I view others as a problem or the other, then I am more likely "to be hard" rather than "to be had". And when I operate solely on my own power driven ego, which is eager to control and has all the answers to the situation, then I determine who are the winners and who are the losers.

And the danger in definitions is that we can all be diminished without even realising it. But if one is diminished we all are diminished. And therein arises the disconnectedness. For as, Kirkegaard, the famous philosopher, said:
"once you label me, you limit me".

Through crisis times at Tauondi, I came to see the connectedness of ourselves and others to the human condition. Indeed, an ex-Jesuit priest with whom I worked with there, for ten years, once said that Aborigines had taught him about "connectedness".

And, in this sense, had much to teach non-Aboriginal Australia.

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