Fun with Educational Policy!

I’m currently reading Simon Marginson’s book on the development of educational policy in Australia’s recent history. Apart from being possibly the most nerdy book I’ve read all year (statistics *om nom nom*), it is a fascinating exploration of how the educational system we live with now has come into being (the book was finished in 1993, so many of the policy that applies to us today was just being consolidated.)

Oh no, I hear you say. Policy documents? Snore. Bring me a doona, stat.

You’re probably right. I am a little abnormal for being interested in such bloodless nonsense. But indulge me for a moment here. There are a couple of good reasons why teachers should be interested in educational policy, and this book certainly got me thinking about those reasons in more detail.

Firstly, if there is one thing that we can appropriate from Paulo Freire that might actually be useful and applicable to our context today, it’s the ability to be aware of the over-arching societal structures that result in our oppression*. Are teachers oppressed? Yes, to an extent! We teach under a prescribed curriculum, we operate within a highly regulated industry, we have an aggressively mandated profession. Therefore, the structures and agendas that result in these prescriptions are worth exploring. Only then, as Freire says, can we be truly free to explore alternative options, or truly be free.

I read somewhere that we can ask three questions as teachers:

The first is ‘What will I teach?’ (concerned with content and knowledge)

The second is ‘How will I teach? (concerned with the process and the dynamics of teaching)

The third, more illuminating question is one that we don’t necessarily ask very often.

‘Why do I teach?’

Not in the sense of exploring the deep, personal reasons for becoming a teacher (although those are important.) Why do I teach the content that I do? What is the ultimate purpose of education? Who is determining the direction of education? What sort of future Australia am I helping to create?

This is the questions that has seized me.

For example, are we aware, as teachers in Australia, of the incredibly strong economic agenda that exists in our curriculum and in our educational institutions? Human capital theory, an economic theory that was birthed in the period following the Second World War, is the most influential economic theory of education, one that has been setting the framework of government policies in Australia since the 1960’s. Human capital theory basically proposes that the value or worth of a person is their monetary value, or earning power. People who are educated, using tax dollars provided by the citizens, are expected to earn wages that will contribute to the economic well-being of the nation in the future. The human capital theory that informs our policy today is even more free-market then the original manifestation. All the arguments about what gets included in the curriculum, the side-lining of ‘arts’ subjects like music and dance, the increasing emphasis on objectives and competencies in adult education, all of these can be linked back to neo-classical economics. The role of markets is becoming increasingly important in higher education. You only need to look at recent Liberal budget and the beginnings of deregulation of university fee structures to see this at play.

So what could this one, small part of our policy history mean for me in the classroom? It highlights to me again the importance and value of critical thinking, of encouraging our students to develop skills in not swallowing everything that is given to them without evaluating it. Whilst I cannot necessarily change policy at a national level, I can think about the way I am educating my students and determine to teach them that there is more to life than making the big bucks. That they are more than numbers in an economist’s equation. The education can be as much about our basic humanity then it is about our national interest.

I feel ridiculously naïve sometimes. I still have so much to learn!

*By oppression, I don’t mean the ‘beating with sticks, imprisonment, erosion of human rights’ kind of oppression. More like the ‘narrowing of freedom, over-regulating’ type of oppression.