Another Brick in the Wall

By Jonathan Howcroft

After my name I am entitled to add the letters BA and MA. I only narrowly avoided committing to the minimum three years required to add P, H and D. I am 29, I have no idea what my contribution to the world is but I know an awful lot about the history of Britain since the war.

My story is increasingly familiar throughout Australia and the developed world. Hordes of Gen Y-ers perpetually gilding their CVs to make a second-year sociology project reflect their capacity to problem solve, network, or whatever facile commercially inspired character trait is required from that particular employer. Meanwhile, the media regales in stories of industry-changing entrepreneurs graduating only from the ‘school of life’. There is a dislocation between an increasingly educated population and that group’s ability to engage with the world around it. I am part of that group and I am frustrated. Prosperity in Australia and similar countries is predicated on a belief that an academic education is the goose that lays golden eggs. Perhaps all that glitters is not in fact gold.

This is a view shared by Sir Ken Robinson, a leader in the fields of education and creative thinking. Sir Ken was interviewed recently by Kerry O’Brien for the 7.30 Report; an interview deemed so important by the ABC it spanned two editions of the show. Sir Ken reprised his role as a genial agitator of bureaucracies, asserting his view that the educational structures designed to move countries forward could actually be holding them back. Robinson’s argument follows that each stage of education is designed as a stepping-stone towards the next – not to be actualising experiences in their own right. The logic of this system would see a child entering at prep, advancing through the various tiers of schooling to the ivory towers of the university. And then what? Either they are burped out of the system as identi-kit-graduates or the pattern repeats itself – undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral, post-doc, tenure and cardigans. In short, if observed successfully, the Australian education system is designed to create academic professors.

It should be pointed out that there are vocations that require such journeys, notably medical, or legal, if for no other reason than to accumulate the necessary reservoir of knowledge in non-practicing environments. However, as philosopher Alain de Botton mischievously suggested to a packed RMIT recently, most other professions can be satisfactorily executed by a competent 12 year old.

The product of such systems is a distortion of the very purpose that they were designed for. There are now more university graduates than at any point in history. Ostensibly this is a good thing. It hints towards social mobility and an increase in the general education of the populus. But for what tangible benefit? The Bachelors degree, which used to represent a level of intellectual competency sufficient to guarantee a professional career, now requires upgrading to a masters degree to retain comparative status. It is surely only a matter of time before this is super-sized into a PhD. The outcome? Successive cohorts of academically educated young people whose garlands diminish in value with each successive university intake.

I, and many like me, are now over-educated in a world in which conventional career and lifestyle choices fail to resonate with our experiences. Gen Y does not have the economic imperative to work to survive as previous generations. Affluence and education has made us lazy and cynical. We know what we don’t want but we’re too precious to change anything ourselves. We are more aware of environmental and ethical concerns, limiting our desires to join the oil companies and media empires formerly seen as the gold standard graduate employers. Contemporary graduates, so disillusioned with their ascent, suddenly want to work for NGOs or charities helping orphaned leper-donkeys in Malawi suffering from HIV. This marketplace is now so congested with Gen Y grads there is a minimum level of work experience required to even get an interview for what are poorly paid short-term positions.

The multiple ironies are not lost on me and I appreciate this is very much a middle-class whinge from a position of comfort and security. My parents are not university graduates and they worked hard in careers I am sure were not their childhood dreams, in order to provide for their family and the lives they aspired to. The perfect end to this scenario, of course, being to send their children to university. And in that familial context the bigger picture is reduced to a simple decision. University is the goal, the end-point of the process. The life beyond is an afterthought, a given. A degree equals success.

The outcome for me is that following four years of tertiary education (as well as the now standard gap-year) I did not fully engage in the labour market until I was 24. Assuming most people take time to find suitable careers and move between employers often during the initial stages of full-time work, it was probable that on leaving education I would be pushing 30 before I even had a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Throw in mortgages, families and student loan repayments and it’s easy to see how juvenile disaffection could mutate into serious status anxiety. For young people entering the workforce earlier, say at 18, that process can begin in the safety of adolescence and bear fruit soon enough to enable life plans to be made with confidence. For this to succeed, societal attitudes towards vocational training and the omnipotence of universities requires overhauling.

If this appears to be a hatchet jab on higher-education it is not meant to be so. The twenty-first century will be driven by knowledge economies. Contemporary wisdom dictates that knowledge is generated by an academic system with universities at the summit. As Sir Ken Robinson passionately points out, contemporary wisdom is often a poor judge of future need. We do not yet know what systems are required to prepare future generations for the problems they do not yet know they will face. Primary aged children of today will be world leaders in 2060 and beyond, and we have no comprehension of the world they are going to inherit. Despite this, they are being educated in a system based on nineteenth century ideals overlaid with successive short-term objectives. The bulge of early twenty-first century graduates is one such short-term objective designed to fuel the knowledge economy. I am 29, I have no idea what my contribution to the world is but I know an awful lot about the history of Britain since the war.