BY PETER ROBSON
The Wodonga campus of La Trobe University only offers one humanities subject. There are almost twice as many students enrolled in the course as there are places.
The lecture theatre's doors are closed as soon as all the seats are taken, typically five minutes before the class is due to begin. Other students wait outside to get notes off friends who managed to get inside.
The lecturer never attends the class. On a good week, the students get to see a video of the lecturer presenting in Melbourne the week before. On a bad week, students only get a sound recording.
This example is extreme. But universities are getting more crowded, the amount of staff-student face-to-face contact is decreasing and many courses that find it hard to get industry sponsorship have been cut.
This is the end result of decades of starving universities of funds. Per-student funding has fallen dramatically since the mid-1980s, when the federal ALP government "restructured" the sector, and even more so after the Coalition was elected in 1996. Funding has dropped by $1200 per student since then.
In 1989, universities employed an average of one staff member to every 13 students. By 2001, it was one staff member to every 20 students. The exception to the rule is the war-training institution, the Australian Defence Academy, which boasts one staff member to every seven students
The government's priorities are clear: in the May budget, defence was given an extra $2.5 billion. Canberra will spend $745 million on occupying Iraq. This money would go a long way to restoring decent education in Australia, but the Coalition government has other ideas.
These priorities — funding unjust wars over our education — are screwed.
Just as university students push and shove to attend a lecture of little value, students spend all of high school studying like crazy, competing viciously against other students, in order to get into a higher education system that leaves a lot to be desired.
High school students are driven into such stress over the perceived importance of their results that youth suicides increase around the time of final exams.
We live in a capitalist society, where education, like most social services, is driven by corporations' desire to make profits out of it.
Widespread publicly funded primary education was first introduced in developed capitalist countries during the 19th century, when young workers needed basic literacy and numeracy skills to work effectively within factories. High school education became important as the need for more skilled workers grew.
University education remained the province of the very wealthy until after the second world war, when capitalism required a vast increase in the number of university-educated workers in the First World.
The introduction of the Commonwealth Grants Scheme in the 1960s, followed by the abolition of university fees in 1975, helped dramatically expand the number of working-class youth able to access university education.
Even under free education, access to universities was never equal. Students coming from wealthy elite private schools have always made it into the "best" universities much more easily than students from public schools, and those coming from schools in poor working-class neighbourhoods often find it impossible to get into a university at all.
Increased student fees, like the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, have made this worse.
Indigenous students make up just 1.2% of students who start a university degree. Women pay off their HECS debt much more slowly than men. Seventy per cent of students find they have to work in order to survive, and a third of those must miss classes to attend work.
The whole education system enforces the "values" bosses want: respect for authority (teachers and academics hold absolute sway in classrooms); competition (students' performance is assessed in relation to each-other, collaboration between students is almost always viewed as 'cheating'); and obedient, "disciplined" behaviour.
The idea that universities are places where critical thinking is developed and students' perspective is broadened may be popular, but it is mostly an illusion. For employers and their government, universities are first and foremost there to turn out skilled, compliant workers.
Now that the government thinks it can get students to pay for an education, which is necessary to get a well-paying white-collar job, it is moving to completely corporatise the higher-education sector.
Education minister Brendan Nelson's plans include allowing universities to charge students an extra 30% on top of current HECS levels, double the number of students paying full up-front fees and introduce an interest-based student loans scheme.
Students will only be able to access the kind of education that they can afford, and universities will, even more than they do now, perpetuate class discrimination.
Working-class students will pay through the nose, incurring a mortgage-sized debt, in order to be trained as useful workers. Most university research is already funded by industry, and this trend is set to continue.
This focus on training workers, not allowing students to explore the world, warps the very definition of education. In the US, in Oak Brook, Illinois, there is a "Hamburger University" where students are taught how to make hamburgers for fast food chains.
The pressure on universities to operate as businesses also distorts education delivery. At the University of Western Sydney, the administration had more books than it could store. Its solution: to bury the books deep under university grounds.
The education system should be a resource for all of society. It should develop the skills that we all need. Medical research for diseases that kill people is more important than more instant-erection drugs, or more symptom-suppressors designed to keep us working when sick.
Environmental science, which could save our planet, is more important than learning how to make "smart" bombs, which could destroy it. Understanding history, politics and philosophy is more important than "computer ethics" classes that teach you not to rip off Microsoft software.
If the people decided what we wanted to teach and learn, to become the society we want to live in, then we would see a real public education system, where solutions for environmental and social problems could be debated and discovered.
The resources now dedicated to finding new ways to make money could, if reorganised, be used to find new and better ways to fulfill human needs and provide for the full development of human beings.
This would require a revolutionary approach.
The money is there. According to the Australian Greens, if the government's latest tax cut of $4 a week were put instead into the education system, universities could operate without any student contributions. There would be no upfront fees, no HECS repayments, no postgraduate fees and no fees for international students.
But a truly democratic, equitable and resourced education system would require a far greater investment. In the last year, the Coalition government has criminally wasted over $20 billion of public money on guns, bombs, submarines and fighter jets to kill other human beings.
If money for education were prioritised over spending on the military then the entire education system could be rebuilt to adequately fund every single person's education, not just those now "lucky" enough to get to university.
This must include, of course, a living income for students and teachers. The slow erosion of Austudy and the Youth Allowance is one of the biggest deterrents to attending university or TAFE for the poor.
Money, however, is not enough. A real education system would not be based upon competition but collaboration and student input. A teaching approach that focused on students working together on common problems, learning, teamwork and problem-solving in real-world situations is far more useful than standardised tests with "right" or "wrong" answers.
Some of these teaching techniques have been theorised by experts like Paolo Friere and Bell Hooks. In socialist Cuba, they have been applied with great success along with other changes that have aided the development of students.
As satirist Michael Moore once said, "a democracy is only as good as its participants, when it becomes a spectator sport is when everything goes wrong". Just as education now serves to put people off political involvement, a different approach could encourage people to participate in running society.
A population that does not question or debate only serves the interests of those who are in power. Education needs to encourage critique from the earliest stages, and not rely upon the presentation of experts or inherited knowledge. Every classroom could be a laboratory of ideas.
It is possible to provide a real humane education system. But it won't happen with a government whose strings are pulled by big business.
We can win reforms to the current system. Mass action campaigning has won important gains for students in the past and, if we can build a strong enough campaign, will in the future. But eventually, this is not enough.
A public, democratic, people-friendly education system can only be realised if the masses of ordinary people are in control of how this system is run: if we have a democratic socialist society.
[Peter Robson is a member of the socialist youth organisation Resistance.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 27, 2003.
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