Dr Paul Brock's Occasional Address*
Mr Chancellor; Mr Vice-Chancellor; Members of Council; Dean of Education, my former academic colleagues, other members of staff; my wife Dr Jacqueline Manuel, a triple graduate of this university and without whom, literally, I could not be here; distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen; and – above all – you graduands for whom today is a such a wonderful one for you and your families. Irrespective of your age, past, present or future careers, one thing is certain: you'll never forget this day for the rest of your lives.
Being the Graduation Day for the Faculty of Education, I thought I might focus this morning on some broader issues associated with being an educated person – and / or being an educator - within Australia which seems ever-increasingly in need of the contribution that education can and should make to the vitality of our democratic society.
Let me start with language. As educated people, and as educators, we should always be aware of the power and significance of the language that we use, and the crucial role that it plays in the public and private life of our human activity. In 1990, during my time as an advisor on the personal staff of the then Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training, John Dawkins, I drafted the Introduction to the Hawke Government's Green Paper on Australia's Language and Literacy Policy - The Language of Australia: Discussion Paper on an Australian Literacy and Language Policy for the 1990s. I hasten to add that I joined Dawkins' staff in Canberra after – and not before – he carried out his 'Dawkinisation' of the Tertiary Education System in Australia. Dawkins agreed to affix his signature to the Introduction I had written.
In the opening sentence I attempted to articulate the power and significance of language in the following words: "It is through language that we develop our thoughts, shape our experience, explore our customs, structure our community, construct our laws, articulate our values and give expression to our hopes and ideals." [1]
During my time on Dawkins' staff, Don Watson was Prime Minister Paul Keating's speech writer and was a notable presence within the Ministerial Wing of the Federal Parliament. His book, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language, deserves to be compulsory reading for every member of every parliament; every public servant; every member of every public and private board; every corporate manager; and every member of the media. And, perhaps above all, by every educator. Watson brilliantly savages the rubbish that so often purports to be effective communication, today. He strips off the pretence of politically correct pompous managerial-speak. He shows how linguistic sludge – and its uncritical acceptance by a society that should know better - has cast a pall over clarity of thought, imagination, innovation, administration, and enterprise.
Just recently, I was asked to review a book on education. The back cover boldly proclaimed that "The book is a 'must read' for... educators, administrators and parents...". Let me read out just one small passage that I read within this book.
There is no difficulty in seeing that ANT is not about traced networks but about network-tracing activity... there is not a net and an actor laying down the net, but there is an actor [or actant] whose definition of the world outlines, traces, delineates, describes, shadows forth, inscrolls, files, lists, records, marks, or tags a trajectory that is called a network. No net exists independently of the very act of tracing it, and no tracing is done by an actor exterior to the net. A network is not a thing but the recorded movement of a thing.[2]
As my young daughters would say 'How random is that'!! As educators we have a responsibility to be lucid in the ways we express our thoughts, ideas and values. Sludgy, clichéd, jargonistic, language is evidence of sludgy, clichéd, jargonistic, thinking and feeling.
What of the role that education should play in confronting issues of national, indeed global, significance? In all its complex and often contradictory aspects, what has been called the 'War on Terrorism' dominates much of contemporary social, political, and humanitarian discourse as we survey our immediate past, reflect over the present, and contemplate our future.
Where will we find the foundations of wisdom to identify and expose contemporary intellectual, religious or spiritual ignorance wherever manifestations of such ignorance flourish? What will guide and encourage us to seek, identify and reject political leadership of deceit, of cowardice, of humbug, of corruption - wherever such leadership may be flourishing in the First, Second, Third or any other World? What forces can expose and then tackle the global obscenity recently revealed by the United Nations that in 2005 one hundred million children were sold into slavery: the vast majority of these poor children being sold into sexual slavery.
How can humanity progress towards that loving human fellowship preached by the charismatic and holy founders of the world's great religions whose inspiration and sanctity have so consistently been besmirched down the ages by too many of their acolytes who have been bigots or selectively fundamentalist? What forces will protect us from the evils imposed on and within society under the banner of terrorism on the one hand, or under the banner of protecting us from terrorism on the other? That innocent people on London trains are not only protected from the evil of terrorists' bombs but also protected from cold-blooded killing by police who then seek to cover up the truth with a farrago of lies?
What forces do we need to ensure that our civil liberties are not trampled upon? That people are not denied their basic human rights? That those legal rights enshrined in the Magna Carta and other seminal legal testaments which are at the core of our Australian democratic values are not besmirched? That our political and other leaders do not trample upon the presumption of innocence until proven guilty; the protection of habeas corpus; freedom of the press; trial by jury (as distinct from trial by media); freedom of association; equal rights under the law without fear or favour; and so on?
So, to summarise this point, what forces will sustain democratic civilization from the attacks upon our individual, collective, and indeed national security on the one hand; and upon our liberty, privacy, fraternity, equality, mutual respect on the other? For attacks on both fronts may come both from without and within our own Australian society.
Of course, these kinds of questions have been addressed by our predecessors - within, admittedly, different historical contexts. For example in the latter half of the 19th Century that very fine poet, public servant, literary critic and educator Matthew Arnold came to the conclusion that because of the decline in the power of the established Church of England, the moral fibre of British civilisation would now have to be found in "contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world". In particular, Arnold looked to the power of literature and its attenuated cultural values to provide bulwarks against those forces that threatened society. World War 1 would smash so much of this idealism, hope and confidence generated within the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
To what can we look today? Surely it must be to education – in all its depth, breadth and rigour in all of its intellectual, moral, spiritual, physical and cultural dimensions. And accessible to all. Anywhere and everywhere in the world. An education which, among its other values, is committed to helping students in the universal human need to search for truth and meaning.
In particular, a quality of public education that is informed, honest, critiqued, and properly resourced. That is both properly idealistic and properly sceptical. That celebrates the virtues of compassion, justice, human rights. And which repudiates tyranny, ignorance, fundamentalism of all kinds, and terrorism - whatever and wherever be its sources around the globe. As the Canadian writer and philosopher, John Ralston Saul, wrote in 2002: "Any weakening of universal public education can only be a weakening of the long-standing essential role universal public education plays in making us a civilized democracy". [3]
That is a huge task. But without a truly educated global world we will all be condemned to suffering the inevitable consequences of failing to learn from history and running the risk of wiping out the world as we know it. For example, without education in the fullest sense of the word, we in the West will continue to cast a blind eye upon the evils before our very own eyes. Such as was the initial response to the genocide in Rwanda – where the United Nations failed so miserably.
Or in the break-up of Yugoslavia where, for too long, the Christian West turned its back on the slaughter of the Muslims – until it was too late. Or where for so long Australia turned a blind eye to the slaughters in East Timor until the Australian Government declared that enough was enough and sent in our police and army to protect those poor people from further atrocities.
We have a responsibility as educators not only to support the intellectual and personal growth of our students, but to help them develop as ethically and morally responsible citizens aware of injustice, misery and, indeed, of evil. And of justice, happiness and, indeed, of goodness. As educators we have a responsibility to try to ensure that our students learn from history and do not end up merely replicating our historical failures, but build upon our historical successes.
To do this, we educators must be – among other things - men and women of awareness; sensitively and finely attuned to the world in which we live. Such awareness and sensitivity to the significance of things happening within our world and drawing out the educational (in the broadest sense of the word) consequences is at the heart of being a good educator – both within and beyond the boundaries of classroom and lecture theatre.
It is common for people living within a period of profound historical change, or who are witnesses to an event that, in retrospect, will be invested with high significance by future historians not to be immediately aware of the change and of its significance. Usually, it is the later insight of history that invests the events with the significance that they warranted at the time.
The great twentieth century poet W. H Auden makes this kind of point powerfully in the context of reflecting over the nature of human suffering in his 1940 poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" - based on his viewing several paintings by the sixteenth Century Flemish painter Pieter Breughel including the 1558 painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, his 1566 work The Numbering at Bethlehem, and his 1566-1567 painting The Massacre of the Innocents.
A central theme of this short poem is that, in each of the episodes captured in the paintings, the non-participating observer is either oblivious to or fails to respond to the essential tragedy of the event at the immediate moment of its being experienced. Auden describes people continuing to walk unconcernedly outside a room in which appalling torture and murder is taking place. A farmer ploughing his field and a captain of a passing boat look on unconcernedly at what should be the amazing and tragic sight of the young Icarus falling from the sky and plunging to his death in the sea. Like those recent lonely deaths of elderly people in Sydney apartments, nobody notices. Nobody seems to be aware. Nobody seems to care.
But as educators we must go beyond awareness. Informed critique, imagination, creativity, innovation, knowing, and caring will have to be the principal drivers of effective education now and into the future, guided by our own compass of critique, informed by knowledge, skills, understanding and values built upon a 21st century kind of Arnoldian commitment to "the best which has been thought and said in the world".
This involves our critiquing of the here and now; our status quo. If, and when, our critique reveals that we must make changes – however disturbing this may be to our comfortable couch of the status quo – then we must do so before we drown in a sludge of antiquated irrelevance and brain-dead educational practices.
For those of us who are professional educators, it also means continuously critiquing those educational institutions within which we work – to try to ensure that the values we profess are the values lived out by and within these institutions. The sociologist and former Jesuit Priest, Ivan Illich, coined the phrase 'the institutionalising of value'. By which he meant that while institutions are usually established, often by charismatic individuals, in order to serve the needs of clients – be they school students or patients in hospitals, for example – they too often end up really serving the needs of those in charge of them, whether they be school teachers or doctors and nurses. The concept of 'institutionalising of value' is a very powerful instrument for critiquing all institutions within our society.
We often hear that famous dictum of the French philosopher, political activist and human rights advocate, Voltaire, that "while I strongly disagree with what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it". This is one of the values to which we as educators must always be committed. But I fear that there is a new political correctness, maybe even a new McCarthyism, abroad in Australia. It seems to me that people may be beginning to be afraid to speak out publicly on some important issues.
Perhaps we are entering a period when we need seriously to remind ourselves of the writings of people like George Orwell and to act upon his insights into political correctness and the gradual dismemberment of freedoms. Those great novels 1984 and Animal Farm cry out for re-reading. Along with Camus' The Plague. Let me offer you just one extract from 1984.
And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive. [4]
These words have spine-chilling resonance in 2006. Incidentally, another saying of Voltaire worth remembering in 2006 is that "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities".
When I first started to teach George Orwell's powerful novel 1984 back in the 1970s, I felt very comfortable in being able to point the finger at totalitarian regimes from earlier history and far off places like Communist Russia, Communist China, Nazi Germany as powerful exemplars of the appalling forces and perversions of freedom explored in that novel. At no time had I ever felt any serious relevance to the Australia of my birth and upbringing up to the point when I ceased to be a school teacher and became an academic – a country that had been led by Prime Ministers Curtin, Chifley, Menzies, Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam and Fraser.
But how would I engage my senior students in the searing social critique at the heart of 1984 today in a world whose consciousness is saturated by the real, perceived and the sometimes artificially manufactured threats of terrorism? If, like all good teachers of English, I set out to help my students connect with the novel by relating it to their own contemporary world, would I be liable to being charged with sedition under the Act passed late December in Federal Parliament were I to quote the former Liberal Party Prime Minister of this country, Malcolm Fraser. Not long ago Mr Fraser delivered an address to an audience in the University of Melbourne in which he expanded upon a previous comment he had made one month earlier that "these are powers whose breadth and arbitrary nature, with lack of judicial oversight, should not exist in any democratic country".[5]
What if I were to suggest any parallels with contemporary legislation on such matters as the banning of one parent of a 16-18 year old youngster – who had been informed that their youngster had been arrested under the new preventative legislation – from telling the other parent without risking a jail sentence of up to 7 years? And, were I to do so, would I be exposing myself to being charged with sedition under the new legislation? It would be far safer to stay well away from all of this. But would this be an abrogation of my duties as a teacher, were I to avoid this?
Many people today look back with derision at a photograph of Neville Chamberlain returning from his meeting with Hitler in Munich in 1938 waving a piece of paper at the airport and proclaiming that he had achieved "peace in our time". This declaration was acclaimed by an overwhelming majority on both sides of the House of Commons and by the populus at large. There was enormous hope across Britain that a Second World War had been averted.
The Munich meeting had involved Hitler himself, Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier of France, and Benito Mussolini of Italy. On January 2, 1939 TIME Magazine honoured Hitler with its award of Man of the Year for 1938 because of his achievement at Munich.
So, at the height of his meteoric rise to power in Germany, only a few months before the invasion of Poland, and five years after his launching of the murderous campaign against the Jewish people, to what extent was Hitler's catastrophic ambitions to transform Europe being taken seriously? How troubling was it to the bulk of the British Parliament – and, the British people? Hitler's weapons of mass destruction were no figment of any politician's imagination, dissembling, stupidity, incompetence, or deceit. They had been plain for everyone to see before and after Hitler's troops had rumbled into the Rhineland back in March 1936.
As High Court Justice Michael Kirby pointed out very recently in launching Heirloom, a book on the memories of child survivors of the Holocaust, Germany was "one of the most civilised countries on Earth".[6] In Germany, from 1933 onwards, where were the educators? Who was speaking out? Who was aware? Who was critiquing the here and now - there and then? How many educated people in Germany would have been aware of what was going on? Apart from those individuals such as the remarkable Pastor Bonhoeffer who would eventually be executed in the most barbaric way for his resistance? What would we have done?
Time and again later generations have asked 'Surely many of the German people must have known what was going on?' Over and over we have heard statements like 'In the morning the officers at the concentration camps would kiss their wives and children goodbye, go off to work and gas thousands of innocent men, women and children all day, then come home, kiss their wives and children, have dinner, listen to a bit of Beethoven or Schubert on the gramophone, and go to bed. How could they do this?'
We should never forget that Hitler came to power in the 1933 elections by winning the largest number of votes of a single party in the Reichstag before, of course, subsequently banning all parties opposed to him from being represented in the Reichstag. But he was democratically elected. One of the lessons from the horrors of Hitler and Nazism is that we must be ever vigilant to protect both our fundamental securities and our fundamental freedoms. Not that we should be stupidly paranoid, but that we be prudently sceptical of the wielders of power of any political organization. Lord Acton's famous, but too often misquoted, warning that "power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is one that we educators ought always to reflect over.
Just over a week ago in Sydney, I was privileged to be invited to attend the launching of several books honouring the Sesquicentenary of responsible parliamentary government in NSW inside the very chamber where the original Parliament had first convened in May 1856, surrounded by present and former parliamentarians, in the presence of direct descendants of every Premier since Henry Parkes, and presided over by the current Speaker, John Aquilina. In one of the finest speeches I have ever heard, former Labor Party Premier Neville Wran spoke with wisdom and passion about the very issues I have just been considering.
Let me quote from Mr Wran's speech, as recorded in Hansard.
Democracy is a work in progress. When we of the West talk about building and spreading democracy, even fighting wars for democracy, we ought to have the grace to realize our own shortcomings and hypocrisies. We talk as if these values – democratically elected assemblies, equal representation, the sanctity of the ballot, the secular state, freedom of religion, including freedom from religion as a political test, the equal status of women, the right of organized labour, the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, the presumption of innocence, a citizen's right to privacy, the criminality of state torture, the sovereignty of peoples and of nations under international law – were all self-evident truths and inalienable rights which we uphold as universal, immutable and immortal.
We talk about them as if we guaranteed them in our own societies ... .. (W)e talk about these values as if they were so much part of the natural order of things from time immemorial that we have a divine right to impose them on the rest of the world even if it means war. Yet there is not one of these values – not one – which has not been under challenged in our societies in the lifetime of every one of us in this room.
... .. (H)ow fragile and vulnerable, how hard and recently won, are those concepts which we now demand, in all our arrogance and hypocrisy, shall be accepted by the rest of the world without question. We ought at least to have a decent humility about these things. We did in fact fight a Great War to make the world "safe for democracy", as we were told. That was from 1914 to 1918.
In less than two decades the democracy we were supposed to have established in Europe, in the very heartland of Western civilizations, had been destroyed in Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Yugoslavia, Austria and, above all, Germany. [7]
Neville Wran's speech was a triumph of awareness and critique. Of knowledge, wisdom and caring. The former Labor Party Premier of NSW, now in his 80th year, and the former Liberal Party Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, who is 76 this year, speak now not as political party partisans but as truly educated and wise elders who are passionately concerned about Australia and our future. Indeed, in the best sense of the word, Mr Fraser and Mr Wran have been speaking as educators of our contemporary and future Australia. In their contributions to the public discourse to which I have referred this morning, they remind us that we should never underestimate the crucial contribution that an educated citizenry needs to make in building and sustaining a fully educated society committed to the ideals and values of a liberal democracy.
I have Motor Neurone Disease - an incurable, inevitably fatal disease. It progressively paralyses your arms, legs, swallowing and speaking muscles and eventually, if you live that long, you end up with a mind and a consciousness inside a body capable only of eye-blinking - before the breathing muscles give way, and you die. At any one time there are about 1,400 people afflicted with MND in Australia: every day one Australian dies of MND and one more is diagnosed with this wretched affliction.
This week has been Motor NeuroneDisease Awareness Week across Australia. There is a desperate need to raise the level of community and government awareness of MND. For a disease first identified in the scientific literature by the great French neurologist Jean Charcot in 1869, it is a scientific / medical research disgrace that in 2006 nobody still understands the cause and nobody has yet discovered a cure for MND. Yet in the last twelve months, for example, total funding for MND research right across Australia was a mere pittance of just over $350,000.
The average period of survival of people with MND from diagnosis to death is only 18 months. At one extreme end of the survival spectrum are people like Pro Hart who lived for only 3 months after being afflicted. Others, most famously Professor Stephen Hawking, survive for much longer. Given at worst 3 years and at best 5 years to live in 1996, I am a very rare long term survivor. So, for obvious reasons, I have to speak about the future with fragility.
So, I would like to conclude my Address by speaking directly, personally and individually to every one of you graduands – whether you are already teaching, about to teach, or in positions to support teaching and learning in schools. At the end of Chapter 10 of my autobiography A Passion for Life, published in 2004 by ABC Books I summed up my own hopes and aspirations for education by putting them within a very personal and a specifically public schooling context. As I reflected over the quality of public education that I want for our two children – Millie, who is now in Year 6 at Oakhill Drive Public School and Sophie who is in Year 10 at Cherrybrook Technology High School– I wrote the following.
Therefore, not just as a professional educator, but as a Dad, I want all future teachers of my Sophie and Millie to abide by three fundamental principles that I believe should underpin teaching and learning in every public school.
First, to nurture and challenge my daughters' intellectual and imaginative capacities way out to horizons unsullied by self-fulfillingly minimalist expectations. Don't patronise them with lowest-common-denominator blancmange masquerading as knowledge and learning; nor crush their love for learning through boring pedagogy. Don't bludgeon them with mindless 'busy work' and limit the exploration of the world of evolving knowledge merely to the tyranny of repetitively churned-out recycled worksheets. Ensure that there is legitimate progression of learning from one day, week, month, term and year to the next.
Second, to care for Sophie and Millie with humanity and sensitivity, as developing human beings worthy of being taught with genuine respect, enlightened discipline and imaginative flair.
And third, please strive to maximise their potential for later schooling, post-school education, training and employment, and for the quality of life itself so that they can contribute to and enjoy the fruits of living within an Australian society that is fair, just, tolerant, honourable, knowledgeable, prosperous and happy.
When all is said and done, surely this is what every parent and every student should be able to expect of school education: not only as delivered within every public school in NSW, but within every school not only in Australia but throughout the entire world. [8]
[1] Department of Employment, Education and Training, The Language of Australia: Discussion Paper on an Australian Literacy and Language Policy for the 1990s, Canberra 1990, p. ix
[2] Latour (1998), quoted in Harris, C. and Marsh, C. 'Analysing curriculum change: Some reconceptualised approaches', Curriculum Developments in Australia: Promising initiatives, impasses and dead-ends, Australian Curriculum Studies Association, Adelaide, 2005, p31
[3] Cited in The Charter for Public Education Network (British Columbia, Canada), Charter for Public Education, Vancouver, 2003, p. 1
[4] George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 9
[5] Cited in Mike Carlton's weekly column in The Sydney Morning Herald Weekend Edition 22-23 October, 2005
[6] Justice Kirby's complete utterance on this particular point was reported in The Sydney Morning Herald, April 3, 2006, page 2, as follows: "If (the Holocaust) could happen in one of the most civilised countries on Earth it could happen anywhere" said Sir Justice Kirby. "Even in Australia. We have been warned. We must heed the warning."
[7] Hansard, NSW Parliament, "Launch of THE PREMIERS OF NEW SOUTH WALES (Volume One 1856-1901 and Volume Two 1856-2005) edited by Ken Turner and David Clune AND DECISION AND DELIBERATION: THE PARLIAMENT OF NEW SOUTH WALES 1856-2003, Written by David Clune and Gareth Griffith, Legislative Assembly Chamber, Parliament House, Sydney, Friday 31 March 2006, page 8
[8] Paul Brock, A Passion for Life, ABC Books, Sydney, 2004, pp 250-251