NSW Premier Morris Iemma today sang the national anthem on live TV to act as a role model to other students who might soon be forced to sing their patriotic hearts out every morning (“Compulsory anthem to advance racial harmony”). The idea is to curb future racial outbreaks. And new subjects that will soon be introduced to teach “Australian values” as a result of a “fundamental lack of respect for authority”.

There’s certainly a problem with nationalism in the classroom. The indoctrination of children is still believed to have been a landmark (Hitler Youth) policy which furthered the fate of Nazi Germany. Hitler once proclaimed that, “You, my youth, are our nation’s most precious guarantee for a great future. Never forget that one day you will rule the world”. Mussolini, likewise, recruited an army of children, based on the Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child for his first seven years and I’ll give you the man”. Although acquiring values in education is inevitable (yet subconcious), you don’t make a concious decision that confuses schools with a value system.

I always find it such a paradox that Australia boasts itself as multicultural, but rams home a message of truly Australian values over and over again. You can’t have the best of both worlds – such extreme form of nationalism doesn’t mix with multiculturalism.

‘Values in the classroom’ is rightfully the subject that courts most controversy and media attention. Take the debate extraordinaire over Intelligent Design. Further examples include the Islamic madras (or alleged terror schools), the banning of the Hijab, or maybe even the debate over postmodernism conquering the English syllabus. Also have a look at the “Values Education Study”.

Looking at the overall picture - there seems to be an underlying assumption that education is always either the origin or solution to a problem. When it comes to terrorism, the Islamic madras (religious school) is blamed for propagating the ‘axis of evil’. When it comes to the AIDS crisis, education seems to be all-time solution. Is education really ‘all that’?

This post’s headline might be a slight exaggeration, especially for someone who hates index fingers being constantly pointed at the big, bad and evil media. But in the case of reporting VSU protests, the media should be (at the very least) a suspect for causing the underlying assumption that student activism is dead.

The SBS documentary on the Daily Telegraph (which was screened in class) caused some freaky conclusions about the power of the media. Sure we’ve heard about the media manufacturing news, yet it’s quite different when you have the whole picture and process projected before you.

During our discussions, Juliette made an important addition to the debate over the agenda-setting function of the media. Not only does the media have the influence to manufacture news, but it accordingly has the power to bury the news.

The latter was evident at the height of anti-VSU sentiments by students. For the past decade, students have been negatively labelled apathetic when compared to the rich and vibrant student environment of the 60s/70s. Student protestism, according to many, is dead. Yet when the major anti-VSU protest took its course, which was considered by some the biggest protest since the anti-Vietnam War movement (or at least since 1996), the media barely covered the voices of students, and if it did, it landed on page 146 of the paper. Well no wonder then that students are seemingly silent nowadays.

Equally, reports on the alleged death of student activism are exaggerated. This is mainly due to superficial comparisons between the past and present. Of course it is undisputable that a 60s/70s scenario of driven students taking on the streets would be an unfamiliar sight today (is it?), but that should not account for labelling this generation’s students apathetic and therefore rendering the newsworthiness of their voices void and coverage unnecessary.

Most have associated the decline in student activism to an overriding interest in careers. Such an argument might be based on empirical evidence, but only if you draw comparisons to the past. There is, however, an abundance of examples that student protestism is alive and that it’s only dead in the media. My former post, that dealt with the extraordinary and consistent coverage of student life by Germany’s Der Spiegel, concisely proves that students are still breathing. In fact, many organisations still dedicate themselves to the vibrant nature of campus activism, like Australia’s “Books not bombs” organisation, the civil rights organisation, the campus activism network, or even the ‘mainstream’ culture-jammer group AdBusters.

There seems to be an underlying, somewhat cynical, paradox amid the debate over student protestism in the media. One the one hand, you have student activism supposedly laying dormant, yet on the other, you have the constant attacks on students on the left being “too active”. Take the example of Janet Albrechtsen’s recent, very opinionated analysis of the year 2005 (appropriately titled: “An excellent year for conservatives and the country”):

Similarly, the VSU reforms are based on a simple idea that no one should be forced to join a union, be it on campus or in the workplace. So if students want to jump on a bus to Woomera to protest against mandatory detention, fine. But don’t expect other students to pick up the bus fare by paying compulsory union fees.

It ain’t rocket science: if the media and their conservative counterparts soldier on with whinging over students dressing left politically, then how can those very people assume the momentous position of campus affairs being apolitical and dead? Are they questioning the legitimacy of students and their humanitarian causes, maybe comparing today’s idealism and semi-anarchy driven campuses to the grandeur of the suffragette movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela?

If student voices are hanging by a thread as we are led to believe, then such condition is certainly reinforced and maintained by an active media.

Britain, for example, has nearly 300,000 foreign students out of a total university student population of 2 million; Germany is next with nearly 250,000 students and Australia has nearly 200,000 students

It is interesting that Germany is on the list. Give various German publications a browse and you can’t help but notice the stark contrast in content to mainstream education reports emerging from countries like the US, Britain or Australia. In particular, the mainstream German press barely considers funding or an economically-driven agenda when it comes to education. Rather, the focus remains on the quality and nature of education.

Der Spiegel (which I’d consider the best magazine worldwide) publishes a supplementary magazine on education, titled “UniSpiegel”. Its repeated coverage of the intimate life of student affairs and politics is interesting and appears to have been neglected and replaced with fiscal issues in countries other than Germany. The entrenched theme of ‘education as a right’ would today be considered very traditional, especially when comparing such treatment worldwide.

There might be several reasons for this, but the main one should be the overarching (today unconventional) policy, which provides for free higher/ secondary/ primary education to German citizens. In fact, private schools are highly unpopular and therefore hardly exist. It could therefore be argued that interest in fiscal aspects of education are neither reflective nor necessary. This month, for example, the cover story of UniSpiegel reported on German student politics today and before, which was exceptionally portrayed in a positive light. Most media too often ignore student activism in particular, but the UniSpiegel exceptionally covered a boycott Coca Cola rally happening in the United States (Studenten meutern gegen ‘Killer-Coke’”) for example, written by one its very own journalists. In the same issue, the UniSpiegel reported on another protest of medical students whining over job prospects (“Beruflische Zukunft nur im Ausland”).

One thing’s certain, student activism along with media exposure is alive and well in Germany.

The AFR reported yesterday (“International uni enrolments slow” – no online version available) on the decline of international student enrolments. The US media reported on the exact same problem domestically, with George W. Bush raising the alarm at the State summit attended by over a hundred university presidents.

So Australia is not the only country suffering a loss in numbers of foreign students. And given the massive dependence on international fees to sustain higher education institutions, the competition between universities from developed countries is heating up.

USA TODAY (“USA losing its advantage drawing foreign students”):

Rising U.S. tuitions, increased tension between much of the world and the United States and post-9/11-related immigration issues have all fed a decline in foreign student enrollment. So, too, has heightened competition from the rest of the developed world. For the USA, attracting foreign students is also crucial at a time when public opinion polls show that many abroad intensely dislike U.S. foreign policies.

THE AUSTRALIAN (“Unis depend on money from foreign students”):

Students have cited global security concerns and the worsening exchange rate among reasons for the crisis, but the slowdown has also coincided with the sharp increase in university fees. Education Department figures show the average course fee for a foreign student has risen from about $16,000 a year last year to $17,000 this year - an increase of 6.25 per cent.

Also see:

TODAYOnline [Singapore] (“Australian universities in foreign cash windfall”)

Hindustan Times [India] (“Sending students to the US, trends appear to be slowing down”)

The Age (“Unis gambling on foreign cash”)

The Australian (“Boom in overseas students is over”)

Whenever political correctness gets appraised, the link to education and its culture seems inevitable– whether the syllabus of the classroom or the thought police coming to get you at universities. In the last few days, the mainstream media – both domestically and internationally – has produced an enormous amount of news on intelligent design, sparked by the recent US judgment that found in favor of a no-intelligent-design scheme in classrooms (Search). Politically and legally, its basis was the deep-seated Establishment clause of the US Constitution which guarantees the separation of church and state. However, not far from sight, the judgment furthers, naturalizes and renders concrete the idea of a politically correct and secular culture in classrooms. It’s today become some sort of classroom doctrine.

By googling Miranda, I came across her opinion on PC (as expected) and found this (as expected) (“A toxic twist in the learning curve”):

The creed of political and cultural correctness has poisoned our school system … Today, four competing ideologies hold sway: “Critical theory [and post-modernism], a degenerated form of Marxism, [emphasising] the social context of knowledge”; a social justice approach dwelling on “disadvantaged” groups, such as women, minority ethnic groups, homosexuals and Aborigines; a vocational approach; and the “relics of traditional liberal-humanist values”. Postmodern relativism so influences the curriculum we cannot rank a work of art based on artistic value because that would be “elitist”, writes Dr Barry Spurr, senior lecturer in English literature at Sydney University. Thus King Lear is no better than Ginger Meggs, and Bush Tucker Man videos are as much a syllabus “text” as The Grapes of Wrath. But in the Standard HSC English course, “not one poet from the entire 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is to be found”.

There are instances, however, which prove that political correctness can go mad. The quintessential controversy in recent times was the banning of the “Hijab” in schools (“Head scarf row erupts in France”). Political correctness has managed to overshadow religion to such an extent that the sheer idea of a right to religion, especially in a country that boasts “libterté, egalité, fraternité,” simply does not exist in schools. Amongst the many religious symbols that exist, the Hijab was singled out because critics believed it to be a “political statement”. This further reinforces the politically correct mindset washing over public education sector. Political correctness promises tolerance, but it can likewise stifle the renowned academic thought process. (Click here to see the reporting of the Australian counterpart: “Respecting Hijab”).

In fact, political correctness could even accommodate the entire VSU debate. Indeed, most universities worship a left-wing agenda, so should political correctness step in to make sure the biased tradition is made viewpoint neutral. Such a process has (again) crossed the line by stifling political speech and activity in its entirety, instead of injecting neutrality into the system. So here we have a new and fresh politically correct take overriding the good ol’ politically correct custom at universities!? Some sense please.

A great commentary by Laurie Oakes takes an unusual stand on the art of the floor-crossing, defending the “free-thinking conscience” as a matter of principle which “should be praised, not bagged”. For that reason, he writes the following about Joyce:

“The outrage evident at senior levels of the government over his crossing of the floor is just another indication of the contempt an increasingly arrogant executive has for parliament and parliamentary processes.”

Another interesting fact is that crossing the floor is not as eccentric as we are led to believe. A document by the parliamentary library sheds light on how frequent parliament has come across the art (arguably right) of cross-flooring and its effects since 1950 (“Crossing the floor in the Federal Parliament 1950-2004”).

Interestingly, Robert Hill is among the “most frequent corss-floorers,” having committed the ‘crime’ 10 times. Or Ron Boswell, who voiced his hatred over Barnaby’s misdeed, crossed floors 6 times on various issues. Oakes adds that “Philip Ruddock, Amanda Vanstone, Eric Abetz, Peter McGauran, Warren Truss and De-Anne Kelly are other ministers who have done what Joyce is now being vilified for doing”.

It’s even been said that cross-flooring is a truly Australian thing. Including vilification of it, apparently. The question, however, remains as to why Barnaby has been singled out and targeted by the media. Is it because he disrupted Howard’s control of both houses? This topic is worthy of PhD thesis.

Brendan might have gained a spot in modern political folklore, but so has Barnaby, the Senate’s rabble-rouser extraordinaire, who claims to have the ‘balance of power’ in the Senate.

He’s been called everything from political neophyte, raving recalcitrant, apprentice parliamentarian to accidental working-class hero, heavy price fighter, piss-and-wind rebel and even a Christmas turkey. Despite his critics in parliament, he knows what buttons to push to make headlines, as the Courier Mail (“Xmas message has hollow ring”) suggests. “Barnaby Joyce didn’t save Christmas. He says he did. But don’t believe his spin”.

In August, the Media Monitors agency reported that Barnaby Joyce held the no. 1 spot as the biggest domestic news story — mentioned 4900 times in the media. Unsurprisingly, 2^nd place for most talked-about issue went to Voluntary Student Unionism — mentioned 2900 times. From reading various 2005 reviews, Barnaby has also been sporadically featured.

Simon Cottle in “Rethinking News Access” writes that journalists “fit new situations into old definitions”. Such “old definitions”, he proposes, inspire a mythological game of categories, like hero/villain or good/bad.

But what about the battle between Left versus Right? News outlets continually frame issues in light of political labels - either deliberately or subconsciously. For those who didn’t rejoice the reforms of Nelson, Joyce was breath of fresh air. Students, in particular, relied heavily on the politics of Barnaby, signing petitions and campaigning against VSU alongside his penstrokes. For that reason, he’s become some left-wing spectacle for the media.

In a profile produced by the ABC, Barnaby was questioned on the politics of cross-flooring:

Well certainly and we’ll get to that in just a moment, but you know, I’m interested to know whether you were surprised when you found that even those on the left were heralding you as a political hero?

Senator Barnaby Joyce: Yes it’s always a bit of a concern when people on the left herald you as a political hero because you want to make sure that you’re not being manipulated to go out of your political prism and go into another side that’s represented by another party.

Is the temptation there, is that what you’re saying?

Senator Barnaby Joyce: No, I don’t think so. I mean I’ve always been, that’s why I’m in the national party I’ve always been probably a socially conservative but a little bit more economically to the left of the liberal party. We understand that there are times where the market works and does a very good job and there’s times where it falls flat on its face and leaves people hurt.

In spite of all the attention devoted to Barnaby, he’s been noticeably damned by the media. It’s quite remarkable how political fights are invoked by the media, indeed producing a vision of good and evil. In early December, the final days before VSU was passed, the Herald ran a story titled “VSU ‘ revenge of the nerds’”. This certainly is only one of many articles that inflame the tensions between political rivals: in the red corner we have dissidents Beazley and Joyce, whilst in the blue corner, reformer Nelson. And it gets quite personal:

”What do we hear from Brendan? That he doesn’t like the student politicians he used to mix with 20 years ago. Well bully for him,” Mr Beazley told reporters.

”This is revenge of the nerds from Brendan Nelson.

To be continued.

The man and his machine… Brendan Nelson likes to take to the highways for relaxation from politics.

The softening of his image overlaps with John Street’s work on celebrity politics. He writes:

… The political use of popular culture is a cynical expression of a desperate populism, one in which presentation and appearance substitute for policy and principle

And given that Nelson’s brain cells are infamously known to have stimulated radical reform in education, it seems a bit awkward to divert from “policy and principle” and move into phony tactics of political communication, especially in light of the recent passing of VSU. While I find, overall, no objection to such strategies, Street also notes that the fusion of pop culture and politics is that last resort by politicians to fix “their loss of credibility and trust”. So Nelson fits the profile.

Another interesting aspect is how the media loves to expose certain public figures as potential political candidates. Whether Garrett, Costello, or even the deceased Kerry Packer, they’ve all been dragged into American-coined ‘poli-tainment’ as wannabe PMs. According to the Herald, Nelson is “firming as the next deputy should Peter Costello jump into the Prime Minister’s slot,” despite “artfully” sidestepping questions about his political ambitions. Barry O’Farrell further reinforced that he is “capable of going the whole way in politics”.

Earlier this month, The Age (“The Wild One: Education 2005”) already included Nelson as a key component (or opponent?) in its annual education review (with the same aphrodisiacal image may I add), but the Herald took it a headline and a double-page spread further. The Age barely reported on Nelson, so I guess the image sums up all factors that rocked that Australian education system this year. Thankfully enough, pictures are indeed worth a thousand words.

Here, the very first two paragraphs of the Herald feature:

Should you catch the faint strains of an electric guitar drifting down the silent corridors of Canberra’s Parliament House late night, don’t question your grip on reality. It’s likely to be Dr Brendan Nelson, peeling off a few riffs once the staff have gone home.

“I’ve got a Fender Stratocaster 50^th anniversary, I’ve got a Fender 60s facsimile and I’ve got a Yamaha RGX1212,” he says casually, rattling off a trademark cascade of facts and figures. The Education Minister is trying his hand at Eric Burdon and the Animals, Pink Floyd and longtime favourite Slim Dusty.

He believes that “…. it is not clear that admitting students on low marks is necessarily in their interests,” at the same time suggesting that arguments whipped up by the Opposition lack substance. He goes on to advocate the idea of “education brokers,” suggesting that universities carry an ethical duty to caution students of the demands of their course and prospective future.

It’s a persuasive argument, but I’m not fully convinced that that’s the issue. Should universities admit anyone as long as students show adequate performance in their tertiary studies? If there is an over-supply in places, should universities offer these to students who lack the marks as long as they can afford (no pun intended) to do so? One commentator came to this conclusion:

There are one of two strategies that can be followed. Take as many as you can, give everyone the opportunity and fail those who don’t make it. Or carefully select those who have a good, if not excellent, chance of succeeding, and have lower failure rates. I tend to support the first strategy. Most academics I’ve met prefer the second. Unfortunately, many uni’s now seem to follow the take everyone and fail no-one strategy.

I find both strategies gain foothold in the very heart of the debate as to whether education should be a right or a privilege. Yet it’s not about going one way or the other, but striking a reasonable balance between both. If we go back to an idealistic conception of education as a ‘human right’ we find an egalitarian prospect, which would however, undermine quality provisions, especially in an increasingly competitive, corporate and globalised education system.

Another issue that suddenly seems to have vanished is the idea that only wealthy students are able to gain access to places offered at lower cut-offs. As Sascha Fenton told The Australian (“Money talks as unis admit bad scholars”): “”Education should be about merit and earning your place through hard work. If you can’t get there on hard work you shouldn’t get there because you can afford to.” And that’s what renders the debate over egalitarianism so ridiculous.

In that last seminar with Wendy Bacon, Jon questioned the effectiveness of press releases and whether public relations firms should (or even carry a duty) to render these more attractive so-that the media catches the news breeze. At first instance, I think it is dangerous to think that the media stands idle until some embellished press release crops up and acts like a RedBull to get the media back on their feet. As we already established, the media does have a superior duty to hold our public institutions accountable, which essentially entails a process of actively digging up information.

But there is some truth to the matter. In the past week, most issues dealing with education have been linked to the HSC. And this isn’t sheer coincidence, but a media pattern. If it takes an event, like the release of the HSC, to force the media to look at certain issues, then the media isn’t as active as idealistically thought of. The same can also be said of the Cronulla affair – it took a riot to spark an array of race issues.

So here are just a few of the issues that took over the education agenda in the past week.

Prologue
In an opinion piece in the Herald (“Education is more than ever the key to jobs”), Adele Horin had this to say:

It is politically correct, I know, to debunk the fuss over a single credential. There are many paths to happiness, someone will say. But really, you cannot blame parents for being swept up in a moral panic over education. More than ever, education and formal skills dictate how people fare in the new economy. To the credentialled go the spoils.

Chapter I
The magazine show Today Tonight unusually went hard news this evening with a story on financially-capable students being able to enter university, despite not reaching the official UAI. Education Minister Brendan Nelson and his Labor Opposition, Jenny Macklin battled it out. A science degree at Monash which usually requires a 97 mark in the HSC could be lowered down to a sheer 85 if students can pay (upfront) $16,000 in tuition per annum. I’ve always wondered how Nelson could logically argue his case for such a policy, but apparently it’s possible. He argues that if foreign students enter universities on such basis, why shouldn’t Australian students. I can’t seem to locate a transcript of the programme and only found a forum directed at parents.

Chapter II
The Australian tackled the same issue (first), but embarked from an entirely different angle to the extent of blaming universities and overshadowing Nelson’s involvement (“Failing students buy way into uni”). All of a sudden, Nelson seemed refined, even heroic, and universities and their respective Vice-Chancellors were the cartoon villains. The front-page feature had this to say:

Students are gaining entry to university despite failing Year 12, prompting a warning from federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson that academic standards are “unacceptably low”.

Dr Nelson yesterday urged vice-chancellors to review their entry standards after warning that some students “shouldn’t be at university”.

Only later does it indicate that Nelson, in fact, forces universities to lower their entry requirements to fill every place. Despite the screaming headline, hardly any attention is given to the logistics of the issue – a policy devoted to well-off students (or rather parents) buying a place and future at some university, which automatically keeps off the hands of poorer students.

Chapter III
Here the SMH digs deeper. An editorial last Friday took on an odd issue on the day HSC results were released that essentially deals with freedom of information (“HSC disclosure the best results: secrecy is poor policy”). It humbly attacked the Board of Studies for their secrecy surrounding information on HSC results. As of the moment, the only information made public is that of high achievers, presenting a “narrow criteria on which to judge school performance and quality” and effectively review Australia’s education system. Although it claims that full disclosure will drive better results for students and parents, ultimately it’s journalists who need such information to hold those who run the education system accountable. This, yet again, spells out the struggle between journalists and freedom FROM information and that newsroom principle of enclosure over disclosure.

Chapter IV
Today, the Herald furthered its desire for a freer approach to information by the Board of Studies, this time dealing with FOI requests by students (“Students battle to learn HSC raw marks”). Students launched requests to get hold of their HSC raw marks. I actually remember reading this story on some student back in March or so trying to get some info on how his exam was assessed. That didn’t go well and the issue has not been re-appraised until now.