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Archive for Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 04:47 pm GMT +10
The Education Crisis
We need a revolution. I wish I said this as a revolutionary. My whole life I’ve attempted to look natural with a bandanna around my neck, a cigarillo in my mouth and Nietzsche in my bag. I try, but I suspect I don’t look very convincing. But start me thinking about the current education system in this dear state of ours, and all I want to do is reach for the Communist Manifesto and pull on the camouflage. An education revolution is needed, because what we have isn’t working. Worse than being ineffective, it’s hindering the people we set out to assist and encourage.
I can’t speak for what’s happening in other states. NSW born and bred, a graduate of The Year of Hard Slog commonly known as the HSC, I tend to have a pretty dark view of education in our state.
I’m sure people who have gone through the VCE or other equivalents have as negative a perception of the process. But I can only talk about what I know, and I know that what we are asking young people to go through in NSW isn’t right. I’m not sure what the alternative should look like, but I know it needs to include a greater acceptance and encouragement of alternatives such as vocational education, and much less emphasis on the process as the make or break moment of a lifetime.
School needs to be reconfigured around providing options, not barring them.
Thankfully, the mood appears to have shifted. Finally it would appear the university executives are in agreement that the HSC doesn’t turn out well-rounded healthy people who have a good grasp of education. University of Sydney Vice Chancellor Michael Spence recently stated the HSC was “a crude and one-dimensional measure of a student’s track record”. Hear hear says I! He continued, ‘What we are looking for is [sic] people who are going to grow into champions in the kind of highquality environment we can provide for them. That is not necessarily the person who ran the fastest race”. As someone who is a particularly slow runner, I sincerely appreciate the sentiment.
Michael Spence is not alone in his feeling. The Macquarie University Vice Chancellor has long been a campaigner to abolish the UAI, and the new chief executive of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (where do they come up with these catching titles?) has voiced concern about having the HSC as a national model of assessment. I’m not surprised. Anyone that went through the HSC would have significant concerns about exporting it across the country.
Personally, I had managed to forget what a horrible process the HSC was until my younger brothers started it this year. Normal amiable people both, they’ve become unrecognisable. We’re asking too much of young people. We’re putting them under too much pressure. Without taking away from those who work hard in the HSC, a lot of what the final exams test is how well you can remember your English essays. Call me crazy, but that’s not what I have in mind when I talk about education.There are lots of arguments espoused for the HSC. You need a ranking system. Final exams are important. How else do you organise people into university? There are safeguards if things go wrong, such as special considerations in the case of disadvantage. But by and large, the delightfully apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the HSC aims to suggest that your life hangs in the balance of the little numbers of your UAI (or an ATAR, I think that’s they are calling it these days. Back in the day, it was a UAI. An ATAR sounds way too much like the online version of yourself in Second Life). I find it hard to believe that a system of educating young people must inevitably be a horrible process.
The suggestion from the Board of Studies and the Universities Admissions Centre is that alternatives are encouraged in the HSC. I disagree. Vocational education plays a minimal and little-recognised role in giving kids certificate level qualifications and industry experience, all within a school environment. And yet the implication is that the kids who do vocational education are in some way less talented than those who do the academic subjects. Instead of supporting people to obtain apprenticeships when they leave school, TAFE and careers in trade don’t rate a mention. You play the game, or you don’t play at all.
If we legally require young people to be students until they are seventeen years old, we have an obligation to provide the education that works best for them until that age. It’s a contract. If we demand that that they are there, we must also provide something that will engage them.
Concerns with the HSC go beyond engagement, and extend into the mental health of young people.
A 2003 report from the Commission for Children and Young People estimated that one in eleven youth suicides are due to the HSC. One in eleven. As soon as a school system starts figuring as a major reason for youth suicide, the school system needs to change. In fact, it should have changed long before anyone felt that such an act was his or her only solution.
What happened to our duty of care? Individually, the teachers involved are doing their best for the students. But the system of ranking students, the pressure to produce classes with high-ranking scores, seems to take away from the learning and support that is necessary. If I remember rightly, being a teenager isn’t the easiest of times, and adding this pressure into the mix just seems insanity.
Sadly much of the pressure on students seems to come from the schools themselves, who seem unwilling to encourage vocational education within their curriculum and seem infinitely happier to pack people who want to do VET off to ‘alternative schools’. Career counsellors often don’t seem to feel the need to talk about any kind of option, outside of a university degree. The change needs to be multi-layered. It needs to come from government policy, supporting vocational education in all schools. It needs to come from the Board of Studies and universities in promoting alternatives.
Change needs to come from schools, where alternatives such as VET are encouraged and the onesize– fits– al approach abolished.
It’s time to take stock of our priorities. It’s time to genuinely do what is right for our young people.
Because until we do, young people will fall through the cracks. Education should be about providing equal opportunities for all. The only equality the HSC provides is an equality of stress levels. We encourage young people to feel like failures if they’re ATAR is low or if they prefer construction to English Extension. Until that mindset is banished from our education system, we will continue to fail young people. And so, comrades, I say it’s time to don our berets, paint our placards, and take it down.
Francesca Sidoti, 22, is a Policy Officer at Left Right Think-Tank, Australia’s first independent and non-partisan think-tank of young minds.
Australia’s Drug Addiction
Last year, New South Wales Health reported a 59 per cent increase in alcohol-related admissions to hospitals between 2000 and 2007 with 40,000 people now being admitted annually. The Morgan Poll also reported that year that almost 20 per cent of Australians had been victims of alcohol related violence or knew someone who had. And four months ago a Galaxy Survey found that 80 per cent of Australians think we drink too much and 85 per cent think more needs to be done to reduce alcohol related injuries and deaths. All of these statistics point to one thing: Australia is addicted to the toxic drug ethanol and needs help. Historically, an illusion that ‘drunkeness is just Aussieness’ has stymied efforts to reform laws relating to alcohol consumption. Thankfully, with increasing awareness about the health hazards of frequent and excessive consumption, alcohol is now attaining a new, more realistic, more sinister image. But to what extent are we really prepared to accept responsibility for our actions and reverse the stereotype that the Australian culture is a boozing, brawling one? Our history of dealing with our binging, drunken culture has been to shift the blame onto anyone or anything except ourselves. We blame ‘ready-to-drink’ products for the rise in teen drinking (that the big alcohol industry is enticing them with ’pretty colours’), and we blame alcohol sponsorship of sport for our boozing culture (that we’re being lead astray with poor role models and VB symbols on Ricky Ponting’s chest). Of course, these influences can be significant, but to ascribe full fault to them is simplistic. The core issue is the lack of responsibility we as a society, and as individuals, take for the example we set.
What we fail to recognise in Australia is that alcohol is a drug. It is a toxin that kills and destroys lives.
Statistics show that more teenagers die from the effects of alcohol than any other drug. On average, Australians consume almost 10 litres of pure alcohol each year. As a nation we are addicted to alcohol. We see it as an essential element for a good time. This was shown recently in an article describing ‘Uncle Alcohol’ as ‘the favourite relative who arrives for the weekend to show everyone a good time.’ We don’t see the harm alcohol brings. Not until it is too late. The time has come to reveal that harsh truth.
The government should play an active role in changing the culture associated with drinking.
Targeting our hip-pockets is essential but needs to be done through initiatives that will reduce consumption rather than ones that merely shift drinkers on to other products. One such initiative is to implement volumetric taxation on alcohol – the higher the content of alcohol, the higher the tax placed on it. Not only would this get rid of the absurd system of taxation currently in place – irregularities such as a cask of wine attracting a tax of 6c/standard drink while a bottle attracts a tax of 36c/standard drink despite the strength of alcohol being the same; it would also encourage a shift to lower strength products because they would be comparatively cheaper. Using price in this way has proven highly effective in changing consumers’ buying habits.
There also needs to be a closer look at the factors underlying our attraction to alcohol – what makes us ‘need to escape’ or associates drunkenness with ‘good times’. There is evidence that trends in risky drinking behaviour reflect broader socio-economic and structural issues in Australian society, highlighting the imperative of ensuring that services are provided to those who need them most — services related to healthcare, welfare and employment, among others. At the same time these services must not be purely focused in areas of lower socio-economic status as all levels of society are affected by alcohol related health problems (it is not just the ‘working man’s curse’). We should also strive to reduce the stigma surrounding the use of these services, which will reduce reluctance to admit drinking problems and seek assistance. One important step, perhaps, is to set up drinking hotlines (similar to the gambling and smoking hotlines that have proven highly effective) to encourage people to address their risky behaviours, and to require drink coasters and product labels to print warnings and the hotline number (the small ‘drink responsibly’ logo is neither sufficient nor on every product).
Other policy suggestions such as raising the legal drinking age have not been popular, and given the number of underage drinkers currently – at least 506,000 between the ages of 12 – 17 according to a 2005 survey — it seems clear that raising the age to 21 would only see more underage drinkers and therefore achieve little. The other major proposal is to ban advertising of alcohol. It is true that advertising is a factor in encouraging drinking, but social peer pressure and our cultural normalisation of drinking are equally or more substantial inducements. A better initiative would be to further: expand the government’s ‘drinkwise’ program into schools and homes, emphasising the danger this addictive drug presents and tackling insidious causes such as peer pressure and normalisation. Education is an essential step in tackling this engrained feature of society and removing misguided thoughts that consuming 40 – 50 standard alcoholic drinks per week (or more) is ‘healthy’. However, such education is seriously lacking, with recent Roy Morgan research showing that 12 million Australians were unaware of new national guidelines regarding teenage drinking13.
This must change.
Cultural change is one of the hardest policy initiatives to put into place, plan for or achieve. However it can be done. We’ve seen it happen here in Australia – one example being our shift from considering smoking socially acceptable to banning it in most public places. What won’t help achieve it is restricting policy to just one area or shifting blame away from ourselves onto the alcohol or advertising industry. It is a complex issue and requires a multifaceted approach. We need to reassess what we consider to be ‘culturally acceptable’, see alcohol for what it truly is — a dangerous and addictive drug — and take personal responsibility for the example we set and the reaction we have to binge drinking/excessive drinking friends and family.
Kathleen Morris, 18, is a Policy Officer at Left Right Think-Tank, Australia’s first independent and non-partisan think-tank of young minds.