Thor May

different way, in military & maritime skills training. However the

TAFE configuration as we know it is less than a generation old. There

seem to be forces gathering which are bent on destroying the sector. It

is an appropriate time to ask whether this vessel has a star to steer by,

or is doomed to vanish in the gathering storm of economic change.

1. The vocational training and further education sectors of a community

can have a variety of layers, depending upon sophistication and

funding. Australia's particular TAFE configuration may have reached

its greatest institutional complexity by the late 1980's. As with all social

systems, a number of shortcomings and rigidities became evident in

TAFEs. It was reasonable to address whatever problems had arisen in

the TAFE mission and its delivery. However the process has become

highly politicized, and driven by parties who obviously have no serious

understanding of educational process, educational quality, or the social

and economic benefits that flow from a skilled and informed

population. Indeed the language with which we express quality itself

has been stolen, debased and sloganized to a point where it is difficult

to debate the issues in public. If this debate is to have meaning at all, it

is necessary to go back to first causes and to establish a context for the

situation which is emerging. The discussion which follows makes some

attempt at this, and suggests some consequences.

2. Every community on earth has its conservative and more progressive

protagonists. Wherever the social system allows political pluralism, we

find conservative and progressive wings. In Australia we have

accommodated, even relished, this natural division on the premise that

one wing will keep the more unbalanced enthusiams of the other wing

in check, both within parties and across the political spectrum. It has

worked, more or less, while some consensus remained on national

goals, if not always on methods. In the past it has been our national

salvation to forge this consensus. We are entering a phase where a

consensus of interests is harder to identify, and in some cases seems to

be actively undermined.

3. Those with power to mobilize capital, whether multinational

companies or local entrepreneurs, or whatever political proxies they

can lever into control, are less and less driven by a need to form

alliances with those who have little to sell but their labour. The reasons

for this range from industrial automation, to trans-national manufacture

& marketing to the loss of control by nation states over the creation

and distribution of money (which will be soon be largely privatized).

4. The relatively even distribution of wealth in Australia in the second

half of this century (especially) came from a shotgun marriage of

capital and labour behind protective tariff barriers. The solution had its

problems, sometimes tolerating indiscipline and low productivity. It

also had much success. In this system, equality of opportunity was a

realistic political goal and it gave rise, amongst other things, to a

vibrant mass education system based on merit and available to all.

5. The new political landscape, which is being marketed as modern,

desirable and "open" is in fact one in which wealth is to be

concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged class, the middle class

is to be drastically downsized, and a very large part of the population is

to be essentially denied the opportunity to develop economic power or

intellectual growth. Labour will be either bought at $1 a day from Third

World slave markets, or displaced by automation. Government can no

longer be sensibly said to represent the aspirations of all of the people.

There is nothing new about this unbalanced model. Variations of it

have been the norm since Neolithic times and still predominate

globally. Its re-emergence is being modelled in the American landscape,

which Australia tends to mimic. Both major political parties have

accepted the new paradigm as realpolitik.

6. A century ago crude, early capitalism led to the crude early reactions

of Marxism, autocratic Communism and Nazism. These were solutions

by political slogan which proved sterile and generated mass misery. In

1996 a small, though not necessarily influential, international elite does

have some accumulated understanding of economics and social growth.

It is being poorly accessed by local decision makers however, even

those with honest intentions. There has been much vain-glory, but a

striking lack of political intelligence at work in our recent leadership as

it wrestles with the transition from local democracy to trans-national

plutocracy. A characteristic of such political transitions is that words

themselves lose their reference points, empty rhetoric flourishes and the

regard for honest intention plummets. We are far enough into the

process now for sharper minds to notice that many public statements

have to be read as code for an agenda that most of us revile.

7. What are the consequences for mass education, and the TAFE

system in particular, of the emerging political changes outlined above?

Firstly, since education is the mechanism by which we transmit

civilization from one generation to the next, large changes in our social

and economic structures will always cause changes in the educational

process. If it is no longer of economic (hence political) value to those

with power to maximize the knowledge base of the general population,

then we must expect aggressive attempts to modify those institutions

which transmit knowledge.

8. Australian mass education is under sustained attack at every level

from primary to tertiary. Changes proceed under the rhetoric of reform,

rationalization, economy or competitive improvement. The adjectives

don't much matter; they are temporizations by the salesman. Even the

mechanisms don't much matter; they are inventions of the moment. We

can argue with the details, become lost in the trees. Certainly there is

often a need for reform, improvement and perhaps re-deployment.

However, behind the confusion of battle here is not a struggle for better

education, but for the abandonment of genuine education for a large

part of the population. This is a radical idea, certainly not grasped by

many of the managerial lieutenants in the field. They really do think

they are working for "improved productivity" (without wondering what

productivity really is), for a "competitive edge" (even as it destroys

pathways for students they are paid to guide), or for a "rational

distribution" of diminishing resources (while not understanding why the

resources are diminishing).

9. Technical and Further Education has already lost the "Further

Education" segment of its title in public political reference. It is de

rigeur to talk now of Vocational Education and Training (V.E.T.), as if

further education had become irrelevant to a workforce which must

expect to change occupations half a dozen times in a lifetime, and has

no useful human role beyond screwing up the widget of the moment.

Now vocational training is to be taken from the institutions and given

back to the workshops of the nation.

10. We can scarcely argue with the importance of workplace

experience. But as educators we challenge the proposition that most

industry in its multitude of offices and factory sites has the knowledge

base, teaching skills, resources and above all the will to properly

educate the working people of this country. We got past that when the

economy grew beyond craft guilds. We look at the provisions for

workplace assessment and smell potential for corruption, evasion and a

disregard for genuine, consistent standards. This has been the outcome

of self-regulation everywhere in industry; why should training be

different? Those amongst us who want genuine TAFE reform see

assessment as the weakest area in the institutions themselves: a system

in which the able have little incentive to excel, and the inept are

rewarded with equal status for simply attending. Is this to be

challenged? No. It is to be generalized beyond all serious auditing, into

industry.

11. For perhaps a generation, TAFE teaching has been a genuine

vocation. Throughout the sector are professional teachers with expert

skills acquired over many years. Relatively security of tenure has

enabled them to develop programs for their specialization, trial them

and present them in an expert way to generations of students. There

are, as in any profession, poor or indifferent teachers who need

retraining or easing into other occupations. However, current personnel

plans for TAFE evolution take no account of the good, the bad or the

indifferent in teaching. Rather, the clear intention of management is to

casualize the workforce. The net effect of this is already becoming

apparent: the destruction of TAFE teaching as a profession. TAFEs in

the current mode are asset-stripping human resources. More and more

we see "trainers" with no knowledge of how to develop the potential in

each student. They do their stuff and are out the door. On a low hourly

rate, who wouldn't be? And who would bother with advanced tertiary

qualifications to enter into a career with three month security and

AUD$19200 pro rata per annum ($24 x 800 hours) regardless of experience?

This is not the dynamic of a profession with rising standards.

12. We all live in a bubble of time, and are apt to think that now is the

way things always were. It wasn't of course, and isn't in most other

places. Our country, our institutions, our society itself is a miracle of

the moment, enjoying one brief summer of a generation or two on a

journey from a fascist prison camp two centuries ago to heaven knows

where. Sixty years ago we were neck and neck with Argentina,

remarkably similar societies. They took one turning, into disaster. By

luck and occasional good management we took another. The road

ahead continues to branch. Our neighbours on the Pacific rim, starting

from a zero base, are rushing furiously into industrialization and

dreaming of the society which we seem determined to lose. Our

leaders, dazed with economic babble and bought off with American

Express gold cards, talk of microeconomic reform while they

systematically destroy the human skill base that is our greatest asset.

13. As political storms threaten to sweep institutions from under our

feet it is easy to become confused about objectives, or even seduced by

the slogans of the moment. Yet we recall that the results of our work go

beyond the classroom and the factory floor, colour the lives of millions.

We act on that responsibility as best we can. A TAFE is not a pickle

factory, but a colloquium of active minds in pursuit of knowledge,

understanding and skills. It is neither making nor selling a generic

product, but providing a guided environment in which individuals have

the chance to cultivate socially and economically useful skills,

according to personal aptitude.

14. If you tell me that the educational concept of TAFEs, as I have

described it, is outdated, that the client is not the individual but

industry, then I must reply that "industry" is a phantom when it comes

to learning. I have never sat a Mr. Industry down with a smile and

coaxed him to understand anything. My clients are men and women

with needs and limitations which would have been familiar to Aristotle,

Euclid or the Gautama Buddha. The goals which I facilitate, and the art

which I must practice in that facilitation, are relearned by each

generation but scarcely change in substance, whatever the jargon of the

day. If TAFEs are abolished in all but name, we will see the

disappearance of one more venue where learning can occur, but no spin

doctor can redefine learning itself, the conditions which make it

possible, not the ancient art of helping it to happen. There are constant

values for the noblest profession known to every civilization, that of

teacher. These values are a navigation star which politicians have

dimmed, but never quite extinguished.

[Thor May, December 1996]