Ross Gittins, whom we all agree should be prime minister, has written another piercing Age column, this time about the federal government’s new university funding.
Citing a Griffith University academic’s research, he showed that universities will be expected to do more with less. Overall, he writes, the government will cut funding per student by $1883 annually.
And although it will be cheaper to study disciplines such as engineering, maths, and science, which allegedly lead to jobs and a booming economy, the cost of studying humanities subjects will more than double. More than double!
Many commentators have underlined the cost to Australians’ critical thinking if fewer of us are versed in the human race’s chronic bastardry, learned from history. But there’s another problem. For decades Australia has been led by politicians, most of them lawyers, who are trained to tell half-truths and to suppress any remnants they might possess of a humane instinct. They’re all about what’s possible, not what’s fair to most of their constituents.
So it’s time, I reckon, to start testing those who wish to enter public life. Well before they enter it?
I’d require them to pass an exam on a few set texts. You could name hundreds, but off the top of my head let me suggest Crime and Punishment, Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, and a few of Graham Greene’s ‘Catholic’ books. Just to see if their consciences work.
I’d get them to whistle from memory a few bars of, say, three pieces of classical music, preferably written by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, the giants. And I’d get them to write 100 words on Sid Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings or Guernica or van Gogh’s The Starry Night. In short, they’d need to convince us that they knew the difference between right and wrong as applied to the lives of others. That they had a certain sensitivity. That they understood nuances. Almost none these days seem to.
And there’s another way worth trying to produce more humane, sensitive Australians. In French secondary schools the study of philosophy is compulsory. And in their last year, students must pass a four-hour ‘philo’ exam to enter tertiary studies. They might have to discuss whether science can be dangerous or whether it’s the individual’s job to be happy, whether good decisions always produce well-being, or whether they can be made to privilege only minorities.
The basis of their studies is what the Enlightenment philosophers thought. And they were renowned for formulating ways in which everyone’s potential for humanity might be harnessed for the general good. French students study Rousseau and Voltaire, of course, but in anglophone nations students could be versed in the thoughts of the Utilitarians, Bentham and Mill among several, who argued cogently that the point of life was to improve the lot of the greatest number of people. I believe that to study their philosophy in secondary-school curricula might help to create a more egalitarian, humane Australia.
While self-interested lobbyists and factions infest Canberra and the common good is largely irrelevant, there is little chance that most Australian lives will improve, especially post-COVID-19. But if our public servants and politicians of the future knew more about what is needed to take account of the lives of others, to be more thoughtful and less open to sectional influence, perhaps things might change for the better.