What Did You Learn Today? by Mark Latham

In the midst of transition to the information economy, there is a need for thinking about learning in ways that will help us to reconstruct the education system, while enhancing its critical and reflective role, and improving equality of opportunity. This new book by Mark Latham, a Labor MHR, isn’t it, though at first glance many will think it might be. Consciously or otherwise, it’s a substantial surrender to new Right ways of thinking. Worse, it’s intellectually sloppy and rife with obvious and unresolved contradictions. Latham argues that every aspect of the existing education system is geared to the needs of an industrial economy, and hence focused on delimited learning – i.e. education ends when youth does – inflexible training, crude funding models and unresponsive institutions. Retooling for the information age will involve a co-ordinated policy of introducing lifelong learning and retraining in skills and competencies, as opposed to single-stage training in specific professions and trades. The onus will be on individuals to manage their education with lifelong learning accounts – funds which draw on moneys from government, employer and individual contributions, in the manner of super schemes. Needs-based schools funding, the extension of the learning environment into everyday life, and increased specialisation of universities, are among a host of specific and general reform proposals. But the core proposition is that education is a tool for economic growth and that reflection on values and political choices – including the virtue of economic growth – remains a marginal activity. Latham makes gestures towards the role of lifelong learning in personal development and the university as a ‘community of scholars’, but there is no serious thinking about the manner in which the education system would have a critical and reflective relationship to the society within which it exists. Education is all but totally instrumentalised. That is to be expected in the current framework, where the idea of a critical education system is seen as a relic of the 1960s. what is disappointing is the way in which the marginalisation of reflection and critical thinking extends to Latham’s thinking itself. Lathan unquestioningly accepts the superficial cant of the information society as the ‘age of the network’ in which decentralised, non-hierarchical, co-operative arrangements supersede old, top-down industrial-era arrangements. The implicit idea is that technological advance per se, rather than our critical relationship to it, will liberate us from old networks of privilege and inequality of opportunity. From there, it’s an easy step to being post-political altogether. For Latham, as for most ‘third-wayers’, debates between public and private ownership and provision, traditional and radical education, and so on are not conflicts between different value systems or the real interests of different social groups: they are simply ‘barren’ or ‘tired’ debates, which can be transcended by more innovative thinking and policy. This assumption takes him deep into liberal individualist territory, lambasting public-school advocates for being obsessed with the ‘zero sum’ activity of holding back private schools, encouraging them instead to look towards the ‘positive sum’ approach of thinking of ways they could improve their product delivery. Thus the reasonable statement – that drawing in private funds could increase education funding over time – is taken as an alibi for refusing to acknowledge any social or political relationship between the resources and power of private schools and the enhanced life chances of their students. Political struggle is constructed as debate between ideas, and the contests that most of us see as ‘ongoing’ are construed as passé. Nor is one encouraged by Latham’s shaky grasp of the bigger political philosophical questions. ‘Progressive’ education, for example, is rendered as entirely concerned with shoring up a student’s self-esteem, and lacking a concern with content. This is a Herald Sun view of one strand of the massive and contradictory field of ‘progressive’ education – ignoring, for example, the work of Freire, which is totally bound up with the importance of content in a liberatory education. Latham is either unaware of this, or excludes it from an oversimplified schema. Marx and Rawls are portrayed as proponents of distributive justice and are equated with policies that emphasise uniformity and sameness. To suggest that Rawls – the single most effective critic of equalitarianism in the history of liberalism – is a proponent of sameness and uniformity is simply ludicrous. And Latham’s proposal of the post-Left social principle of ‘aspirational equality … in which all individuals and institutions are able to fulfil their potential’ sounds not a million miles from ‘the free development of each as a condition for the free development of all’ suggested by one K. Marx in 1848. The difference is that Marx understood that it could not be achieved simply by an act of thought. At points, the reforming fervour displays a potential impatience with the messy negotiations and compromises of democratic politics. Many of the particular policies have a democratic sheen, but the touchstone for the implementation of a non-hierarchical, networked solution remains – Singapore, the super-hierarchical, thug-nanny state par excellence. The implicit desire to replace politics with administration is buttressed by an apparent belief in the transcendence of historical contradiction, a feature of twentieth-century reform movements that most of us would hope we had left behind. Thus: ‘in other theories of justice, diversity and equality are usually seen as competing ideals. Aspirational equality, however, brings them together.’ The intractable problem of state-versus-market power is solved in a sentence. Actually, it is just a step further to the right, as a subsequent example shows: ‘it is unjust to prevent a university from pursuing a distinctive mission and funding base, if the university and its students aspire to such arrangements.’ In other words, it would be unjust to oppose full fees. King Market wins again. I wonder if Latham really believes that this laissez-faire liberalism, gilded with the jargon of ‘aspiration’, is genuinely new, or whether the whole book is a strategic act, designed to sign on both centre-Left and centre-Right to his programme. Either way – and notwithstanding the validity of many of the micro-policy suggestions in the book – it gives one no confidence in the rigour of politician-intellectuals or in the political will of a Beazley government.

Guy Rundle

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