Education, Regional Development, and Australian Prosperity

James Roberts
Sep 7, 2018 · 7 min read

Two articles caught my attention today, and both relate to Australia’s continued prosperity: Warren Mundine published an article in the News Corp papers (pay-walled) “We must build out to build big” (for an earlier, non pay-walled piece by Mundine on the same topic published in the AFR click here), and an article from the World Economic Forum on the 2018 Times Higher Education World University Rankings which not only discusses some notable changes in the ranking, but also provides a useful summary of the number of top-200 universities in each represented country.

“aerial view of graduates wearing hats” by Good Free Photos on Unsplash

In higher education, Australia has continued to represent well, being fifth on the list internationally with eight top-200 universities. With a population of only 24 million people this is a great achievement, though with little room for complacency as it is rivaled or exceeded by several other countries, notably the Netherlands (fourth, with 13 top-200 universities and a population of 17 million), Switzerland (sixth, with 7 represented institutes from a population of just 8 million), Sweden (6 from 8 million), Hong Kong (5 from 7 million), and Belgium (4 from 11 million).

If we are to remain a prosperous nation, these institutes of higher learning are going to be critical in three ways. Firstly, through profitability and the direct injection of cash into the economy through the sale of education to foreign students, and the services they consume throughout their education in this country. Secondly, through the subsequent effects of educating the middle and upper classes of our neighbours, through both the global cross-cultural network this creates as those students return with a (hopefully positive) experience in Australia and Australian friends and contacts, and by attracting intellectual talent to stay and contribute directly to the economy as researchers, professionals, and entrepreneurs.

But primarily, we should be using these institutions to educate Australians, and train them in cultural and professional skills that will continue to be valuable in the world economy, and develop industries that are less disadvantaged by Australia’s remote location and relatively small economy. And I fear we are failing in this through the decline of our primary and secondary education which cannot produce students ready to benefit from the outstanding tertiary opportunities available.

Donald Horne’s description of Australia as “the lucky country” over 50 years ago was condemnation, not praise, suggesting we were lucky to be as prosperous as we were, that our industrial and political systems and talent were not of the first rate, and intended as a wake up call that we need to improve and work harder to maintain our prosperity. Since then globalisation has killed our manufacturing sectors one by one, and we are fast becoming a nation of little more than bankers, builders and shop-keepers, with wealth and development becoming ever more concentrated in our major cities.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with large, vibrant wealthy cities, in fact they are a great asset, but they need to be underpinned by an economy that is funded by more than foreign investment in our farms, mines and real estate, and they should be connected by a network of smaller and mid-size towns supporting their surrounding regions, sharing some of the economic opportunities available in cities with the regions they support, and offering options to address over-crowding in our major cities. Surely the Australian population is large enough to support a more vibrant network of mid-size regional cities, sharing prosperity and broadening the nation’s social and economic base?

Peel Street Markets — Tamworth (https://rvtrips.com.au/site/pages/poiview/poidetails.aspx?key=2112)

Warren Mundine’s “We must build out to build big” discusses some aspects of this, the high concentration of our population compared to other countries, and the desire to stimulate growth and opportunity in our remote and rural regions. We can work to match the skills of the people there with the local needs — as Mundine argues, we should invest in making the unemployed in regional areas employable, and capable of taking on the opportunities that already exist (for example, taking on farm work and tourism jobs currently filled by young international tourists). By contrast, suggestions to forcibly locate immigrants in regional towns with little opportunity seems to be more fanciful thinking than a realistic way to deal with both immigration and regional decline.

While many of the places Mundine has visited and observed are remote and many of the unemployed he is concerned about are perhaps in a inter-generational cycle of educational and economic failure and disadvantage, both the improvement of opportunity for these regionally disadvantaged and the preparation of students able to capitalise on our excellent tertiary system are linked to the performance of our primary and secondary schools — and unfortunately, these seem to be under-achieving, as evidenced by the absolute declines in educational performance. Obviously, there is much to learn from comparison with our own past practices, and from the practices in those countries who are succeeding. (My own views on education, I will admit, lean somewhat to the conservative way of thinking*).

Whether lifting our childrens’ educational performance, across all regions and classes and cultures, is enough to not only take fuller advantage of our higher educational opportunities, but to sustain and even grow regional economies so they become vibrant and attractive destinations in their own right, for both current residents and immigrants, remains to be seen, but it is surely a crucial component if we are to be truly prosperous.

Thriving and vibrant regional towns with well developed and diverse economies — I’d love to think that would be possible too — but is that a pipe dream for a nation as large as ours, with only 24 million people? Must we concentrate ourselves in a handful of large cities that can compete with other global centres of financial and intellectual capital?


* Regarding current schooling, my own observations, as a parent of children aged 16 and 13 year in New South Wales, are:

  • That the use of laptops to replace school books is in fact a poor substitute — it is very difficult for parents to review the texts their children are learning, and therefore to identify when they may be struggling and provide (or request) assistance. In fact, it’s hard to even know whether a coherent text is being followed.
  • That education predicated on all students working on the same material, regardless of achievement level, suits only those children who are grasping the material at the pace presented by the curriculum. Those who could do more are unchallenged, and worse, those who fall behind are then expected to somehow keep up while the underlying foundations of the discipline they are studying are not properly understood — a recipe for continued poor performance, discouragement and guaranteed under-achievement.
  • A pet peeve: history seems to be taught (at least in New South Wales) in snippets, with whole terms spent in detailed studies of isolated periods of history and geography, with no overall presentation of history as the story of mankind’s’ advancement from caves to the world we live in today. It fails to engage students or develop any coherent narrative, in a subject is the greatest narrative we have.
  • Our daughter once spent a substantial portion of a term in English watching and critiquing a Japanese anime film, requiring research into Japanese history, customs, culture, and the development of anime as an art form. Doing this in English class seems way off track to me. If you want to teach Japanese culture or art, add it to the geography and social studies and art curricula, but don’t do inject it into English, where developing reading and comprehension and spoken and written English should be the objective. There’s precious little focus on reading at all, which is a shame. Or poetry — I don’t recall when our children have learned any poetry at all. I don’t enjoy poetry in my adult life, I admit, but it seems a shame to never develop an appreciation for it at all.
  • The educational establishment leans to the left of the population in general, and whether knowingly or not, this affects the syllabus and the presentation. The educational system needs to work hard to maintain neutrality and keep political opinion out of teaching and the syllabus. Academic facts, not social engineering, should be the focus of our education.

To my mind, the most salient point is the second one, in bold text. How students can be expected to progress through the same material, satisfactorily, at the same pace, is beyond me. Surely the system must be adjusted to allow development at a rate fairly suitable for each student, so that subject mastery and confidence can be developed properly? The current system is producing large numbers of students whose whole education may as well be a house of cards, an edifice that may briefly look stable, but which has no lasting substance and crumbles at the first application of any pressure. If we are to prepare more students for tertiary education and the advanced industries that can be competitive in our remote corner of the globe, we must find a way to do better, particularly for second, third and fourth quartiles of our student population.

James Roberts

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Progressive conservative. Biased free-thinker. God-fearing skeptic. The good thing about sitting on the fence is that you can see the grass on both sides ...

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