In a talk to launch a report by the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation recently, Tony Abbott spoke of ‘the tyranny of low expectations’.
The elegant phrase rightly encouraged students and schools to set themselves high goals and to trust themselves to reach them. It is indeed a tyranny to settle for the mediocre.
But such well-crafted and sweeping phrases always raise deeper questions. We need to ask why people have low expectations. The reasons often have to do with culture and not simply with the individual.
Low expectations are rife in impoverished communities that are lacking in material and educational resources, excluded from social participation by race, poverty or distance, with few mentors and little say in the decisions that affect their lives. What else would we expect? So low expectations cannot be addressed solely by exhorting individuals; community disadvantage needs also to be attended to.
‘The tyranny of low expectations’ is an evocative phrase that invites more general reflection on education and public life. I believe that the Australian approach to education does indeed impose a tyranny of low expectations. The expectations are framed in economic terms, and are focused on the individual. So high expectations are usually defined by economic achievement and its attendant wealth and status, and the goal for schools is success in enabling students to participate economically.
The controlling educational metaphor is economic, where costs and benefits are assessed in financial terms, students are assessed by competitive exams that dominate the curriculum, and schools measured by quantifiable results. Both schools and students are players and pawns in the educational market.
The tyranny of low expectation, confined to economic participation and performance, leads to a pervasive sense of failure among those who cannot compete and competitive relationships between the successful. This in turn weakens the trust needed for a vigorous economy. People are trained to compete in given structures, not to think outside those structures.
These expectations sell human beings short. The good of society and the growth of young people depend on the encouragement of wonder, of reflective gifts, of creativity. It requires nurturing the sense of other people as other - not as competitors but as fellow human beings whose flourishing is integral to one’s own good.
These qualities also underpin a healthy economy, since they foster innovation, loyalty to a common enterprise, a questioning attitude to conventional institutional arrangements, and a readiness to set aside one’s own interests for the common