In recent speeches about education and schools Mr Howard and Mr Rudd celebrated their differences. Mr Rudd stressed the importance of education for economic growth, and promised to make technical education more generally available. Mr Howard gave priority to values, endorsing traditional educational processes for their capacity to form skilled and self-reliant individuals.
The difference between the two programmes was less than appeared. Both men insisted that Australian education must contribute to economic growth and to the development of the individual student. Neither showed evidence that he had reflected at any depth on the relationship between education, economy and human development.
The problem for governments is that they begin by imagining that education is for the economy. Even when they qualify this starting point, they fail to appreciate the paradoxical truth that the economy is for education. Education is the process that enables human beings to flourish — to develop rich relationships to their world and to other people.
These relationships include curiosity, wonder, critical and practical skills, compassion, and an eye for the common good. When people flourish in this way, they will build an economy that satisfies their needs. More important, they will sustain the moral conditions of reliability, trustworthiness and altruism on which the economy depends. But economic growth is not the goal of education, simply a result of good education.
If this is the case, governments should first ask not whether education serves the economy, but whether economic activity is structured in ways that contribute to good education. It is difficult to see that the emphasis on the individual and on individual choice in the regulation of work, the consequent atomisation of families, and the tolerance, indeed encouragement of greed, in commercial life are consistent with good education. People with a single-minded zest for making pots of money, whom any well-educated person would enjoy as comic figures, are taken seriously, envied, and even proposed as role models.
When governments consistently undermine the foundations of good education, it is tempting to disregard their words about values in education. Nevertheless, Mr Howard’s account of education, with its mixture of goals and means for attaining them, deserves comment. It has some good things in it and raises interesting questions.
He praises a traditional style of education that looks primarily to quality, not to expenditure. It is characterised by high academic standards, competitive examinations, teacher directed classes, and good discipline. It will help individuals develop, socialise them, build character and ground them in Australian values.
Other features of this approach to education include literacy and numeracy tests, and the public accountability of students for their results.
The virtue of this approach to education is its seriousness of intent, even if the means to achieve it belong to the early twentieth century rather than to the larger tradition. A traditional education, for example, would be based on rhetoric and would not include competitive examinations. There is a variety of paths, all encouraging self-discipline, to serious learning.
Mr Howard’s emphasis on values, like his treatment of the economy, lacks reflectiveness about the personal qualities and social relationships that further human flourishing. Instead he offers the ideal of competitive individuals who are defined by the choices they make, and of a school whose value is defined by its results in competitive examinations. This is a thin view of humanity. Schools currently do much better for their students than this.
Compare Mr Howard’s account, for example, with the qualities attributed to Catholic schools. They are said to encourage compassion and a concern for social justice. We might question whether these values are general and deeply held among students of Catholic schools — they are at the least inconspicuous in many Catholics engaged in political life.
But to the extent that they are inculcated, they represent a deeper vision of what it means to be human and so of education than that offered by Mr. Howard. And the same would be true of the educational processes of other kinds of schools. It is to be hoped that in the debate before the next elections, both leaders will reflect more deeply on what education as well as economic development are about.