The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  The apprenticeship system is still tied to its medieval past by the shortsightedness of managements and unions, and by the lack of vigour in governments. Usually there are no tests of skill at the end of a five-year apprenticeship in which a young man has been indentured to one firm. There are no national standards; apprenticeship is a ‘State matter’, with the Federal Department of Labour and National Service trying to improve it by Federal diplomacy. Apprentices are not always given the kind of broad general background necessary in an age of quick technological advance and quick obsolescence; there is no training in flexibility. To make sense this would require a longer period of secondary education.

  The whole structure of the State Education Departments is authoritarian. It was inevitable, given the vast distances of Australia, the sparse population and the weakness of local government that the State systems of education should be centralized around the State capital cities. Children are supposed to be taught the same things in the same way throughout a State; headmasters and headmistresses have little discretion; decision is by decree from the Department rather than by local decision. Experiment is almost impossible. School teachers are shunted around as unpredictably as officials in Stalin’s Russia. The whole tone of the departments is regulatory and disciplinary, to the extent at times of bleak administrative cruelty. The primary school teachers, who are not university educated, set the tone of discussion within the teachers’ unions. The tone is almost completely non-professional. University-educated teachers are tied to their Departments for a period of service and sometimes humiliated by their masters while at the university.

  The schools, run by remote control from the Departments, are often isolated within their own social communities. Because of all the shunting around of staff, teachers are often strangers within their environment or, at best, friendly transients. Participation of the community in school activities is limited to fund-raising and providing amenities. In Victoria when the mothers of Eagle Point started making cocoa with free school milk the Department told them that free milk must not be issued in any form other than straight milk; after a public fuss the Director of Education amended policy to allow small schools to make cocoa with free milk provided they made application to do so and the applications were approved. When the Victorian Federation of Mothers’ Clubs then assumed that this meant that schools might also make hot soup with free milk they were sharply corrected: ‘This idea has not been considered by the Department and will not be considered by it’. It is a tribute to the endurability of the human spirit that so much of education has survived in Australia despite this dreadful system.

  Not only because democracy becomes fraudulent if minority views are not protected, but in the interests of education and of human decency, the greatest single reform that seems to be needed in Australian education – and one of the most important reforms that could be made in Australia – is its decentralization, to allow teachers to become members of the communities in which they teach, to allow principals of schools greater initiative, to develop a sense of professional responsibility amongst teachers, to allow variety and experiment, and to allow more community participation. This reform could even be carried out in conjunction with a constitutional reform granting the Federal Government the financial control of education, a general setting of standards and an adequate planning department.

  Images of life

  What kind of a world is presented to children in Australian school rooms? Except for the Catholic schools there is little presentation of a religious view of life. In most schools there is no glorification of militarism. There is certainly no worship of the State. Here and there, mainly in the fee-paying non-Catholic schools, there are left-overs of the English ideology of service; but it is a poor thing, divorced from community and home life. Love of country is sometimes purveyed, but often it is mainly a literary and historical affair that has little meaning to young minds that are already becoming sceptical; there is no longer available the folk-patriotism that was so confident earlier in the century. The British Empire has naturally disappeared as an article of faith although there is still some adulation of the Monarchy and some attempt to extract meaning from the ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ idea. A sense of curiosity and wonder is rare. The field in which this could be most easily aroused might be in science (with its materialism and new scepticism about even itself the teaching of science could make a natural impact on young Australians) but the schools are weakest in science teachers; the teachers of the humanities, often not really aware of what they defend or what they attack, lend an anti-science bias to much high school teaching. There is a resentment against science; its civilized values do not require the demagoguery of ‘development of personalities’ and so forth.

  There is certainly no worship of rugged self-reliance or of acceptance of the ideology of ‘free enterprise’. Apart from the irrelevance of much of this ideology in an Australian context, schoolteachers often have an animus against practical affairs. They may become so demoralized that their main active belief is hatred of ‘The Department’ that employs them. In so far as they have attitudes to the practical world they are feelings of alienation and opposition; there is a feeling that the practical world is inimical to cultural values (so very often are teachers, but they are stuck with a public defence of them); there are feelings of envy about the better money earned ‘outside’. Practical affairs seem so different from the gentle, boring round of school life that they must be wrong. (As any observer of them knows, practical affairs have their gentle, boring rounds, too.)

  However there is a concern that children should ‘get on’ – usually in a good white-collar job. ‘Getting on’ is not the get-up-and-go of economic progress but a quiet gaining of respectability in an easy-going job that does not make many demands but provides sufficient leisure and money for the enjoyment of family life and sport. It is not a question of being efficient but of getting jobs with good provision for retirement and of learning to keep one’s nose clean. Theoretically the Catholic schools should provide some contrast to this but in practice they often offend most. In this case there is concern not only for the child, but the good name of the Church in urging that children ‘get on’.

  Living lives that seem inadequate by their own professional standards (such as they are) or by those of the community, many teachers seem to identify themselves with weakness in personality. Subconsciously this kind of teacher might prefer sensible, conventional, well-behaved and only medium-witted children. The spirit of philanthropy that now pervades educational thinking may be connected with this identification with weakness. The weak lead the weak and in these terms ‘education for democracy’ becomes a degenerate travesty of democracy; belief in majority rule becomes belief in mediocrity; egalitarianism and fraternalism become conformity; liberty becomes salvationary – others have suffered that we might do what we wish, as long as it meets the wishes of most other people. A ‘satisfactory life’ becomes one that is the same as everyone else’s. No new ideas are needed. There are to be no more experiments. We shall go on being the same. Someone or other will look after us.

  Fortunately there are counterbalances to this, otherwise Australians would by now be a race of idiots. There are teachers who prefer excellence, and delight in cultivating it: there are children who fight battles of the intellect for themselves. There is considerable distrust of teachers, especially in the higher grades. However, the fact that Australian children are taught by people who are often in a state of mild despair, who are dissatisfied with their material and social lot and are alienated from both practicality and the real values of the culture they purvey must be of great importance. It is in the alienation of both teachers and pupils from the values of the culture they are forced towards that one seems to get near the heart of the problem of Australians.

  The ‘academics’

  Before the Second World War Australian universities were of what might be called high provincial standard. They were a reasonably faithful copy, if a
dull one, of minor universities in England and Scotland. Even then there were strong criticisms of them for being little more than ‘degree shops’. There were a few dazzling exceptions, but on the whole university teachers had not managed to produce universities which transformed the products of the schools. Normally there was little about a graduate that distinguished him from other reasonably successful people in the community. Then for a while the increased demand from the increasingly larger younger generations and the demand for a higher proportion of skills seemed to shock and demoralize those responsible for decisions about universities. There was poor leadership in the universities and some of the new class of university ‘administrators’ seemed to be managerially illiterate. Then there began to be improvement.

  The general tone of university life, especially among those engaged in the ‘humanities’, is not invigorating. (There are plenty of exceptions of course.) It is a matter of record that the academic issue that arouses the most steady lively group interest among the nearly 7000 full-time and part-time teaching and research staff of the universities is money. This is associated with envious myths about what everyone else is earning. I have heard ‘academics’ complain that the ‘working-class people’ they meet pity them because they earn so little money. The ‘so little money’ is several times as much as average weekly earnings. Professors on $14 000 a year feel that businessmen are earning much more than they are, but this – apart from the men at the top – is not so. There is a feeling of self-pity and alienation which extends even to attitudes to students: they see students mill in and out of lecture rooms, resent their numbers and their demands, but have little individual knowledge of them. And among the non-scientists there is an impotent unease, perhaps envy, about the successes of science.

  The one field in which comparative earnings make sense is science. Here one can describe a salaries market quite specifically. In the humanities, with exceptions, one cannot, except to hazard a guess that at least some of the humanities men would earn less money outside. (This is not a criticism of them.) However, again with exceptions, the science faculties cannot put in competitive offers and raise their rates to attract new talent, any more than the Education Departments could pay science and mathematics teachers more than the others. Usually the non-scientists are in control and market rates are determined by the price for professors of Latin.

  With exceptions, the non-scientist ‘academics’ in Australia have been rather undistinguished. The middle ranges are adequate but there is nothing much at the top. Even the occasional brilliant man sometimes gets away with it too easily for him to maintain excellence. He suffers from the Australian lack of competition, lack of interest in excellence, and a certain amount of conformist envy or sheer misunderstanding. Vincent Buckley gives a convincing picture of the Australian non-scientist academic in Australian Civilization: ‘They are institutionally absorbed and job-conscious, they are suburban … they take questions of salary and promotions as seriously as any trade unionist … There is no nonsense about an intellectual’s existence to think and to make other people think: on the contrary he exists to “work” in a “job” … As one lecturer in literature (of all subjects) has said, “The only sensible thing is to see it as a nine-to-five job” … As every idealistic schoolteacher knows, a man who lets his life work be reduced to the status of a “job”, with increments, working conditions, and all the rest of the weary defensive mechanism, soon becomes cynical about the very job he has been so avid to fill … At “work”, one sticks to the “job”; the rest of the time is for gentle living. The Smiths visit the Joneses at predictable intervals, drink a little red wine decanted from a flagon, eat French salad off wooden platters, chat about the car and the kids and the holidays.’

  Before the Second World War the general line of belief of the most influential Australian academics was, on the whole, conservative. Some were reactionaries tied into the crude conspiracies that then tried to run the capital cities. There is still some of this conservatism left, although it is necessarily changed in style, but on the whole Australian academics now hold orthodox Australian liberal opinions: they are critical of censorship, licensing laws, hanging and the police; in politics they would tend to distrust the Liberal Party, hate the Democratic Labor Party and worry about the Labor Party; usually they would feel detached from party politics; they detest anti-semitism but often are suspicious of all Catholics; they fear McCarthyism, a term that they often wrongly apply to spirited discussion of Communist influence in trade unions. A few of the older men, who learned their politics in the Spanish Civil War or in hatred of Hitler, still see things in terms of the 1930s; there is sometimes a streak of hysteria in the fears and manipulations, and an old-fashioned flavour about their language that can make the subject they are talking about unrecognizable.

  Some academics consort with businessmen and some with politicians or government officials, but the attitudes of most to practical affairs reveal the frustrations of the social fragmentation so strong in Australia. Often the academics’ discussion on public affairs is no better informed than anyone else’s: where it is better informed, as with economists, it is sometimes not thought out thoroughly enough to be intelligible to an educated audience.

  There is a very strong sense of difference, and of moral superiority. Most academics would not disagree with the Sydney lecturer who said academics were more fair, sensitive and unselfish than the greater part of mankind’. There is a distrust of any intellectual activity that is not carried out by academics, as if contributions to a ‘subject’ could not sometimes be made by a person outside a university, or as if ‘subjects’ covered the whole field of intellectual discourse. This specialism goes with a quite frequent indifference to literature and the arts: these are treated either as specialist subjects or as un-academic. There are not many Australian academics whose conversation shows awareness of the main intellectual dilemmas of the age. (These are nobody’s specialty.) Some of them seem to take the ordinary Australian view: the main intellectual dilemmas of the age have nothing to do with us. Yet they often try to arrogate more honour to themselves, compared with the rest of the community, than university people do in countries where membership of a university means more than it normally does in Australia. In particular, those who consider themselves intellectuals often consider intellectual life to be coterminous with academic life.

  The prevailing tone is perhaps one of isolation and of self-pity rather than of academic responsibility; it is passive rather than active, even in the running of university affairs. The universities meet the demands of the age with a reserved resentment; lectures are delivered, exam papers marked. That’s that.

  The Press

  Complete independence is something that no man can achieve but given less idealistic definitions of independence one can say that there are not many men of independent position in Australia who regularly discuss public affairs with a sense of audience and in some depth. The professional classes have become more or less commercial-minded; there is no cultivated leisure class; with exceptions, members of the universities are silent; and there are very few independent-minded journalist–publicists who write with considerable knowledge, originality and style. There are no ‘quality’ daily or Sunday newspapers of the standard of those of London, New York, or Western Europe, and no journals of record and opinion as independent, as strongly established, as well-staffed and as well provided with contributors as the ‘quality’ periodicals of Britain and Western Europe. The casting up of new concepts of how things are going is very rare; even regular background information and interpretation is hard to come by; there are few possibilities for sustained and rigorous debate on new problems; few journalists can take the time to involve themselves in a field to the point at which they can give an interpretative, related account of it, to follow a story to the point of significance. The result is that images of Australian life usually fall into crude stereotypes. Decision-makers and intellectuals get so used to reading about Australia i
n oversimplified terms and they so lack information that their discourse becomes brutalized when they talk about Australia. There is an irascible ignorance, impatient with complexity, and a failure to understand that policy-making involves the analysis of alternatives.

  In Australia people get away with things that would be exposed in a more sophisticated nation. In other countries some of our politicians would be satirized so successfully that to survive they would have to acquire a better public style. Discussion on public affairs in Australia has become very solemn; it takes the principal performers at their own value and perpetuates their pomposities. The traditions of cheekiness and scepticism have all but died. The ordinary people know that politicians are often clowns and that powerful men are often power racketeers, but writers no longer tell them so, although once there were Australian publications that gave an almost Brechtian view of the world. One of the reasons for the distrust by ordinary people of the Press may lie in the false note it often strikes: it almost always presents the mediocre men of Australia as if they were to be taken seriously. To ordinary Australians public affairs now seem spurious and remote. But the tiredness and cliche-thinking of opinion-makers is unable to capture the scepticism of the people. It is almost a conspiracy of tiredness of the spirit.