Isn’t it fascinating when you have Rupert Murdoch and Julia Gillard singing from the same song sheet?
Rupert Murdoch’s fourth Boyer Lecture was aimed directly at ‘our public education systems [which] are a disgrace. Despite spending more and more money, our children seem to be learning less and less—especially for those who are most vulnerable in our society’. Other countries, and he cites Finland, Korea and Singapore, are leaving us behind. In a competitive world we have to set much higher expectations for our students and hold schools accountable when they fail.

Much of what he has to say is sound and has the backing of the current Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. In her introduction to an education forum in Melbourne earlier this week she stressed that the current government wanted a transformational change in Australian schools. She brought the Chancellor of the New York Department of Education Joel Klein to explain the changes he has presided over in that city. Gillard claims that Klein has ‘demonstrated that change has to be systematic, that it has to focus unrelentingly on quality improvement and that we must demand high standards of achievement from every student no matter how disadvantaged’.

‘The people who need a solid education to lift them out of deprived circumstances are the people who are falling further and further behind. That is unacceptable to me,’ Murdoch says. Rural areas, indigenous communities and inner urban poor areas tend to have under-resourced schools relative to the needs of their students. As Gillard points out, ‘A child from a working class family is only half as likely as a child from a high income family to go on to tertiary study.’ While tertiary study may be expensive, its contribution to the life-time earning stream of the recipient is massive and growing. A country like Australia which cannot compete in wage costs needs to offset that by greater investment in human capital, in the skills and knowledge of its workforce at all levels.

All three contributors to the debate want greater transparency and accountability, because lack of these hides failures, the sheeting home of responsibility and the ability to focus on where greater effort and investment are needed. That information needs to be available to parents and students, not just to educational bureaucrats and politicians.

So far so good, but let’s just be a little careful about some of the arguments being advanced. Murdoch asserts that ‘corporate leaders know better than government officials the skills that people need to get ahead in the 21st century’. Where is the evidence for this blanket statement? Of course, we have to improve basic literacy and numeracy, and students would benefit from exposure to the kind of conditions they would face in various forms of employment to help them make rational, informed choices of career. But there is a danger if we make a competitive industrial model the key to our educational system we may finish up with a vocational training structure rather than an educational one.

We have had examples in the past where we have tried to use a competitive model. In England in the 19th century it was called payment by results and it was abandoned as a failure. Measurement in education is one of the critical areas. It has its uses but also its limits. It is vital for accountability but it can be narrowing and misleading. It may well result in concentrating only on producing what is measurable and hence not valuing that which is not, or what is more difficult to measure, quality and variety.

Everyone will have his or her own experience from schooling of those occasions when an enthusiastic and capable teacher managed to awaken a love of learning and puzzle solving. When individuality and difference was encouraged and it helped change your view of the world. Whatever we do in the education revolution we have to retain that core of what it means to educate rather than train someone for the complex world we live in.

Rupert Murdoch’s second Boyer Lecture on the ABC ‘Who’s afraid of new technology?’ was a challenging call to Australians to embrace the opportunities of the new rather than bemoan its collateral damage. But it harboured a contradiction at its very centre. Murdoch began with a tale about the Luddites, who destroyed stocking frames and weaving machines in the early nineteenth century in a violent protest against one aspect of the technological change of their day. He went on, ‘After a while, a number of the leading luddites were arrested and brought to trial. Some were hanged. Some were thrown into prison. And some were transported here to Australia, where they became among our first settlers. They were treated very harshly. But they were truly prisoners of the past.’

The lecture then addressed three subjects. ‘First, why technology is a good thing despite the unsettling changes it brings. Second, in business terms, how technology is putting a greater premium on what is awkwardly called “human capital”. Finally … what all this means for Australia’s future.’ It is that middle element which contains the contradiction, for Murdoch insists that what distinguishes progressive enterprise is not its equipment or its technology but the skills of its people. He quotes Bill Gates, ‘take our 20 best people away, and I tell you that Microsoft would become an unimportant company’.

Now my story about the Luddites is that they had the human capital of their day and so they were dumped on the scrap heap or hanged or transported for demanding that their skills should be valued. If they had been offered a clearly articulated alternative rather than redundancy and could see how they could adapt to the new world, then my guess is that they would have gone in that direction. But it is easier for those who want to change technology to junk those who resist rather than ensure that they have a chance to adapt to it in their own way.

If you do want a model of what is possible in the new world, then the little island of Samso in Denmark might be a better one to consider. In this windswept little scrap of land in the Kattegat, an inlet of the North Sea, the 4100 inhabitants have embarked on a renewable energy project that has cut their carbon footprint by 140 per cent and they now export millions of kilowatt hours of electricity to the rest of Denmark. Wind turbines along the coast, fields full of solar panels, biomass and wood chip power generators and efficient hot water distribution systems supply the people’s needs but with a substantial surplus which brings in revenue. Nothing was imposed on these people. They won a competition to take part in the experiment and everything is owned by local collectives or individuals. Sure there was significant public investment, from the Danish government and the European Union, but a substantial part of the average $US18500 cost per islander has come out of their own pockets. ‘The crucial point that we have shown that if you want to change how we generate energy you have to start at the community level and not impose technology on people,’ says Soren Harmensen, the former environmental studies teacher who helped get the Samso experiment under way.

Now Rupert Murdoch will quite rightly come back and say that this only reinforces another of his messages about the importance of education, resilience and risk taking by the people. It certainly shows that people can and do adopt technological and other changes when it is in their interests to do so. So the carrot might be better than the stick after all.