The Interests of the Educated Individual, the Employer, and the Economy - Assignment Example

The Interests of the Educated Individual, the Employer, and the Economy Education is one of the chief social activities. Almost half of the populations in Australia are students. Educational institutions contribute a vital role regarding the employment of the residents of Australia. In terms of the volume of employment, education and health are the two prime sectors in Australia. The Australian government spends a huge amount of its national income every year for supporting and promoting the educational institutions of the country. In the line of public policy, education is always given priority because in one hand development of education system plays a modern role for sophisticating the society while on the other hand an improved educational system is expected to absorb the unemployment by providing educated, thoughtful, intellectual and innovative human resources. For example, the mean of ‘Smart State’ vision of the government of Queensland was to develop technology-based industries and build up the skillful and flexible working people. In this policy, the Queensland government for the growth and development of the state in future has promoted innovative ideas in the field of scientific research and information and communication technologies. (Lenore Adie, 2008, pp 252-255). Beside the government of Queensland on the issues of social justice, has developed the reform strategy QSE 2010. This strategy was developed responding ‘the major challenges for education posed by the global knowledge economy in ‘new times’, characterized in particular by the global information networked society and increased inequalities and new forms of exclusion’. (Taylor and Singh, 2005, p 727). However, though the demand for education has risen tremendously in the recent past in Australia, the allocation of resources to education relative to the country’s GDP has not risen accordingly. In Australia there have been seen changing and volatile policies towards the education. People in Australia are very much aware on what a good and proper educational system should be and regarding this, there are common as well as conflict views among the residents of Australia. While some Australian think the education system as the solely public goods and the government has the whole responsibility to maintain and develop the educational system in the country for serving the entire community, others think that the educational development can be better organized in private hands to serve the current and modern requirements of the business, employers and scholars. (Marginson, 1999; pp 3-6). However, the political value of this private-public dichotomy is really confusing though the market integration is possible by the objective effects in the place of communicative agreements. “Most corporations are public companies in the sense that their stock is held relatively widely and traded on open market…confusingly, these are still considered part of the private sector”. (Bennet, Grossberg and Morris, 2005, pp 281-285). Let us now see the basic structure of the Australian educational system. In Australia, up to the age of 15, primary and secondary schooling is compulsory. Almost 75% of the students remain up to 12 years in school, the final year of schooling. The number of Catholic schools and other private schools are more than one third of the public or government funded schools and this number is still growing. After successful completion of schooling, there are two kinds of public teaching system- The TAFE institutions, which provide the vocational, and generalist educational programs in the line of technical and further education and the university programs in arts and business programs for higher education. Generally mature-age students go for the higher educational programs. But both of these programs do not access the students automatically with a year 12 pass results since it is very aggressive to get entry into the programs like dentistry, law, medicine, etc. in Australia. The official education in Australia can be divided into two parts, the basic education in schools and the higher education, and the training in private industry and in TAFE. However, over time this distinction between the education and training has gradually loosen the support and the growth of post school education has made the professional-para-professional division between the courses of the higher education and TAFE to become vague. The government grant is the main source of funding for the education in Australia besides the private training in the industries. Though at the beginning the share of private funding fell in the 80s but at present the private sectors contribute a subsequent amount in education sector and this tendency is growing at a rapid speed. The state itself along with the territory education authorities controls the management and execution of the public schools whereas the private schools are autonomous for their management though the public examinations and the requirements of the university entrance procedure affect their practices. In the history we have seen that the government has always support the growth of education by its resource assurance until 1980s when the funding for the public education of the government failed to support the increasing demand for education. (Marginson, 1999; pp 8-10). In Australia over the last decade, the growth of the non-government sector as the percentage of enrolled students in the private schools has risen hugely. In 1980 there were mainly three facrors, which operated to develop the standard of education globally. These are the ‘standardization of education’, ‘increased focus on literacy and numeracy’ and the introduction of ‘consequential accountability system’. (Sahlberg, March 2007 p 149-151). Since 1996, the private schooling sector of Australia has been promoted by the policies of the Commonwealth government that was initiated for rendering the public and government schools in the arena of market competition. This process has been supported by the opening of new private schools in one hand and reducing the government funding to the public sector for a new single private sector by an amount of around $1700. Resuming the underline legislation of the 19th century regarding the public education system has widened the distance between the private and public sector. The state and the Commonwealth government of Australia have drastically wrinkled the Education Acts of a ‘free, compulsory and secular’ public education system of the 19th century. The surrounded social values have automatically been damaged by the weight of such overriding economic dissertation. The results of such structural shifts have been noticed in the re-design of public education system in support of the urbanized and modernized parents of the middle class. The new legislation enabling the fees of the public school as compulsory, promoted the exclusion principles for those students who cannot afford such high fees. This process further aggravated the division of the Australian community in terms of the paying ability of the parents’ for the education of their children. (Meadmore, P, 2001, 122-124). Openness of the national borders across the world brings more opportunities and set of choices in education sector. The GATS commitments have encouraged Australia’ trade liberalization in the shape of augmented privatization and deregulation. The addition of the commercial education system in GATS causes some severe risks to public education. (Catano, 2007) The promoters of the globalization attain their purpose of borderless education and the contest among the private providers becomes more hostile. (Smart, 2003, pp 518-519). Beside, many leaders thought that the growth of disparity between the public and private schools would not serve the requirement for all citizens. However, the movement from a social educational though to the rationale of individual choices has compelled the educational environment of Australia to operate in such an educational market where the individual choices are made by the individual consumers. This system helps in functioning of all the apparatus and mechanism of the market, including the inevitabilities for developing brand images and selling these images by using public relations mechanism. This new and modern discourse promotes the choice concept by emphasizing on the parents’ right in choosing the relatively suitable educational environment for their children, whether a government sector or whether a private sector. (Reid, 2003, pp 3-5) So the old resistance of public education in Australia is turning out as inadequate with the appearance of neoliberal education policy. This is the reason why many scholars have thought that the current policy of giving aid to the private schools in relation to state, has failed to serve the public rationalism for the education by accentuating individual purposes and supporting the elite rights. However, the argument in favor of the public education can be raised by focusing to the process of educational publicness by reviving the notion of the public good in the rapidity of the diversity of Australian society. Without this effort public education will change its shape in the hand of market power and individual choice. (Reid, 2003, pp 9-10 & 17). The formation of the new markets for education has privileged the preamble of the competition into the structure of public sector by decomposing them into different business units, such as the this system has risen the competition between the education providers like schools, colleges and universities with a view that the education is a private good. These so called institutes recruit the students for maximizing their opportunity to get employed. The affectivity of the competition however lies on the impact of market failure on the health of the private organizations. The privatization processes in education activated by the parental and students’ selections, lead to the services available best in the market by these institutions towards the students that is influenced by hypotheses of class, race, way of life and even gender intersection. These sorts of choice processes also lead to segregation and harmonization of the students of these schools. (Youdell, 2008). This process has helped some schools to establish an identification and reputation of their organization in the market by securing their desired population of students and making their counterparts to become marginalized or to feel the burden of that population of students who have been rejected. This process compels such organization to involve in students or teacher attrition mechanism. Even such a process of privatized educational system has altered the identification of the head teacher to the manager, the teacher to technician and the students to the assets or liabilities or the final output. (Ball and Youdell , July 2007, pp 42-47). A change in responsibility of the state towards commissioning, contracting and audit helps to form two policy movements. The first one is that there emerges a variety of deliverers in the public and the private domain that with the introduction of competition between the deliverers regarding their best services and value for money. The second one is that growing possibilities for the private fund providers to develop the public sector infrastructure. This is called the Private Finance Initiative. (Ball, 2007, pp 27-28). In case of Australia, the public-private partnership (PPP) has appeared in a chain of public services like health, transport, postal services, telecommunication, etc. However, in the education sector, for developing a proper PPP model there are some problems regarding the unhealthiness of the Australian schooling system. So, it is the high time to think on the options that encourage the PPP or some new relationship between the communal and private divisions so as to add some values towards the schooling in Australia. (Caldwell and Keating, 2004 pp 33-35). References 1. Adie, L (2008), “The hegemonic positioning of "Smart State" policy”, Journal of Educational Policy, Vol 23, pp 251-264. 2. Ball, J, S (2007), Understanding private sector participation in public sector education, Education plc, Routledge, London and NY. 3. Ball, J, S and D, Youdell (July 2007), “Hidden privatization in public education”, Institute of Education, University of London.Available at: http://download.ei-ie.org/docs/IRISDocuments/Research%20on%20Education/Privatisation%20and%20Commercialisation/2007-00242-01-E.pdf (accessed on April 14, 2010) 4. Bennet, T, Grossberg, L and M, Morris (2005), New key words: A revised vocabulary of culture and society, New York: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 5. Caldwel,B and J, Keating (2004), “Value to Public Education: An Examination of the Possibilites for Public Private Partnerships”, ACDE. Available at: http://www.acde.edu.au/docs/adding_value_public_private_071104.pdf(accessed on April 14, 2010) 6. Catano, V (2007), “ Privatization Threatens Quality of Education Across the Americas”, Caut Bulletin.Available at: http://www.cautbulletin.ca/en_article.asp?articleid=640(accessed on April 14, 2010) 7. Marginson, S (1999), Education and Public Policy in Australia, University of Cambridge, Australia. 8. Meadmore, P (2001) “Free, compulsory and secular"? The reinvention of Australian Public Education”, Journal of Education Policy, vol 16, pp 113-125. 9. Reid, A (2003), “Public Education as an education commons”, ACDE. Available at http://www.acde.edu.au/docs/Public%20Education%20as%20an%20Education%20Commons%20-%2023%20Sep.pdf (accessed on April 14, 2010) 10. Sahlberg, P (March 2007), “Education policies for raising student learning: the Finnish approach”, Journal of Educational Policy, Routledge, NY, vol 22, pp 147-171 11. Smart, C, J (2003) “Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research”, Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, Vol 18. 12. Taylor, S and P, Singh (2005), “The logic of equity practice in Queensland state education – 2010”, Journal of Educational Policy, Vol 26, pp 725 - 740. 13. Youdell, D (2008), “ Hidden privatization in public education” Atmn. Available at: http://www.aeufederal.org.au/Publications/TATT/Atmn08pp16-17.pdf (accessed on April 14, 2010) Read More