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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 11. 22 July 1970

The Crisis in Education

The Crisis in Education

It is, of course, true that similar negative moods car: be found in past periods of our history, variously described as mal de siecle, romantic despair, Russian Nihilism, apocalyptic expectations. And there have been Ranters, Messianic sects and Tarantula dancers, all of whom have their striking contemporary parallels. But the present has a unique and unprecedented urgency because the rate of change is now moving along an ever steeper exponential curve, and history is accelerating like the molecules in a liquid coming to the boil. There is no need to evoke the population explosion, urban explosion and explosion of explosive power; we live in their midst, in the eye of the hurricane.

This brings me back to my starting point. The ideal of the educator as a catalysing agent is for the time being unattainable. Exceptions always granted, he has been a conditioning influence, and the conditions he created amount to an explosive vacuum.

I do not believe that the crisis in education can be solved by the educators. They are themselves products of that Zeitgeist which brought on the crisis. All our laudable efforts to reform the universities can at best produce paliatives and symptom-therapy. I think that in a confused way the rebellious students are aware of this, and that this is why they are so helpless when asked for constructive proposals, and why no proposed reform can satisfy their ravenous appetites. They are, simply, hungry for meaning, which their teachers cannot provide. They feel that all their teachers can do is to produce rabbits out of empty hats. Up to a point the rebels have succeeded in imparting this awareness to society at large; and that, regardless of the grotesque methods employed, seems to me a wholesome achievement.

Drawing of a protest