1. New Times.
Those who study society agree that we are
living in a time of great change, but they cannot agree about the nature
of those changes. Sociologists have a range of labels
(9) to describe the series of social phenomena
that affect our everyday lives and the social
world we inhabit. The Age of Uncertainty, New Times, The Age of Anxiety
are just three that try to capture how it is that things we have been used
to thinking about as natural and true are now less so. This section argues
that
the decline of tradition and authority
the rise of global communications
the further internationalisation of the economy changes in work organisations
changes in identity and
the emergence of the risk society
all appear in the work of schools and Principals, and in the values, cultures
and behaviours of the students who walk into our classrooms. This places
new demands on schools and their Principals, who are increasingly left
to resolve significant social issues and tensions, by themselves, at the
local level, unsupported
by policy.
To go to the next section, which looks at
changes in education policy and the public sector in Australia, click here.
The decline of tradition and authority.
The way we live is now much more a matter
of personal choice than ever before. We no longer make decisions about
our families, work, and where and how to live, based only on tradition
- we do not do something simply because that is the way it has always been
done - or based only on authority - we do not do something just because
it is what our parents, religion or our teachers taught us. This can be
seen in the challenges to parent authority by children, who may now demand
explanation and reason and/or discomforting degrees of personal autonomy.
These changes are not just confined to private life. They affect public
and civil life as well.
Groups who used to be considered above challenge
because of their professional knowledge now face criticism from individuals,
governments and the media. Doctors, whom we now understand to be fallible,
are routinely subject to second opinions, legal action and consumer protest.
Scientists are queried about the consequences to human health and social
peace of their discoveries. Economists' explanations of unemployment and
prescriptions for economic recovery are met with scepticism, since no solution
they offer seems to work. This increasing distrust of experts and authority
is also to be seen in the declining public perception of the profession
of teachers: we are no longer seen to be the sole sources of understanding
about learning, fair discipline and necessary knowledge. There is now a
proliferation of experts all with different opinions on any subject, including
education, and ideas about the appropriate course of action, many of which
end up on newsagency shelves and midday television. Individuals have to
decide for themselves which of these expert opinions they will trust. Like
parents, teachers cannot simply turn to tradition or their designated position
of authority and responsibility and are required to explain and justify
actions to an increasingly better educated and informed public.
The government is no longer seen as the only
source of authority in civil life. Many no longer assume that the government
acts benevolently, with their best interests at heart. This diminution
of public trust in the state and its institutions does have some basis,
as we can see in Australia - the Stolen Children
Report(10), the well publicised paedophilia
cases and the inquiries into corruption and rorting being current examples.
When people are not happy with the decisions
made by government bureaucracies they increasingly seek alternative sources
of authority - people appeal to the law and the media rather than seek
remediation from a bureaucracy and state. School Principals now know only
too well the angry parent syndrome with the occasional threats of litigation,
front page headlines and the one sided ten second sound bite on national
television. At the same time as teachers and Principals are subject to
scepticism, our own trust in the government has also declined; we no longer
implicitly believe that it acts with lofty intentions nor even necessarily
with the best interests of schools and students at heart.
The decline of public trust reverberates
in education in many ways, for schools are also the main public institutions
with a responsibility for inculcating social and civic values in the next
generation. The work of schools, teachers and Principals is significantly
paradoxical - students must learn to be responsible and autonomous in order
to live and work in an increasingly de-traditionalised world. At the same
time they must learn the traditional social values of trust, interdependency,
respect and responsibility - all within an institution that is itself both
increasingly distrusted and also growing more distrustful. The failure
of public leaders to name adequately, and face this complex paradox leaves
the education profession without the collective intellectual and policy
tools to deal with it. Managing the paradox is thus hidden in the daily
work of teachers, schools and students. It is left up to Principals and
leadership teams to move beyond the glib rhetoric of policy documents to
design staff development and curriculum programs that address social values
and bonds in ways that connect with the lived experiences of students and
staff. The potential for the
neighbourhood school to create and sustain social
capital and social solidarities at the local level (11)
can only be met by taking action outside of the current frame of reference.
The Growth of Global Communications
We now share a universal media space of television,
news and entertainment products, telecommunications, and (increasingly)
the Internet. Information and images flow from one part of the world to
another - although not all of the world or the local community participates
equally in their production, distribution and reception. We and our students
may be more familiar with events in far away places than with what happens
in the next suburb. The media is now a significant source of information,
and students' understandings about aspects of the world and society can
be very significantly shaped by what they see and hear. This presents a
challenge to schooling and to the profession, as we are no longer the only
source outside of the family providing information and interpretations
about the environment, sexuality, current events, history - to name just
a few.
The dominance of the printed word is now
rivalled by the importance of image and of style. We can see this everywhere,
from the careful management of electronic media propaganda by politicians,
to the development of glossy school brochures. Youth cultures are now global,
embedded in the new medias and expressed in image and style. It is ironic
that the significant socialising role of the new media, the carrier of
the flow of images, has increased at the same time as media studies and
the visual arts curricula, which provide the critical grammars of visual
imagery and design, have declined. The development of hypertext creates
new ways of reading, new kinds of literacies
(12): critics argue about the effects of this
on traditional reading and writing.
Many teachers may still regard television
as an evil, and computers as a tool to do unchanged classroom tasks more
efficiently. Major government policy resolutely supports a fifties view
of basic skills together with an instrumental, cargo cult approach to computers
that largely ignores the wider issues raised by the new information and
communications technologies. This does not make them go away. The task
of trying to make some sense out of the plethora of views about what global
digital communications might mean for student learning and the curriculum
is left to universities, central office curriculum back-waters and schools.
But their significance for, and in, a twenty first century society is evidenced
by the effortless media multi-tasking and peripheral/side screen vision
of young people as compared to the hesitant progress of many of their teachers
and parents.
It is now commonplace to refer to the emerging
Information Age, in which new ways of communication and making meaning
through the new technologies rely not on information knowing, but information
handling, and where enormous data bases provide the resources necessary
for all economic, social and political decision making and operations.
Popular commentators such as Robert Reich and Jeremy
Rifkin (13) have described the future information
economy and its highly mobile, global symbolic analysts, who synthesise
and categorise, dealing daily in the abstract data sphere. The impact of
the new information technologies on schooling is sometimes summed up as
a shift for the teacher from the 'sage on the stage to the guide on the
side', and a shift for the school from a five day a week presence to a
year long, all day/all night, virtual and actual interaction between children,
programmes and teachers. Theorists talk about schools becoming community
learning centres, operating in an institutionalised network to support
a globalised learning society. While these notions may be seductive, the
reality for state schools is that there is as yet little public support
for de-schooling, insufficient resources to support the individualisation
of hardware or constructionist methods, and a significant lack of local
employment for symbolic analysts in comparison to the growth in casual
services sector jobs. Schools must therefore increasingly work between
short term possibilities and long term probabilities, which are in very
significant tension.
The further internationalisation of the
economy
The recent Asian currency crisis and its
consequent impact on Australia supports the theory that we now inhabit
an interdependent global economy. The growth of huge transnational companies,
some with economies larger than small countries, are supported by instant
digital communications and emerging global and regional trading organisations.
They present a number of challenges to the nation - state. They are mobile,
able to locate where labour, material costs and business conditions are
most advantageous and they have a global/regional outlook rather than a
domestic focus. Governments act in the interests of mega-corporations in
order to keep them on shore, while the businesses themselves act with little
allegiance to their host countries. In Australia, Sydney and Melbourne
compete to become a 'world city', corporate headquarters for these giants
of enterprise, while Adelaide attempts to position itself as a centre for
regional infrastructure (transport, telecommunications, training, defence)
and Western luxuries (gourmet food and wine). The contribution of manufacturing
to national GDP continues to decline as tariffs become the site for decision
making about the continuation of the textile, clothing and car industries.
Primary industry lives with the protectionist policies of its international
competitors, the micro effects of currency changes, increasing environmental
degradation and significant public indifference. As the macro economy changes,
new technologies further exacerbate the de-coupling of wealth creation
from employment and the Australian state, like many other middle size world
economies, faces a fiscal and economic challenge. Since the mid eighties,
Australian government policy has identified fiscal and economic recovery
as being of paramount importance and has adopted the view that public expenditure
must be reduced and private industry fostered. This has had major repercussions
for the resourcing of public education, for social equity and for the curriculum.
Private contributions to previously public
funded services have been made the norm. Recent federal schools policy
has moved to change the mix of public and private schooling through the
'switching device' of the New Schools Policy and
Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment(14). Because
there has been no limit set on the number of non government schools to
be established, this has not been a cost cutting strategy but it has resulted
in less Commonwealth revenue going to state systems. The rhetoric of parent
choice is supported by the production of comparable standardised information
about the performance of states and systems of schooling. The decline in
adequate government funds for government schools has led to an increased
reliance on parent contributions, fundraising and sponsorship and an open
approval of the notion that some children can and ought to have a better
education if their parents can afford to pay for it. This set of educational
policy responses is common to the English speaking developed countries
and there are national and international critiques
of its inequitable effects (15). However,
since both public and private schools receive funds from parents and governments,
the difference between the two is blurred, and discussions about public
values, inclusive enrolment and universal provision become subsumed by
the clamour for a bigger share of government funding.
As businesses move out or fold, some of the
communities served by state school systems face massive youth and adult
unemployment and declining job opportunities. Economic restructuring produces
poverty, as many adults now find they have skills that the economy no longer
wishes to buy. There is a ghetto-isation of poverty in particular geographic
locations, caused in part by post war urban planning which filled large
tracts of available land with public housing and placed low cost, working
class suburbs near industrial parks. As poverty increases
(16) so do the concomitant pressures on individuals,
families and neighbourhoods: some 43% of Australia's children now live
in families receiving welfare assistance, half of whom are now the working
poor, caught in cycles of wage reductions and the casualisation of employment.
More tightly targeted income support schemes (and the exclusion of certain
categories of young people altogether) continues the shift, from universal
benefits to safety net provisions, that has been in train since the mid
1980s. The political assertion that private and family contributions to
individual welfare are the moral responsibility of the citizenry is something
not altogether acceptable to the general public, as we have recently seen
in the case of nursing home charges. However, old age has been more successful
than poverty in altering government strategy. The quantum of people requiring
welfare and health support has increased at the same time as the government
attempts to reign in spending. Large numbers of poor children and their
families now turn to, (or on), their local school which has less support
from interagency mechanisms - the non government welfare agencies are also
stretched to the limit. At the same time as equity and justice, and supporting
funding, have slipped off the agenda, the pressure has increased on state
schools to act as welfare agencies and as institutions to remediate alienated
youth and keep them off the streets and dole queues. This situation is
not just ours alone, it is common in many OECD countries.
Over the last fifteen or so years there has
been a significant change in the purposes of education: from a nation building
and socialising agency to one responsible for the formation of the human
capital necessary for economic recovery. In times of economic uncertainty
parents increasingly look to education as the major means of ensuring their
child/ren have maximum opportunities for a secure future and, encouraged
by the continual political emphasis on choice, shop around for schooling
options. One consequence is an enrolment drift from neighbourhood schools
to those further up the social scale (many in the non government sector)
by those who can afford to do so. Another result is increasing instrumentalism
in the curriculum as schools seek to offer what sells in the educational
marketplace - the promise of employment and training - resulting in the
suturing together of training programs and postcompulsory schooling. This
has placed considerable demands on staff and school resources in the struggle
to provide options - to educate all students as if they are simultaneously
likely to be symbolic analysts, employed and unemployed. Very few politicians
and senior public sector leaders are prepared to acknowledge that there
is not enough work to go around, that young people are disproportionately
bearing the brunt of global economic changes and that residual unemployment,
underemployment and increasing disparities between rich and poor may be
a permanent feature of Australian society. This creates multiple problems
for schools, where staff and communities alike know this to be possible.
Cynical reactions greet government initiatives claiming to have the one
magic bullet. Schools must respond to the reality facing their students
but do so individually and without the support of a robust debate about
what kind of curriculum might be the best response. The task of leading
more honest and frank discussions falls to community leaders, the media
and Principals.
Changes in production processes and organisations.
The glossy volumes of management gurus on
global best seller lists signals, not only the changes in the ways that
work is organised, but also the popularisation of the theorisations
of the change(17). The language of quality,
teams, management and leadership has permeated all layers of the working
population. What they have in common is a rejection of the industrial mode
of production: the assembly line- with its strictly compartmentalised mono-skilled
workforce; the pyramid structure - of supervisors, inspectors, planners,
designers, and executives; top down micro-management; and variable levels
of productivity. The stories of the happy worker of human relations theory
and the alienated worker of Karl Marx have been replaced by the virtual
reality of the highly productive, share owning and self actualised team
which operates within a shared corporate culture in semi autonomy- a product
of multi-skills, devolved budgets, specific quality assurance mechanisms
and centrally determined targets. Much of the private sector has moved
to organisational structures that are flatter and leaner. While less people
work in the new organisations, many of them work increasingly long hours,
but for less years at peak capacity. In the re-engineered corporation,
senior management now earns significantly more and is contracted to perform
for this remuneration. At its most sophisticated, the new organisational
mode is one of highly technologised learning organisations operating globally,
networked to suppliers and the consumers to whom it provides niche market
goods. This imaginary is often spelt out to school communities as the rationale
for the introduction of information and communication technologies, the
introduction of new responsibilities and new student learning requirements,
but it is a far cry from the everyday education organisation reality of
paper files, hierarchical line management and struggling administrative
computing platforms.
The stories of new organisations are, however,
not all the same - there are many competing ideas about what constitutes
best practice. Selections from the range of new management theories have
been variously translated into public sector organisations, many based
loosely on the work of Osborne and Gaebler(18). In many OECD countries, the introduction of
versions of the new management and work organisation acts as an organisational
punctuation mark to accompany the political moves to radical neo- liberal
economic policies. This is the case in Australia. Public sector subsidiarity(19) has come to
mean restructuring to separate policy and accountability functions from
service delivery, flattening organisations to mean significant reductions
in middle management, and increasing productivity is now equated with less
people whose work is defined and managed through outcome and output driven
plans and contracts. In education policy, devolution has replaced more
holistic school based staff and community participation to bring schools
into line as service providers, governed at a distance. (More details can
be found in Section C). The increase
in workload (20) that is one of the hallmarks
of the new organisation has also been transferred into the public service.
Like managers in the private sector, school Principals have experienced
an intensification of work and now routinely spend fifty to sixty hours
a week on school related tasks.
Other versions of new management theories
and the new organisation are reflected in curriculum, in moves to restructure
schools and teacher's work, and in professional development. The shift
from the old assembly line to the new organisation depends very strongly
on teams - and it is the notion of teams that underpinned the development
of the Mayer key competencies (21)
with their emphases on communication, group decision making and working
together. The current interest in multi skilled teacher teams in middle schools (22) works to
provide an integrated curriculum and common approach to student learning.
Many schools trialling teacher teams move to restructure student groupings
and teacher scheduling, building in times for team meetings. Teaching methods
such as group work and collaborative learning support students to learn
how to work in a team. Educational writers address questions such as collegiate versus collaborative (23)
work amongst teachers, and collaborative leadership(24). Many schools now take the notion of a leadership
team as a given. Another version of new post industrial theory is the learning organisation (25)
that puts ideas of process at the fore, with structures that are fluid
and contingent rather than rational and scientific - adhocracy,
strategic leadership using mental models and systems thinking (25) being the basis of team learning and shared
vision.
The rhetoric of the learning organisation
and collaborative work approaches are quite contrary to the top down corporatist
model enshrined in the public sector reform literature and in emerging
bureaucratic practices. It is perhaps the focus on team work that gives
a superficial impression of cohesion between the variations in theory.
In a learning organisation, the question of staff development is taken
seriously, and appropriate budgets allocated. The reality of current South
Australian system practice comes nowhere near what might be imagined in
a learning organisation. For example, professional development for school
Principals usually consists of a small range of offerings. Some are geared
to the immediate introduction of management changes, presented as a blueprint
that must be followed, underlying assumptions rarely being made explicit.
Others present current ideas, perhaps the application of a particular theory
in a school or a research project into effective school administration.
Professional associations often also use national and international university
based theorists to broaden the menu of theory and practice. It is very
rarely the case that Principals collectively or individually have the opportunity
or the mandate to review critically organisational and leadership theories
and practices and to think through their implications and contrary inclinations.
This is not the case in the private sector nor in universities where time
to reflect and learn is seen as an essential and is resourced. One, or
at best three days, out of the school (but still on call), is hardly congruent
with the level of intellectual work required to think through the implications
of the kinds of organisational changes now underway.
5. Changes in identity.
Recent times have seen larger numbers of
people than at any other time in history forced to flee their home country
to find safety and economic security elsewhere. Australia now has a highly
racially, ethnically and culturally diverse population, actively connected
to all parts of the globe. But census forms and quality assurance documents
offer boxes to tick which no longer describe the complexities of children's
lives. We routinely use labels such as socioeconomic status, gender, Aboriginality,
home language, and cultural background - but these names and the explanatory
capacity of the theories that underpin them have been under strain for
some time. They are the words that policy uses, although some, such as
those relating to social class and status, now operate at the very edges
of official discussions. Multicultural policies tend to speak as if all
cultural identities are singular and fixed rather than rapidly changing
and increasingly hybrid. In a school, such categories often significantly
fail to describe the particularities and variation in the ways that social
forces interact and intersect both in the lives and decisions of students
and in the everyday world of the classroom. Policy use of social categories
and prescriptions for action now lags significantly behind ongoing changes
in the population.
While cultural diversity is our lived experience,
there are also organisations that speak for a return to a mono-culture.
The rise of such sentiments can lead to civil war and to significant levels
of social instability as is now the case in Europe. In our own case, we
hear in the media an increase in public racist conversations and that there
is more playground bullying. At the same time, the injustices of colonialism
are at the forefront of policy attention, as the Aboriginal sacred meets
the economically stressed and obsessed secular state in struggles over
land and history. Politicians discuss the possibilities of an election
held around native title. The anniversary of Federation brings debate about
a potential republic that severs legal ties with England. Political events
have brought questions of national and individual identity to the fore.
State schools, which serve all of the Australian population regardless
of who they are or where they live, are charged with the responsibility
of creating the public(s) of Australia, of educating the next generation.
This means that teachers must be able to deal with day to day issues ranging
from National Action on campus to hurtful name calling, from student questions
about the implications of the Wik decision for their backyards to making
meaningful school policy that moves beyond simplistic labels, from planning
a lesson about the Australian flag to designing a school plan to integrate
Aboriginal perspectives across the curriculum. Principals and teachers
deal with these questions largely in isolation. Many teachers have experiences
gained through travel, education and reflection and personal association
with which to understand the increased tensions around culture and identity.
However this is not universally true, and even if it were, it is hardly
sufficient. A system wide policy framework, built on a post-colonial curriculum
that offers more substantive interpretations of the many hybrid identities
that make up the Australian population, and that recognises and reconciles
with our imperial legacies, while looking to our global future, has yet
to emerge.
There are ongoing changes in families, with
the nuclear family no longer the overwhelming social pattern. Divorce is
increasing, the number of marriages declining, parenting is shared to a
greater extent than previously, and blended and extended families are rapidly
becoming the norm. The extent of diversity among children and their families
is more generally regarded as a problem than a positive development. Diversions
from the rhetorical norm are often implicitly denigrated. For example,
it is common to hear the term single parent family still used as synonomous
with poverty, and the assumption made that the non-custodial parent has
no role, function or responsibility. Roles and responsibilities within
the family are no longer uniform or standardised but much politically motivated
talk simplifies differences into human interest stories about sensitive
stay at home men and career mothers. As changing families are increasingly
described as inadequate, concurrent with 'return to the (old) family' sentiments,
the school is increasingly expected to take on more and more of the functions
previously associated with the family and is often castigated for failing
to teach young people about sex, drugs, road safety, lifestyle, and so
on. Schools must act as surveillance agents on parents and parenting while
at the same time relying on parents to support the work of the school in
a myriad of ways- from supervising homework and disciplinary contracts
to donating voluntary labour and money.
Gender relations also are changing and often
misrepresented. Journalists blithely speak of the increase in women in
the workforce whereas the data (26)
indicates that middle class women whose partners are also employed have
an increasing share of the labour market, while working class women whose
husbands are much more likely to be unemployed have less jobs now than
they did some years ago. Print media headlines often trumpet an educational
triumph of girls over boys whereas the reality is more complex. Some girls,
in smaller numbers than their male counterparts, are now being highly successful
in subjects that only a few years earlier were largely uncharted territories
- evidence that some school reforms do have a pay off. But many other young
women face uncertain futures in the most highly gender segmented job market
in the OECD, an enterprise bargaining system that is furthering the gap
between male and female wages, and in an economy where 'female' jobs are
increasingly casualised. A minority of working class boys no longer able
to become adult male workers express their masculinity through excesses
of the 'yob' cultures and violence directed against others and themselves.
The vast majority of young men are not cluttering up the suicide statistics,
the court rooms and goals. Yet political and media conversations about
gender have become increasingly simplistic and categorical. This actively
hinders public understanding and justifies the neo-liberal moves to marginalise
gender policy. Principals and teachers are unsupported both in thinking,
and action, not only about the adequacy of current gender based programs
and practices, but also directions for further reform that will assist
the personal and educational development of young women and men.
Questions of national identity are also fraught.
The capacity of the state to determine national directions is challenged
by a combination of factors - transnational companies and regional and
international agreements, the global media space which transforms traditional
notions of time, space and place, the population that is more diverse and
assertive about its particular needs, beliefs and opinions (to name just
a few). Our current, and to a lesser extent the immediate past, government
has moved to a situation where the economic right to choose within the
market is privileged above all other forms of rights. This is an individualising
process - it creates no social bonds. The state has to create some focus
for national identity and allegiance. There is an increasing tendency for
politicians to use the terms 'Australian' and 'un- Australian' that work
to create an illusion of a simple and single national persona. But words
must also be backed by policy. As in Britain and the United States, one
of the policy approaches to the promotion of national identity and nationalism
is to promote citizenship education. In Australia the meaning of the term
citizenship education has shifted from a broad conception of active participation
to a more narrow content based syllabus. At the same time as churches and
judges are castigated for making public and political commentary, children
are to be taught in classrooms about the superior values and workings of
parliamentary democracy. Broader questions of identity, and the kind of
Australia we collectively would like, are sidelined. Media savvy young
people are unlikely to want the discussion to stop at narrow issues. Identity
questions - what it means to be young, live in Australia, be specifically
raced and gendered, are central to the interests of adolescents. Schools
ignore them to the detriment of students and at the cost of seeming to
be irrelevant, or they proceed in the absence of official mandate and a
variety of professionally prepared curriculum materials. School Principals
then must choose if and how to address and resource individual and national
identity questions, do so with theoretical and policy tools that they have
no mandate to adjust and in a corporate culture which allows such curriculum
autonomy only if it remains hidden and does not impede more narrow bureaucratic
imperatives.
A lack of social cohesion is emerging in
the local and wider community. There are indications that global phenomona,
such as diminution of participation in communal and civic activity, the
growth of spatial ghettoes of security patrolled enclaves for the wealthy
and dismal poorly serviced tracts for the poor, and a fracturing of social
networks, are beginning to appear in Australia. Policies that promote shopping
malls as a major site for recreational activity, and the tiers of government
that spend little on local public facilities and services, that fund the
formation of small enclave schools and reduce the notion of parent participation
in schools to the involvement of an elite minority in governance, contribute
to this scenario. At the same time there are also counter tendencies -
celebrations of sporting achievements that take over entire city centres,
public mourning of symbolic 'good' people, massive voluntary fundraising
to alleviate hardship both of individuals and whole towns, and participation
in public debates of significance. Questions of regional and community
development are re emerging in policy debates and ideas such as social
capital have considerable airplay (11).
Most people routinely belong to many communities that meet particular needs
and interests but it is the networking of these that is most vulnerable
in the Australian context. The capacity of public schools to support both
neighbourhoods and other communities of interest is considerable. The public
school system, rather than reverting to the task of nation building could
appropriately be seen as significant to the making of the Australian publics,
and active in the construction of a social web that values and uses difference.
This however is not the stuff of current public policy which acts to support
fragmentation rather than supporting a rich network of communities. Many
school staffs take on tasks associated with supporting and strengthening
communities and the social fabric, tasks which are beneficial not only
to the school and its students and families but also in the longer term
work to avoid a deeply divided nation state. They do this against the flow,
in their own time, unfunded, unvalued and unacknowledged by policy makers.
Risk, uncertainty and anxiety.
Many social commentators now suggest that
we live in very uncertain times (9). Unlike the
risks and anxieties of former periods, our uncertainty is 'manufactured',
a product of our technological prowess, and social organisation. Global
environmental changes that threaten human life are becoming evident. Advances
in 'wetware' - our capacity to create life, to control reproduction, to
engineer genetically, to combine aspects of machines with human bodies
- create new ethical issues and bring questions of values to the fore.
New technologies provide surveillance capacities that make science fiction
look like history, and global media provides the potential for propaganda
manipulation beyond the imagination of the totalitarian dictators of recent
times. Some discussion about democracy, individual freedoms and the role
of government is emerging in response. The growth of social movements around
the rights of women, indigenous people, and those concerned with environmental
and human rights issues, creates new divisions and new solidarities amongst
us. Local communities are changing, some becoming more shut off from the
wider world, some increasingly mobile and transient. There are discussions
about how to maintain, rescue and produce a civil society and social capital.
There are frequent conflicts between competing demands - for example, greenhouse
gases or jobs - where any solution seems to create as many problems as
are solved.
Uncertainty manifests itself in local communities
where questions of safety, public disapproval and fear of mistakes emerge
in the minutiae of everyday life. Parents drive the children they want
to become independent and responsible to school and forbid them to play
in unsupervised places. Local councils close off local creeks for swimming
to avoid litigation, understanding that, because they cannot provide alternatives,
some young people will choose to continue or to find more antisocial activities
with which to occupy themselves. Risk emerges in school policies - for
example:
rules for excursions which minimise potential dangers but work as a disincentive,
confining young people to classrooms more than is desirable
handling complaints from parents - where maintaining the image of the school
might have to take precedence over tackling a difficult problem such as
racism
deciding how to manage primary to secondary transition programs - where
maintaining one school's numbers might come at the expense of a neighbour's
and to engage in competition might undermine cooperative activity that
is necessary for viability
The Principal and teachers are faced with weighty curriculum questions
- what kinds of knowledge, skills and attitudes do students who live in
the age of uncertainty need to know? There are implications for disciplines,
such as science which is both part of the problem and the solution to many
contemporary risks. There is a need for areas of knowledge such as philosophy,
which are largely unrepresented in the secondary curriculum, to help students
understand and think through ethical matters.
The media often paints a grim picture of
young people: they are portrayed as extremely pessimistic about their individual
and collective futures, as hedonist pleasure seekers engaged in anti-social
youth cultures, as vulnerable to advertising, fashion and sects, as subject
to severe mental illnesses resulting in life threatening behaviours, and
as feral and work shy. When three or more young people are gathered together
in a public space, many members of the community see a crime scene in the
making. These kind of moral panics contrast with the reality that only
ten percent of young people (27)
are not engaged in work, education or training, and that while they might
be concerned about issues such as the environment and prospects of world
peace, they also want opportunities to engage in discussion and social
action and they feel relatively optimistic about their personal futures.
Moral panics not only generate increased surveillance over young people
but also spawn projects directed towards ensuring that young people behave
themselves. Schools often find themselves caught up in a range of policing,
and remediating social educational programmes, since they are a convenient
place where numbers of young people can be surveyed and contacted. While
schools have always worked with the tensions of purposes arising from the
combinations of social control, education and socialisation, pressures
from the community and from public policy to 'solve' the perceived and
exaggerated 'youth problem' and alleviate social risks arising from the
unrestrained behaviour of youth are now significantly increased. They contrast
markedly with the educational goals of encouraging young people to become
active citizens, makers of their personal and social futures, leaders and
innovators, all which work from assumptions about the strengths and capabilities
of young people rather than second hand views of their deficiencies and
riskiness. Such dilemmas are left to individual schools, teachers and Principals
to resolve.
In a climate of uncertainty, government seeks
and needs, if it is to remain in power and position, to present the appearance
of being in control. It is castigated daily in the media for the personal
habits and peccadilloes of its members and tardiness in delivering promises,
no matter how idealistic they might have been. Government demands that
its instrument of management, the public bureaucracy, produces neat managed
plans, sets explicit outcomes and finds magic new solutions to intractable
old problems. It requires that there are consequences for those whose actions
make it seem out of control. There is a system to punish or fail to reward
those devolved managers who are not seen to perform, who are caught out
in no - win, no - win situations. In a climate of risk and uncertainty
everyone must act as if they are both being watched and they are watching
out. The Principal is made responsible for whatever happens in the school
and is expected to manage all short and long term demands without undue
fuss, not making mistakes, only drawing attention to things that will put
the school, system and government in a good light. There is considerable
potential for error, accident and conflict in an organisation as large
as a school, subject to trends and pressures that are often ignored by
policy. It is little wonder that Principals frequently feel themselves
to be torn between too many competing demands and agendas, juggling too
many issues, any one of which could turn into a major catastrophe or a
minor embarrassment. The demands of the Principal-ship are now a tall order
and the personal and emotional demands made on individual Principals are
largely unrecognised and unrewarded.
