This is the first in a four-part series on intergenerational learning ecologies, the reform of Australian education, and what some young people already know and do about living and learning in a time of compounding crisis. Across the series I move from the policy architecture of ‘tertiary harmonisation’ and through some of the places – fire and disaster, food and farming – where meaningful learning is already happening, and what it might mean for education.
‘Pippies at the Spot’ – October 2024, James Goring
Young people are growing up amid profound, unfolding crises of capitalism, of climate, of war. What the UN Secretary-General has called a ‘code red for humanity’ (United Nations, 2021), and what Braidotti (2019, pp. 11–12) identifies as the convergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Mass Extinction. It is the condition, not the backdrop, of the questions this series asks.
The reform of Australian education is increasingly organised around the discourse of ‘tertiary harmonisation’ – a vision for school, vocational education and training (VET), and higher education as a more joined-up system. The Australian Universities Accord calls for:
a more connected, permeable and high-quality tertiary education system in which students can move more easily between providers and qualifications (Australian Government, 2023a, p. 14).
It is hard to argue against connection and permeability. But here I want to suggest that tertiary harmonisation is best understood not as a solution to enduring problems, but as a discursive event which reproduces particular notions of what students, teachers, and academics can be and become. Neoliberal, individualising, stackable skills, credentials and pathways foreclose the place-embedded, material, affective and intergenerational ways in which young people are already resisting, learning and making sustainable futures in the face of crisis and uncertainty.
This is the argument I want to open up across the series. Not that harmonisation is wrong, but that it is dangerous – in the particular sense that Michel Foucault uses the word:
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do (Foucault, in Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, pp. 231–232).
What is dangerous about it are not its ambitions but its silences. The discourse seeks to align school, VET and university without ever naming the ecological, technological, social and political crises that are shaping young people’s lives in the places where they live. In a paper I have recently written on tertiary harmonisation and applied learning, I trace six such silences that run through the schooling, VET and higher education sectors. I will not lay out all six here – the series will let some of them emerge along the way, but three are worth naming now, because they frame what follows.
The relational, collective subject of education
These policies seek to produce the student, the teacher and the worker as a bounded individual: measurable, trackable, credentialed. What is silenced is the relational, collective, place-embedded character of how people actually learn and live, in relation to one another and to more-than-human others. As Carol Bacchi (2009, p. 1) reminds us, the way a problem is represented ‘carries implications for how the issue is thought about, and for how the people involved are treated’. The student who is said to ‘need’ applied learning is already, in the very way the problem is set up, a different kind of student from the one presumed to be headed for an ATAR.
The non-economic purposes of learning
Read genealogically, some of the frameworks that govern applied and vocational learning start to look less like frameworks for learning and more like frameworks for producing a particular kind of future worker. Stephen Ball (2009, p. 213) describes the subject these produce as:
a depthless, flexible, lonely, responsive and responsible learner (collectively represented as human capital), devoid of ‘sociality’ – the ultimate commodification of the social.
The question the apparatus cannot easily ask is what curiosity, resilience and community connectedness might mean when they are not in service of labour market participation – when they are, instead, among the conditions of a life worth living on terms other than economic ones.
Place as more than context
Place-based reform is everywhere in the current moment, but it tends to instrumentalise place – to treat it as the context for an intervention. What is silenced is place as something that teaches: as Country, as an actor rather than a setting. Across submissions to the current parliamentary inquiry into student pathways to in-demand industries, ecological and community-embedded knowledge is often framed as a pathway rationale, warranted by its economic and climate returns. What cannot quite be said, is that learning that is intergenerational, ecological and relational, might matter for reasons the credential framework has no category for.
Underneath these sits a further silence I want to name but not claim to fill: the colonial foundations of the knowledge hierarchy itself – the sorting of academic from applied, theory from practice, university from TAFE, which is not a neutral administrative arrangement but is built on, and continues to reproduce, the epistemic hierarchies of colonial modernity. Naming it here is not the same as filling it, and this is held, throughout this series, as a constitutive absence that demands more situated scholarship than I can offer.
What interests me are the material dimensions: the soils, fire, water, food, tools, bodies, relationships and communities and brigades and generations through which learning is made – not ecology as metaphor for connectedness in general or distributed responsibility. The term cannot do the political work on its own: an ecology can be described as balanced or self-regulating or toxic in ways that make contested distributions of power look like natural arrangements. Naming something an ecology or compost does not make it one.
So these blogs aren’t an argument for or against a better alignment of school, VET and Higher Education sectors. Instead, I am curious to find out what the apparatus continues to silence with all its focus on such projects – and to find it not only in theory but in the places that young people, teachers and communities are already learning, making things and solving problems together. In the next post, I go to bushfire and disaster preparedness: to young people who know and learn how to prepare for and respond to disasters, and to a credential system that cannot quite see what they want, and what they are already doing.
References
Australian Government. (2023a). Australian Universities Accord: Final report. Department of Education.
Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Pearson.
Ball, S. J. (2009). Lifelong learning, subjectivity and the totally pedagogised society. In M. A. Peters et al. (Eds.), Governmentality studies in education (pp. 201–216). Sense Publishers.
Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity Press.
Dreyfus, H. L., & Rabinow, P. (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1997). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76. Picador.
United Nations. (2021, August 9). Secretary-General calls latest IPCC climate report ‘code red for humanity’ [Press release].
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