The government’s recent announcement to double student fees for courses in the arts, humanities and social sciences has horrified academics, prospective students and onlookers alike. In an age where we’ve been repeatedly told that critical and creative thinking skills are the most useful weapons in our arsenal to prevent a robot uprising, the decision is perplexing. Many have also commented on the profound irony that the architects of this proposed policy have themselves benefited from an education in the humanities. This includes 6 out of our last 8 prime ministers, and many of whom received their education for free.
Education minister Dan Tehran and employment minister Michaelia Cash pitched the proposed changes as necessary as we navigate our way through this strange and unpredictable time.
“To power our post-Covid economic recovery, Australia will need more educators, more health professionals and more engineers, and that is why we are sending a price signal to encourage people to study in areas of expected employment growth,” Tehan argues.
Those who choose to study “in areas of expected employment growth” will pay less for their degree. Tehan has announced plans to decrease university fees for STEM based fields as well as nursing, education, agriculture and psychology.
However, students wishing to study the creative arts, philosophy, politics, history, sociology, communications and economics may find the cost of their degrees more than double.
The prospect that students who were otherwise interested in the humanities may be deterred from studying them or from entering university altogether is a bleak one, but more concerning are the larger implications for Australia’s democracy.
No state is served by a less knowledgeable public. Indeed, the fragility of a democracy is not something that should be taken for granted. A public that is ill informed about history, philosophy or sociology becomes susceptible to misinformation, fear mongering and widespread political apathy.
Last year a group of high school students in the US launched a class action lawsuit against their governor Cook v. Raimondo. The plaintiffs claim that the state has violated their constitutional rights by failing to equip them with the basic civics education necessary to properly function in a democracy, including voting and serving on a jury.
Australia is one of the only places in the world which enforces mandatory voting, surely then we have an obligation to maintain a highly informed public equipped with the analytical and critical thinking skills necessary to make choices in an increasingly complex world.
These concerns may seem alarmist to some, but we should remain cognisant that we live in a precarious time and the very real threat that our democratic institutions can be challenged and compromised should not be mistaken for baseless hysteria. Even more concerning is the fact that this announcement coincides with an increasingly bleak day for journalism. The ABC recently announced 250 job losses to offset the latest 84 million budget cut, the most recent in successive reductions to the national broadcaster’s budget by the coalition government. News Corp also recently announced that it will be closing over 100 newspapers and cutting at least 500 staff from its local papers as it moves to an increased emphasis on digital reporting.
As more and more of us increasingly consume our news from social media platforms, placing increased scrutiny on the way these platforms function seems especially pertinent.
Kara Swisher a prominent tech journalist and the host of podcast Recode Decode stated in a 2018 interview when discussing Mark Zuckberg and the influence Facebook had on the 2016 US presidential election that “they never studied humanities in college, so they don’t have a great sense of the things they build.”
Traditional news organisations and digital platforms are legally responsible for the content in which they publish, however social media platforms are not held to the same editorial standards. In fact, Facebook’s creators have deliberately designed the platform in such a way as to abdicate responsibility over the content its users publish. Last year, Facebook also announced that it would not fact check political ads, a decision which infuriated many condemning it as reckless, lazy and dangerous. If a democracy is dependent on the ability of its populace to discern fact from fiction, and hold their elected officials to account, then an investment in the humanities is an essential not a superfluous element in the maintenance of that system.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the very people who should supposedly be regulating tech companies are not in a position where they understand how to do so. One need only have watched a few minutes of the 2018 congressional enquiry hearings with Zuckerberg to understand that most politicians are not technologically literate.
In the wake of these education reforms, there is the potential for a generation to emerge that are proficient in technology and STEM based fields but otherwise uninformed about the broader political process and disinclined to think about the societal implications of technological innovation.
An increased investment in STEM based fields is certainly not something to be discouraged and many would recognise and applaud concerted efforts on behalf of the state to encourage more young women to pursue careers in the hard sciences, however, the fact that this should come at the expense of those wishing to study the humanities is concerning.
Furthermore, the logic behind this decision is questionable. The World Economic Forum an international body dedicated to engaging ‘the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas,’ has projected that the top three skills you need to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution are complex problem- solving, critical thinking and creativity. Analysts have been warning us for decades that many jobs are becoming increasingly susceptible to automation but as of yet there are no machines or artificial intelligence capable or rivalling humans for the above and these are precisely the type of skills humanities-based degrees teach us.
Of course, it’s easy for myself, someone with degrees in the humanities and social sciences to espouse the virtues of these disciplines so instead I refer you to the words of Robert Menzies, one of our most esteemed liberal prime ministers and someone with a great fondness for university education. In 1939 he gave the annual commencement address at the Canberra University College.
“Let me defend a so-called useless scholarship on the great grounds that it represents a sanity badly needed in an insane world… that it points the moral that the mere mechanics of life can never be the sole vocation of the human spirit.”
Of course, data literacy and tech savviness are certainly necessary to compete in an increasingly complex world but so too are emotional intelligence, critical and creative thinking skills. We haven’t yet reached the horrors of Westworld where robots can indeed mimic the consciousness and emotions of humans and an education in the humanities allows individuals to foster, nurture and grow these skills.
Technological innovation can be socially negligible. The kind of world where I want to live in is one where individuals think of consequences beyond the scope of their business profits.
Tech companies are fond of boasting of their disruptive influence and certainly disruption in almost every field is inevitable. But these disruptions can have wider societal implications that may not be immediately recognisable to people who have never taken a sociology, philosophy or politics class before in their life. Investing in a sustainable prosperous future means investing in everyone.
What do you think about these proposed changes? Join the conversation and let us know…