Comments Off on Fuelling Capitalism’s Authority: One Question and One Child at a Time
You breathe a sigh of silent relief. The dinner party your parents are hosting seems to be going well. The relatives haven’t descended into a shouting match over their questionable political views or whether the chicken is edible. You take another sip of water before their attention turns on you when they suddenly need a topic of conversation that’s not your uncle justifying his refusal for the vaccine. They ask the question you’ve been expecting and dreading the whole night: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Every year, those ten syllables are most likely posed to thousands of Australian children. It seems relatively innocent and even polite to ask young people their future aspirations, except those ten words aren’t asking for their dream. Instead, it’s an intrusive probe which degrades their value and potential. Asking young people those ten words during a period in their life where they are struggling to forge an individual identity disregards their unique potential in favour of their promised labour.
It’s easy to understand the damage when considering whether it would be socially acceptable to answer that question without listing a formal occupation.
If people were to ask a teenager, they wouldn’t answer with, “a caring person” or, “someone who does the right thing no matter what.” Instead, the answer which is expected is a profession that suits their skills developed during school which they go off to either study or work straight after school. It’s concerning to notice that this is the default answer, especially when this education to employment pipeline doesn’t cater to anyone’s wellbeing or happiness, but rather to late-stage capitalism which demands labour to foremostly turn a profit for others. Instilling a work-centric attitude upon people is a vicious byproduct of capitalism. Labour empowers modern capitalism at the expense of people – especially young people and people of colour. This notion of the world sustains an ideology that actively harms us and our planet while we perpetuate its success by equating our own self-worth with its survival by constantly demanding and emphasising employment as social status.
The “What do you want to be?” question also frames adolescence as an inferior state: something which exists only to be surpassed by adulthood, where adulthood equals a full-time and productive job. Why are we treating the lives of children and teenagers as nothing but the preparation stages for employment? If we’re doing that, we might as well teach kids how to drive a forklift or a truck instead of celebrating their youth.
In today’s hyper-competitive world, all we’ve ever known is that your job is how others see you and evaluate your self-worth. All of this starts and continues with a ten-word question that fuels capitalism’s authority over us. We should aim to ask young people a different question, one that doesn’t demand nine-to-five employment or their labour, but instead asks them, “What kind of person do you want to be?” After all, it’s still ten syllables, and instead of valuing careers for the future, it values people who care and love for each other and the world we share.
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 22 ‘To Be Confirmed’
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What is it about the current tertiary education system that makes it so unfit for purpose? Maybe I just picked the wrong degree, but if what I’ve described is the recipe for success, our definition of success is surely very, very wrong.
The Australian writer Judith Brett considers this very question in her book Doing Politics: Writing in Public Life. She writes that over the past few decades, during her time as both a student and a professor, she has watched the tertiary education system change for the worse. She writes that what was once a temple of imagination, creativity and ideas has become nothing more than a hollowed-out shopping mall, littered with bad cafés, flashy signs and price-gouging bookshops.
Reflecting on her own time as an undergraduate, she writes that today, “students are offered far less than we were, and they have to pay much more for it.” She laments a system which used to encourage the creation of ideas, rather than their codification into checklists and commercialisation into products. She summarises that today’s universities reward work that is “cautious and uninteresting, producing no new ideas.” She writes that students and academics alike are made to focus on what their superiors want and will be likely to reward rather than what is actually valuable.
The regrettable truth of tertiary education in Australia is that it is just another public good that has been corporatised by neoliberalism, an ideology that measures success according to concepts that have no meaning in a university setting. Words like ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ and that old dreadful poisonous phrase ‘economic rationalism’ have corrupted how we value thought and have reduced our universities to nothing more than another JB HiFi, Target or Big W. The success and standing of a university are no longer measured by the value of the education it provides or the ideas it creates but by the money it makes, the useless theories it sells and how many students trade their souls for clerkships in a race to the bottom. No matter how useless the course, how great the disillusionment or how hopeless the search for employment becomes, the university will get its due. The debt many of us carry around our necks for decades will see to that. It is our souvenir of a road to nowhere.
So the question has to be asked, how do we change this? The answer must be to remove money from the question of tertiary education in its entirety. Only the creation of a universal and costless tertiary education system where money is not the primary motivator can foster the imaginative, creative and original thinking which the world requires. One of the many mistakes of neoliberalism is its defining assumption that everything can be monetised. By its very nature, thought is incapable of being accorded a monetary value. How can you measure essays in dollars? How can you rank ideas according to their financial value? It is simply ridiculous. Yet this is exactly what modern tertiary education does. The fees you pay represent your financial value to the university. Not the value of your ideas, your imagination or your intelligence, but the value of your simple attendance. There is no longer any incentive to engage or even to educate students, just a base motivation to attract them with flashy marketing and then keep them in the store for as long as possible as the fees roll on and on and on.
If cost-cutting, profit-making and corporatisation were no longer the foundations of tertiary education, checklists would be abandoned and soulless courses would be dropped. Universities would be free to reward careful, considerate and quality research which actually added something to the public debate. This would not only enrich the quality of tertiary education but also broaden its base, reducing the gap between rich and poor, young and old by offering students a more equal access to quality education. When universities become something more than callous superstores, they will no longer sell a simple product, but will be free to engage, to inspire and to truly educate.
Surely I can’t be the only one who feels like this. I can’t be the only one who has found tertiary education nothing more than the brutal education of an idealist. I can’t be the only one who feels like it’s all one giant waste of time and money. I know a return to free tertiary education is ambitious. I know it sounds impossible. I know that creative solutions are not easy. But we live in times that demand creativity. The day will come when our generation is called alone to solve the seemingly unsolvable problems of our time, passed down by mediocre and gutless politicians for decades. We will overcome the climate crisis. We will create a society free of crippling socio-economic inequality. We will arrest the slide into populism, oligarchy and autocracy. When that time comes, the world will need imagination more than ever. It will need leaders who are unafraid of the bold, the original and the unthinkable. It will be us who turn the impossible into the possible and broaden the horizons of humanity once more.
But we will not get there with a tertiary education system which rewards unearned characteristics, punishes creativity and turns the possible into the impossible. We will not one day be fit to lead if we allow our imaginations to be limited by a grading system which resembles nothing more than a glorified checklist. The only way to prepare our generation and future generations for the world to come is to create a system which inspires, which fosters imagination and most importantly, looks like the world which we want to build.
With Disraeli’s quote in mind I ask you all, students of ANU, do you feel full of light? Do you feel free? Are you really learning? Does your university look like the world you want to build?
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 2 ‘To Be Confirmed’
Read Part I here.
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In 2021 there were a slew of ANU student research surveys I encountered that essentialised the gender binary. It was after the fifth or sixth psychology student shared such a research survey to ANU Schmidtposting that I began to question the Research School of Psychology’s teaching.
One survey collected “gendered” data with the options: “Are you male; Are you female; Are you intersex/indeterminate/unspecified?” These questions were so prejudiced and bizarre I had to re-read them multiple times before its underlying rhetoric of discrimination – equating anatomical sex to gender, disallowing intersex individuals to be male or female, and lumping together every so-called “non-normative” identity together – became clear to me.
When answering another survey’s first question (“Are you a female?”) the alternate options to “Yes” – “No” and “Prefer not to say” – immediately kicked participants from the survey. We’re only looking for “females,” the survey was saying, a particular “type” of woman whose anatomy corresponds 1:1 with her gender.
Not only were undergraduate students posting these surveys, but so were honours and higher degree research students. These surveys had been signed off by a plethora of supervisors and received the shiny tick of approval from the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC). Apparently nothing in the Psychology School’s whole undergraduate degree plan had taught its students about gender – which was nevertheless, supposedly, a completely necessary data point.
Each time these surveys were shared, I wondered how a supposedly first-class institution could allow inarguably discriminatory and transphobic research. Not only is this research damaging in that it upholds the (violent) gender binary, it’s also unscientific for the same reasons. Not to mention archaic in its methodology: the American Psychological Association (APA) 2015 style guidelines state gender binary measurements should be abandoned due to its exclusionary (and thus inaccurate) and discriminatory nature.
I contacted the researchers responsible for both aforementioned surveys, beginning both emails with various versions of “I am a Gender Studies student at ANU” as if I needed a specific academic reasoning and background to be allowed to be critical and dismayed. The responses were near-immediate. The surveys were taken offline then changed. Thank you for raising this, we are very sorry if this caused any distress, everyone seemed to say to me; this is very important, they all agreed.
Then how, I wondered, had nobody ascertained this before?
The more I thought about it, the more I realised this was an institutional failure. Entangled with this ‘superficial’ failure of research and research approval, there exists ANU’s and academia’s broad institutional limitations (an overload of administrative work pushed onto academics limits their ability to be involved in – especially student – research projects, for one). I slowly recognised my surprise at this ‘new’ failure of ANU to be a form of my (cisgendered) privilege and naivety.
One of the research supervisors in early 2021 promised me they were “committed to continually improving [their] understanding of gender and [how it is measured].” Reviewing this in late 2021 with another Psychology School academic, I was told my feedback had been raised in a variety of channels. This included the Psychology School’s Executive Meeting, and that a change in the way gendered research is undertaken, especially survey wording, should slowly begin to see a shift. I was also informed that a new undergraduate course, Culture and Psychology (PSYC2012), was to be launched in 2022, becoming a core Psychology course from 2023, which would cover, in part, the “issues” I had raised.
Per PSCY2012’s Programs and Courses page, there is no specific reference to gender. Instead, the course seems to focus on the Eurocentric origins of psychological science with “particular emphasis” placed on “Indigenous issues in psychology.” Based on its description, it is an inarguably important course, but one which seems to occlude gender, gender identity and how to collect gendered data accurately and empathetically.
I had also contacted the HREC, attempting to change the scope of ethical approval for gendered language and data collection. In my email, I included a 2019 article by Cameron and Stinson outlining guidelines for collecting gendered data in psychological research. When HREC replied, they noted they had updated the Gender and sexuality in research page to include the 2019 Cameron and Stinson article I had supplied, along with a new section about gendered data and sex and gender within language. This was an article, I emphasise, which I had hastily skimmed before sending it off on its surprising journey to an official research Ethics & integrity webpage – perhaps proving precisely what little these measures are worth.
Sara Ahmed is a cultural theorist who quit their position at a university due to the way it handled complaints of sexual assault and harassment. Ahmed writes about the institutional obsession for “damage limitation” in complaints processes, and further notes how “an email … led to [their] name being put forward … to [help] write a new race equality policy,” showing how “a complaint, whether made formally or not, can lead you to become a diversity worker.”
My experience is not equivalent to Ahmed’s, but it is perhaps parallel. It remains integral to question on whom the onus is placed to improve institutional systems. And while I didn’t experience the same amount of pushback which occurs from other forms of complaints which Ahmed chronicles – especially sexual assault and harassment, racism and bullying – I am still left with a feeling of uneasiness. An uneasiness which compounds when I realise that this was a largely successful complaint process, with numerous responses from individuals who seemed genuine in their caring.
But it remains to be seen the efficacy and actionable changes my complaints will have on the Psychology School and HREC. Is there a genuine drive and, indeed, ability to meaningfully shift the way research is conducted and approved? Or were the responses I received false promises from an obdurate institution bent on rigidity, prioritising “damage limitation” over the wellbeing of community and people? Only time will tell.
If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination in any way, you can reach out to the support services listed below.
Lifeline (13 11 14) A national charity providing all Australians experiencing a personal crisis with access to 24-hour crisis support and suicide prevention services. Call 13 11 13.
Genderqueer Australia Specialises in the support of gender questioning and genderqueer people, their family, friends and professionals who they go to for help.
Intersex Human Rights Australia Intersex human rights, information, education and peer and family support.
Intersex Peer Support Australia An intersex peer support, information and advocacy group for people born with variations in sex characteristics and their families.
Canberra Rape Crisis Centre (6247 2525) CRCC are on campus and available to support you if you have experienced sexual violence, harassment, or anything that has made you feel uncomfortable. You don’t need a Medicare card to see them, all appointments are free, and nobody will be told you have spoken to them. You can call CRCC on 6247 2525 between 7am and 11pm.
1800RESPECT Provides support for people experiencing, or at risk of experiencing, sexual assault, domestic or family violence, their friends and family, and workers and professionals supporting someone experiencing, or at risk of experiencing sexual assault, domestic or family violence. Call 1800 737 732.
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 5 ‘To Be Confirmed’
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.