Labour Saving Devices? It’s all very well to offer the 7 year-olds of today three years of free tertiary education in 2025. The really tough question is: what are we going to teach them? Our universities and polytechnics need a massive injection of funds not only to erect the infrastructure required for free and universal tertiary education, but also to help them – and us – understand and prepare for the world that is coming.
THERE SEEMS LITTLE POINT in subsidising the post-school
education of young New Zealanders if that education isn’t up to scratch. The
voters need to be reassured that just because the next Labour Government will
be offering up to three years of free tertiary education, this country’s
tertiary institutions need no longer concern themselves about providing value
for money.
Right now, New Zealand’s universities are receiving 30
percent less per student from the state than comparable universities overseas.
Staff-student ratios are deteriorating, and it’s getting harder to both attract
and retain the top-flight scholars this country needs. Every week another
tranche of our best and our brightest departs these shores in response to
teaching and research offers New Zealand can no longer match.
But, if our universities are in urgent need of a funding
boost, our polytechs and wanangas are in need of even more. John Key’s National
Government has not been the champion of non-university tertiary education that
the sector so desperately needed. On the contrary, there has been an almost
punitive aspect to the Government’s treatment of these largely vocational
institutions. It began with the defunding of adult education in 2009, and it’s
been downhill for the sector ever since – especially for the smaller, regional
polytechnics.
On the basis of its announced policy, it would appear that
Labour is gearing up to become that long-awaited champion of vocational
education. Andrew Little made it clear in his State of the Nation address last
Sunday that the guiding principle of Labour’s tertiary education policy is that
the knowledge and skills required for a productive life should not be imparted
on the basis of the recipient’s ability to pay.
He also devoted a large chunk of his speech to the dramatic
(some might say devastating) changes technology is poised to bring about in the
workforce. New Zealand needs to brace itself to meet these changes, and one of
the best ways to do that is to make it easy for workers displaced by technology
to retrain themselves.
In Denmark it is called “flexicurity”: a policy aimed at
making it easier for employers to improve the profitability of their firms by
replacing staff with the new generation of faster, smarter computers; while
ensuring that the workers so displaced are retrained, and helped to find new
employment, by the state.
Critics of Labour’s “free education” policy announcement
have pointed out that what it is proposing is nowhere near as generous, nor as
comprehensive, as the Danish model. Labour’s finance spokesperson, Grant
Robertson, whose “Future of Work Commission” has praised the “flexicurity”
concept, must be aware that those most likely to fall victim to the so-called
“Fourth Industrial Revolution” are professionals. It is accountants, nurses and
teachers who are about to see an alarmingly large chunk of their current job
descriptions handed over to artificially-intelligent machines.
In Denmark such post-industrial casualties are paid a very
generous job-search allowance and signed up for re-training by the state –
regardless of their educational history. For the moment, at least, Labour is
restricting its offer of free post-school education to those who have yet to
darken the door of a tertiary institution. Accountants, nurses and teachers
need not apply.
Professionals looking to acquire the (so far) unprogrammable
skills of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, screen-writers and other
creatives will have to foot the new skills bill themselves. So, too, will all
those tradespeople who’ve served their time as apprentices, received their
trade certificates and established thriving small businesses, only to find
their skill-sets rendered superfluous by the dramatically expanding capabilities
of tomorrow’s 3D printers.
It’s all very well to offer the 7 year-olds of today three
years of free tertiary education in 2025. The really tough question is: what
are we going to teach them? Our universities and polytechnics need a massive
injection of funds not only to erect the infrastructure required for free and
universal tertiary education, but also to help them – and us – understand and
prepare for the world that is coming.
Because it’s looking increasingly likely to be a world in
which the pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake; and the acquisition of
skills, exclusively for the purposes of artistic creation; will be the only
remaining vocational options – for human-beings.
And the very last political job will be to persuade the
machines to pay for it all.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 February 2016.
