Letter

In response to The quest for 21st century australian productivity [and] TAFE

TAFE and the commercialisation of education

Neil, thank you for your welcome piece written from within the deterioration of educational integrity of an important post-secondary sector! Thank you. Such insider insight tracing educational decline in TAFE is helpful to sharpen our vision of the related spectacular decline within the “sector” of what are now called “universities”!

To investigate how TAFE was demeaned in public policy will mean revisiting the question of why Institutes of Technology and Colleges of Advanced Education were “reformed” by amalgamation with, and hence required by legislation to take on the labels of, “universities”? Are we to make the sad conclusion that TAFE was actually mangled by a process that viewed it in subsidiary terms within the higher educational sector?

Under the 1980s economic rationalist ideology of the Dawkins reforms, managed by the Federal Department of Employment, Education and Training, all education was subjected to rigorous commercialising policies, geared in a materialistic reductionistic way to GDP “productivity”.

— Bruce Wearne from Ballarat Central