This series is built on the firm belief in “a paradigm of care” being the answer to the cancer of neoliberal economic rationalism, and its bedfellows bullying managerialism, monetarism and compliance surveillance. But following the maxim that “no one likes a whinger”, I am also advocating the timeless message from Swiss American psychiatrist and expert “On death and dying”, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: “If what you have been doing hasn’t been working, do something different!”

We definitely need to do something different and get over our fears about challenging the status quo of the last half century, and to start confidently moving towards the solution: being more human together, and replacing Social Darwinism’s dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest myth, with the truth of evolution, which is that collaborating and co-operating for the common good is what makes for successful species in the long run.

The current predicament the world is facing, Trumpageddon, rise of fascism, filling the coffers of the top one percent while demonising “the other” and continuing to live under the jackboot of neoliberal controls directing every aspect of our lives – it’s all the product of having bought the lie that we just had to wait for our share to arrive, when it trickled down…So why am I always so thirsty?

Bob Stake and Merel Visse have given us the blueprint in their inspiring little book “A paradigm of care” (Information Age Publishing, Charlotte NC 2021). Now we need to apply that set of values and practices across all sectors of society – health and human services, education and training, public administration, banking, finance and taxing, justice, and politics. It’s time to call time on all the Friedmanite BS and get back to caring for the Earth and each other.

Yep, it turns out that warm and fuzzy works. Not ideologically driven hierarchical systems of control and pre-rigged “free market competition” (which was never free and involved no true choices by the customers). Local, listening, delegated budget allocations, decision making and priority setting, informed by caring – that’s where we need to begin. So let’s have a look at how things are faring in the world of education and training.

Industrial schooling was invented to teach obedience and conformity. To easily fill the ranks of the military with compliant soldiers, and then fill the factory floors with process workers, who knew they just had to do what they were told and everything would be alright on payday. It was a formula made for British penal colonies like Australia, Taylorist factory production lines requiring “monkey see, monkey do” workers, and one that perfectly fitted the modern era neoliberal requirement for compliant staff, such as those millions of workers ready to comply with the trickle-down fairytale that Milton Friedman used to win his Nobel Prize in economics.

After writing about education in Australia for 50 years now, I am ashamed to say that nothing’s changed. It’s just gotten worse and worse. The linear, hierarchical, competitive academic curriculum and timetable still rules over countless young lives, their parents, teachers and schools. And universities and TAFE perpetuate the same corporatised, “cookie cutter”, sausage machine approach, overseen by managerialist bullies, with no one in the casualised workforce able to challenge their “stranglehold on knowledge”, or the approval of the qualifications that entitle you to get a foothold on the ladder to so-called success. Meanwhile, those in management positions have long ago drunk the Kool Aid and turn a blind eye to the fact that this system is failing everyone, except those at the top. So it’s a “take the money and run” approach to online learning, “export education” rip-offs of foreign students, and virtually non-existent face-to-face time for students to exchange ideas with teachers and do the most important learning of their lives while just “chewing the fat”.

So how can we, the citizens, students, parents and teachers apply a paradigm of care in such an environment? Simple, by joining the movement led by people like Bob Stake, Merel Visse, Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky and “globalising dissent”; by challenging the corporatised, market mentality approach to packaging teaching and learning. This must happen at the local level first, then we must work our way up to the board and cabinet rooms where big decisions get rubber stamped.

Those of us who “came through” schooling in the 1950s and 1960s could have told you then that “the system sucks”. So many went feral and joined the anti-nuke, anti-war, peace, love and understanding movement… until Baby Boomers started having families, and then worried about their own kids’ futures. So things basically rebooted and stayed the same.

Eventually, even some of those “at the top” started to realise the industrial schooling model was a scam.

The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed – it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardise education, but to personalise it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.

These words from internationally acclaimed British educator Ken Robinson sum up perfectly what is missing from mainstream industrial schooling. In his book _The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything_ (Penguin 2010), he outlined ways people can recover from the damage done by factory-based, standardised industrial schooling models.

Nothing has changed in “the system” since its early colonial beginnings in Australia, and the focus is still on conforming to a rigid curriculum, timetable, competitive assessment and behavioural compliance, top down rules and regulations. For students, teachers, principals and families this is not only constricting, it is completely irrelevant to their experience of the wider world.

So what we need is to go back to square one and reclaim local accountability for how teaching and learning happens. Students need to be valued for who they are as individuals, as well as learning how to be constructive and respectful citizens, who accept difference and diversity in all its richness. And learning needs to be freed from the NAPLAN/HSC competitive stranglehold of competition and hierarchies that crush each person’s individuality, and their ability to contribute to civil society (because they’re too busy cramming for the next “test”).

The missing element here is participation in civil society, as representatives of “the voice of the people”. Instead of trolling about on social media all day and night, whingeing about “others”, we need to rediscover the responsibility we all share for shaping our world. Join the local P&C at your school. Meet your local councillors and state and federal MPs. Talk to them about what’s happening in your community, and what can be done to improve the chances of young people, migrants and refugees, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and those looking to retrain to update their skills for the new world of work.

The paradigm of care works if you work it.

This is part three of a six-part series - Replacing neoliberal entrapment with a paradigm of care

Read the other articles in this series:

https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/hoaxes-that-gush-for-winners-and-trickle-down-for-losers/

https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/x-raying-the-architecture-of-empire-and-removing-some-tumours/