by Alex M.
In another
attempt at being seen to be doing something about the decimation of
manufacturing in Geelong with its consequent job losses, the Education Minister
Christopher Pyne announced that the city would be the site for a pilot program.
The program, based on a New York
educational initiative sponsored by I.B.M. amongst others, is predicated on
greater involvement of corporations in setting curricula.
At first
glance there are two obvious ways that this initiative is bound to give rise to
cynicism and concern.
The first is
that like a number of announcements coming from Federal and State MPs, assorted
Ministers and local political identities about trying to help troubled Geelong,
it is a band-aid solution. There is little or no consultation with the people
of Geelong, a substantial number of who are workers who have lost their jobs or
are about to.
No, what has
tended to happen, for example, is that a suggestion and sometimes even a decision is made to
re-locate a government department making Geelong the headquarters of such and
such a bureaucracy. Some jobs are created, some opportunities are there for
local people to find employment, but for the majority of workers employed by
the likes of Ford, Shell, Alcoa and QANTAS at Avalon they are not going to get
work in public service or administrative jobs; they usually don’t have the
experience or skill sets.
It is clear
that there is little to no long term planning or vision that informs such suggestions
and/or decisions. Band-aid solutions and superficial tidying up after
corporations cut and run is the lot of bourgeois politicians. After all,
businesses must be free to go where profits can be maximised.
Local people
are quite sceptical about the approaches by the mainstream political parties to
the problems facing Geelong, particularly in the run-up to Victorian state
elections in November.
Geelong
Region Local Learning and Employment Network chief Anne-Marie Ryan addressing
the Coalition and state Labor support for relocating the Victorian WorkCover
Authority's head office to Geelong, (which supposedly will bring 550 jobs to
the city) said: ‘I wonder whether any of that is the answer to our issues. It
just kind of feels that there's stuff coming from everywhere, but it's very
prescriptive.
‘Politics
aside, I think there's a real need for some kind of bipartisanship around some
of these issues, rather than people competing and upping each other on what
they can throw at us.
‘The
workers themselves don't see that the new things that are coming in are for
them.
‘They
actually think its spin because their actual experience of what it is like in
the community at the moment is that they've just been cut loose.’
Unemployment
in Geelong is running at 9.5% according to September ABS figures, with 12,000
out of a job and seeking employment. Anne-Marie Ryan believes that this underestimates
the real situation with many people under-employed.
Even
the official figures put in perspective how large the problem is in the region
and how inadequate the responses have been including Pyne’s trumpeting of a new
secondary level education pilot program to be based in Geelong. How many
workers will this program give jobs to? Remarkably few it would be safe to say.
P-Tech program in
Geelong: opportunism and neoliberal ideology combined
Which
leads to the second reason for feeling cynical and concerned about the latest
announcement from Education Minister Pyne regarding what is called in the US
the ‘Pathways to Technology Early College High School’ program (P-Tech).
The
Federal Government, in partnership with the Victorian Department of Education,
has allocated $500,000 in seed money to set up a P-Tech type program in
Geelong. Under the cover of being seen to be doing something for a city and
region which is doing it tough, opportunists like Pyne and Tony Abbott can
point to the P-Tech pilot program as proof of their commitment to the city and its
future workers.
Abbott
paid a visit to the original P-Tech site in a Brooklyn, New York school in June
this year after hearing about it through President Obama’s touting of the
school program two years ago. Abbott met the school’s principal Rashid Davis. Davis defends the program
by asserting that it wasn’t ‘turning over teaching and learning to industry’.
He maintains that despite the involvement of I.B.M. and 65 manufacturing,
telecommunications, health and financial companies involved in P-Tech schools
across New York, Illinois and Connecticut, the program prepares ‘our students
to be the best citizens that they can be so that they have viable options.’
However,
as Davis points out I.B.M. is involved directly in the student’s education:
‘They are direct in providing mentors for students; they are direct in
providing curriculum for a course, called workplace learning, which helps to
prepare students for the mentoring as well as to prepare them for the
internships.’
Pyne
and Abbott, like Davis see nothing wrong with such direct corporate involvement
in education and the influencing of curricula, with Pyne gushing about
‘McDonalds or IBM or BHP Billiton or Iluka or Santos or manufacturing
businesses involved in their local schools’.
Such
schools would necessarily lead to the indoctrination of students with a narrow
corporate-centric worldview. Also, the contraction of education to that of mere
vocational training for sponsoring corporations speaks volumes for how
ideologically driven people like Abbott and Pyne are.
Abbott
and Pyne really don’t care for the lives and education of working class people
in Geelong, the region and the country as a whole. They are opportunists. Like
mainstream politicians of all political persuasions they can see no alternative
to capitalism and many of them are committed to neoliberal ideology.
We
need to advance an independent working class agenda that addresses job
creation, manufacturing and education amongst other things as an integral part
of the struggle for an independent socialist Australia.
No comments:
Post a Comment