And to encourage more people to take on science, technology, engineering and maths degrees, Labor would forgo the student debt for 20,000 award degrees a year for five years.
It would also provide 25,000 teaching scholarships - worth $15,000 each - over five years to science graduates.
- Emma Griffiths, ABC News, 15th May 2015
There was a series of comments from the floor of the House of Representatives last week that I found both encouraging and yet at the same time, deeply disappointing. One of the absolutely brilliant things about being Opposition Leader is that you can write cheques on the Bank of The Future that you'll never worrying about being cashed. Promise the world if you like, because the need to make good on those promises is nil.
Bill Shorten's master plan is to forgive the HECS debt of 100,000 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) students in the hope that they'll be encouraged to continue in their studies and this will then lead to the innovations of the future which will boost productivity and economic growth of the twenty-first century.
Part of me thinks that this is excellent policy. I think that it's pretty obvious by the sheer numbers of Law, Journalism and Business graduates that science education has to some degree, withered on the vine. Granted that society tends to reward lawyers and financial controllers (especially in the finance sector) with very handsome salaries for not a lot more than shifting the great pile of money in the economy from one place to another and then arguing over the associated property rights. The people who do real innovation, who are curious and invent processes and technologies, need to be rewarded better and there needs to be more of an encouragement at the front end to make people think about going into these sorts of areas.
The other side of the coin though, is that this kind of thinking that demands that students go into university courses with the express purpose of eventually producing definable economic outcomes, I think is simply terrible.
To look at universities as the places where invention happens and marketable widgets and gadgets are produced as the fruit of the tree, is to miss entirely what the tree is for. If you consider the trunk of the university tree to be the place where the most basic and fundamental science research is done, knowing beforehand that it is never going to produce any tangible fruit, then your outlook of the whole tree is going to be very different. I like to think about concepts like quantum mechanics, relavitity and basic understanding of how electrons and the atom works and consider that by themselves they're all pretty esoteric and don't have obvious applications.
I also think about how the United States government threw twenty billion dollars towards landing twelve clowns on the moon, and have had discussions with people in the past about how it wasn't a colossal waste of time, money and effort. Yet when people look down at their I devices and they're able to tell them where they are on a map in real time, they're often totally unaware that it takes quantum mechanics, relavitity and more than a basic understanding of how electrons and the atom works to make it all possible. Even the technology to make WiFi make work; which people like to complain about because it's sooooo slow, didn't really have an obvious application when it was being tossed about by a bunch of university students.
There's another issue which gives me the irrits here and that has to do with the discriminatory nature of which kinds of university student's fees are to be forgiven. Again, this seems to based on the assumption that universities are places where society pumps out specific economic units of labour to be plugged into the giant productivity machine at some point in the future. I find this to be very shortsighted indeed.
Think of Aristotle. Now I bet you're wondering why I'm starting with a Greek philosopher of all people but here me out. Aristotle gave us at least an elementary framework upon which to think about how logic works. Jump forwards many many centuries and Gottlob Frege gave us propositional calculus, which builds on both mathematics and philosophy and from that we get the first programmable computer languages. It's so fundamental to the operation of computers, which are in everything, that almost literally no-one gives it a second thought.
Pioneers like Simone de Beavior and Mary Wollstonecraft remind us that women's rights are pretty important. When you're talking about half the population, then all sorts of issues start to come into play and this includes how power is used, gender pay gaps, even how organisations might be improved internally with respect to equality and even the performance of organisations and firms themselves.
There was a series of comments from the floor of the House of Representatives last week that I found both encouraging and yet at the same time, deeply disappointing. One of the absolutely brilliant things about being Opposition Leader is that you can write cheques on the Bank of The Future that you'll never worrying about being cashed. Promise the world if you like, because the need to make good on those promises is nil.
Bill Shorten's master plan is to forgive the HECS debt of 100,000 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) students in the hope that they'll be encouraged to continue in their studies and this will then lead to the innovations of the future which will boost productivity and economic growth of the twenty-first century.
Part of me thinks that this is excellent policy. I think that it's pretty obvious by the sheer numbers of Law, Journalism and Business graduates that science education has to some degree, withered on the vine. Granted that society tends to reward lawyers and financial controllers (especially in the finance sector) with very handsome salaries for not a lot more than shifting the great pile of money in the economy from one place to another and then arguing over the associated property rights. The people who do real innovation, who are curious and invent processes and technologies, need to be rewarded better and there needs to be more of an encouragement at the front end to make people think about going into these sorts of areas.
The other side of the coin though, is that this kind of thinking that demands that students go into university courses with the express purpose of eventually producing definable economic outcomes, I think is simply terrible.
To look at universities as the places where invention happens and marketable widgets and gadgets are produced as the fruit of the tree, is to miss entirely what the tree is for. If you consider the trunk of the university tree to be the place where the most basic and fundamental science research is done, knowing beforehand that it is never going to produce any tangible fruit, then your outlook of the whole tree is going to be very different. I like to think about concepts like quantum mechanics, relavitity and basic understanding of how electrons and the atom works and consider that by themselves they're all pretty esoteric and don't have obvious applications. I also think about how the United States government threw twenty billion dollars towards landing twelve clowns on the moon, and have had discussions with people in the past about how it wasn't a colossal waste of time, money and effort. Yet when people look down at their I devices and they're able to tell them where they are on a map in real time, they're often totally unaware that it takes quantum mechanics, relavitity and more than a basic understanding of how electrons and the atom works to make it all possible. Even the technology to make WiFi make work; which people like to complain about because it's sooooo slow, didn't really have an obvious application when it was being tossed about by a bunch of university students.
There's another issue which gives me the irrits here and that has to do with the discriminatory nature of which kinds of university student's fees are to be forgiven. Again, this seems to based on the assumption that universities are places where society pumps out specific economic units of labour to be plugged into the giant productivity machine at some point in the future. I find this to be very shortsighted indeed.
Think of Aristotle. Now I bet you're wondering why I'm starting with a Greek philosopher of all people but here me out. Aristotle gave us at least an elementary framework upon which to think about how logic works. Jump forwards many many centuries and Gottlob Frage gave us propositional calculus, which builds on both mathematics and philosophy and from that we get the first programmable computer languages. It's so fundamental to the operation of computers, which are in everything, that almost literally no-one gives it a second thought.
Pioneers like Simone de Beavior and Mary Wollstonecraft remind us that women's rights are pretty important. When you're talking about half the population, then all sorts of issues start to come into play and this includes how power is used, gender pay gaps, even how organisations might be improved internally with respect to equality and even the performance of organisations and firms themselves. We're only just now beginning to look into empirical studies into the profitability of firms run by women and it appears as though because of gender differences, and how they're able to manager staff to get the best out of them,that there are definitive and measurable advantages to having women in management.
The alchemists brought us the necessary tools with which to perform chemistry; astrology gave us the maps and the discipline to look towards the heavens and perform proper astronomy. Astronomy which is nominally useless to the world of business and finance, through the work of people like Kepler, Galileo and Newton, gave us calculus and all sorts of motion studies; which form the basis of a whole host of sciences, including the very mechanics needed to place satellites into space.
William James pioneered thinking into that area of philosophy known as radical and radical empiricism. He was concerned which the epistemological problem of truth and upon what basis things can and can't be known. Now whilst that in itself sounds like it can't have any possible application to the world of business, it is from this that we derive out notions of the "cash value" of things. Economists might baulk at such an idea now but in a world of fifty or sixty years time when resources are scarce, questions of value might need to include more than just the cold raw forces of supply and demand. How do you allocate who is to receive limited resources; especially when they are controversial and the subject of contentions, like organ donations? What are the associated ethical questions which arise? These questions permeate right through the business world; especialy when it comes to a whole host of property rights.
Economics which seems to dominate the news, is itself (despite what economists might say) a fuzzy sort of thing which delves into the human psyche. When you're looking at questions en masse of human behaviour, which is hardly and exact science, then formulating ideas to describe what is, is a difficult task and often filled with disagreement.
I can look to the whole panoply of university studies and say that what is and what might be useful is mostly unknowable. Although Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics might have the most obvious and immediate pay off, I don't think that it necessarily follows that they have the biggest pay off. I would rather fund university studies across a kaleidoscope of disciplines and fields because by doing so, ideas cross pollinate and do not remain static. When building the autonomous machines of the future, it might be necessary to program them to ask philosophical questions of the nature of their own being, for the reasons of self-preservation and the protection of the public at large. Medicine is already asking questions which relate to the world of electronics, nuclear chemistry and physics. Everyone needs journalists and writers to communicate ideas and we will certainly always need people to ask ethical questions to keep unscrupulousness and selfish destruction in check.
I think that Shorten would be better off to announce a plan to increase funding and access to all university faculties rather than a few because the benefits apart from the improvement of ideas, is the encouragement of people going to university; from a selfish perspective there's an even stronger reason for doing this. I don't want to live in a society which contains a few highly educated and specialised boffins but lots and lots of chronically stupid people.
Then we read this piece of maleficence:
Kate Carnell from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry said the idea was fine but that the details were missing.
"We need to have more teachers and students in the maths and science space. The problem is we have to pay for it," she said.
"I think Bill Shorten's comments that he was going to write-off the HECS debt of 100,000 Australians was interesting, but no idea of paying for it, no idea of which 100,000.
- Emma Griffiths, ABC News, 15th May 2015
I completely understand that as someone from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Kate Carnell needs to fight for the wishes of the members. It should be said though that the wishes of the members of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry are profits. The problem as she puts it is that we have to pay for educating people and presumably, the members of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry would prefer not to, as paying for anything, even if there is an obvious benefit, cuts immediate profits of firms.
It's worth noting though that this same Kate Carnell graduated with a Bachelor of Pharmacy from the University of Queensland in 1976 at zero cost to her. Who paid for that? The taxpayer of course. Do I begrudge the fact? No.
There's a far far bigger problem than merely who has to pay for someone's education and that is, who has to pay when someone isn't educated? Let's assume for a second that someone (and why not pick someone from the poorest suburb in Sydney, Tregear), couldn't afford to go to university. Already the university fees act as a barrier to entry. Let's further suppose that this particular person was gifted in primary school but because they went to a less well funded high school, never saw their full potential.
What if that person, by virtue of their difficult upbringing, had learned to think differently about the world; in a way which might have seen the development of a cure for cancer, or some new technology that will never be realised because they never went to university. How many brains and bright kids, do we deny the opportunity to go to university and with it, the chance to develop something truly amazing? We can't know the answer to that because the system as it stands already throws them on the economic scrap heap.
What are the outcomes to this? Well it's pretty obvious. If you compare Australia, which is a land rich in natural resources to Germany which is a European nation which has twice been ravaged by war, then maybe Kate Carnell can explain why Australia's biggest export is dirt (albeit special kinds of dirt that magically comes back to us in the form of steel, cars, and other machinery and plant, and why a nation like Germany exports scientific equipment, makes brilliant heavy machinery, and has three big luxury automotive groups, when Australia won't even be able to produce a car at all in three years?
"We've golden soil and wealth for toil" should not in my opinion have been a mission statement.
Who's going to pay for sending people to university? This is the wrong question. University education in Germany is free*. The question should be: Who ends up paying if we don't send people to university? We all do.
*http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article4213550.ece
All German universities will be free of charge when term starts next week after fees were abandoned in Lower Saxony, the last of seven states to charge.
- The Times, 22nd Sep 2014
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