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Halbbildung: Imperialism and education
by Trevor Maddock

With the current Education Minister, Julia Gillard endorsing the New York system for ranking schools based on student performance, some critical reflection is not just timely but essential. The twentieth century German philosopher, Theodor Adorno described the product of the modern education system as Halbbildung. The word doesn’t have a ready equivalent in English, for the idea of “half-education” does not quite capture its meaning, although it points ominously in the direction in which the current system is going. Adorno might have been alluding to Minister Gillard’s proposals for reforming Australian education when he wrote that, “Isolated reforms alone are inadequate, however necessary they may be. Occasionally these reforms even reinforce the crisis of declining intellectual standards” (Theorie der Halbbildung, p. 93). This last phrase, a “crisis of declining intellectual standards”, more than aptly describes the current condition of education in Australia, while the idea that reforms may reinforce the decline in standards points to a major concern over the Gillard proposals: that they are no more than the latest in a bevy of corporate reforms, each of which has made general education worse than it was before.

The idea of Bildung comes from German enlightenment thought. The Humboldt model of the university, which was realised in the University of Berlin in the first decade of the nineteenth century, was intended to provide the facilities whereby Bildung was achieved. The model drew on the ideals of an all-round education, of critical research after the truth, and of academic freedom, effectively liberating university education from government control. Prior to the Humboldt reforms, German universities comprised four faculties. Three – theology, law and medicine – were higher faculties dedicated to state goals, while the lower faculty, philosophy, uniquely pursued the truth. The Humboldt model dissolved this distinction, with all faculties pursuing the self-enculturation of the individual: Bildung. Even if we do not have a word for it in English, we know that this is the goal, the only legitimate goal, of the liberal idea of education. Humboldt’s reforms represented the flowering of this idea. They had but a short flowering season, however, and bloomed only once.

I began my tertiary education in the 1970s, during the Whitlam era, and I might have been forgiven for thinking that liberal ideas were receiving a second flowering. In South Australia, the Whitlam reforms coincided with Director General of Education, Alby Jones’ famous Freedom and Authority memorandum, which effectively placed curriculum development in the hands of teachers. Wattle Park Teachers’ Centre, an old Teachers College campus, was dedicated to facilitating this process. As I began my studies I was surrounded by other mature-age students, all taking advantage of the financial support to take up tertiary study provided by the Whitlam administration. The College of Advanced Education I attended was largely staffed by academics from the old Wattle Park College, many of whom were hand-picked by the noted Australian author Colin Thiele, the college principal, who was in many ways a Humboldt incarnate. Tutorials of between six and twelve people could go on for two, or two and a half hours, until someone suddenly remembered that they had another class. The pedagogical and the social blended seamlessly. I still have contact with some of my teachers, now long-retired. The Philosophy of Education Department, about six or eight people, offered full three-year programmes in philosophy of education and general philosophy. Students abounded. Then, in 1979, for the first time all education graduates were not automatically employed in teaching. The Education Department introduced interviews and selection criteria for choosing potential teachers. The number of people studying philosophy immediately shrank to a mere handful. Practical knowledge had suddenly become the important qualification.

The Whitlam reforms were part of a revolution sweeping the world in the 1960s, taking all in its wake, including so-called “Communist” China and the Vatican. Nothing was left untouched. Student and worker bodies enthusiastically embraced the new ideas and values. A thousand flowers were allowed to bloom, as long as they weren’t the old floral varieties. This is what a revolution is: a complete change in social standards and perceptions. The liberation of ideas can be a mechanism for achieving such transformations and they were so used throughout the world at this time. The reconstruction phase after World War Two, with its Keynesian welfare principles, was completed. Now a revolutionary change in thinking was needed in order to return the world to the programme of economic development interrupted by all the death and destruction. The Whitlam faction of the Australian Labor Party did its part by quietly severing control of the parliamentary wing from the body of the party. With the OECD supervising, everything was in place for the complete corporate restructuring of the public sector.

If all this sounds like a conspiracy that is because that is exactly what it is, a conspiracy. Corporatism is by its very nature conspiratorial. Corporate administration requires that the leaders of institutions come together to form an accord, where agreement is reached over common goals. Prime Minister Hawke employed this strategy in the 1980s, although the exercise was largely for ideological purposes. Mussolini similarly employed it. Accords of actual significance are generally formed behind closed doors, however. The accord stage is participatory and democratic. When it is completed, the task for the various leaders is to return to their institutions and put mechanisms in place to achieve these goals. The leaders have relative autonomy in how they achieve their aims.

During my time in tertiary education, the sector was under continual review. The reviews had strong corporate involvement, some headed by corporate leaders, and thus the values of the corporation progressively became the values of teacher-education. History and philosophy of education were reduced to one subject in a teaching award and then further reduced to a part of one subject. Finally they disappeared altogether. Of the disciplinary basis of teacher-education, only psychology remained, and not for long. Each review, each effort to make educational system more accountable, more relevant, changed what we understand by education. Testability became the key criterion for all worthwhile knowledge, while tradition, in the form of the philosophical canon, was expunged from the curriculum.

Broadly liberal values have not merely been displaced by corporate ones, however, but the administrative structures aimed at achieving liberal values have been replaced with corporate structures. The collegial structure of Australia’s universities is no more. It was no simple exercise; the liberal academics had to go; indeed, everyone had to go who might resist the new structures and practices. In the institution in which I received my first tertiary education, those over forty-five were offered lucrative inducements to go, and most accepted. More or less brutal strategies were used in repeating this success throughout Australia. The Keating Administration altered academics’ redundancy provisions and in the first year of the Howard Administration these provisions were put into effect and for the first time in Australian history tenured academics were made redundant. Such developments mirror key features of the Nazi education reforms after 1933, where there was a greatly increased emphasis on practical knowledge and almost all senior academics were removed from the universities.

When I was a student in the 1970s tutorials typically ranged in number of from six to twelve people and went for an hour. Questions were set on a previous lecture and weekly readings. Today, the tutorial has largely been replaced by a weekly two-hour seminar, nominally of about twenty-five students; the actual numbers may extend to fifty or more. The students are divided into groups and on any particular week one of these groups gives a presentation to the others. In the seminars I have experienced, the emphasis has typically been on presentation, with much use of audio-visual and computer equipment. They often reflected a desire to entertain; some were even quite theatrical. This emphasis on presentation often masked a meagre content. There was little space for intervention by the tutor or for group discussion. Students were generally bored with the content presented in lectures, readings and seminars, which was intellectually slight and over-used. The academic staff did their best but were over-worked and under-prepared, in comparison with the education I received thirty years before. There are fewer senior academics to support the development of the younger generation, who are left to reinvent the wheel.

This is Halbbildung: it is not half-education but the denial of education. Each step in the dismantling of the system through which I was educated, each step in the process from education to Halbbildung, has been marked by the rhetoric of standards and testing. With the implementation of each review standards plunged further into the depths of Halbbildung. Good luck! Get all the private education for your kiddies that you can. It’s not going to make any difference. A double dose of Halbbildung will never equal an education.

The effort to abandon tradition and convert education into practical training, which has driven the corporate review of education since the 1960s, has a history born in the early decades of the 19th century, as the state came to intervene in the marketplace, thus ending the liberal era of capitalism. Full details of this development are to be found in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (Volume 2). The first modern education act was the Irish Education Act of 1847, passed in a British parliament in order to make economic conditions in Ireland the same as those in Britain, re-educating the Irish people. The goal of British imperialism was to make economic conditions abroad the same as they were in Britain. Ireland was its first victim but not its last. The South Australian Education Act of 1851 was based on the Irish Education Act, as was the 1875 Education Act, where efficiency became a manifest concern (see: Pavla Miller, Long Division: State Schooling in South Australia, Wakefield Press, 1986). In the universities, the philosophical tradition leading up to Hegel was abandoned and philosophy reconfigured as the clarification of language. It came to be seen as a kind of pre-science that needed to exist only as long as it took to hand over all its functions to science proper.

The Gillard proposals amount to no more than the latest attempt to achieve imperialist, corporate goals. The Education Minister maintains that “performance at the higher levels of achievement is static or declining”, but it is the Parliamentary wing of the Australian Labor Party, more than any other association, that has directed the transformation of Australian education over the past four decades. How is a further review of education which again focuses solely on an assessment-lead pedagogy going to bring about any improvement? The Gillard proposals will only make things worse.

The Minister sees egalitarian virtues in the New York system (Webdiary, 26/11/23008), whereas it has been criticised for actually increasing inequalities (see the work of Jennifer Booher-Jennings, much of which is available on the Web). In an environment where funding is determined by improvements in assessment performance, schools are focusing on those students who are just below pass level and directing resources into the intensive training of these people while neglecting other classroom groups, namely, those who will pass the tests anyway and those who are well below pass level. These two groups miss out in the New York system, which is about results. An improvement in results is achieved and that is all that can be said. The so-called “gifted” miss out, as do those disadvantaged minority groups, who predominate in the group of students who are well below pass levels. But none of these arguments will dissuade the Minister. After all, the goals of educational reform have already been set.