By Zala Volcic
Posted Tue 8 October, 2024

As I settle into my new role as a Research Director for the School of Media, Film, and Journalism, I find myself reflecting on the contrast between this position and my previous ones as Director of the Bachelor of Media Communication degree and Director of Teaching Innovation. The transition has been a revelation – it is as if I have been handed a new pair of glasses, inviting me to see the interactions between different institutional layers in a new light. For example, my former roles invited me to develop and practise so-called compassionate pedagogy. This approach understands that education is primarily based on relationships, care, and compassion: most of our students, and colleagues alike, express a deep desire for meaningful connections. And so my teaching here at Monash has been (also) about building a deep sense of connection to each other, since I’ve learned that relationships are the most powerful means to inspire all students to learn.

It’s important to recognise and acknowledge that as educators, we teach our academic expertise – but we do so much more. We mentor, guide, inspire, encourage curiosity and openness… We help to foster rich relationships, a sense of community, compassion, care and motivation. We are at the heart of relationship building. We are at the heart of the student learning experience.

As educators, we teach our academic expertise – but we do so much more. We mentor, guide, inspire, encourage curiosity and openness… We help to foster rich relationships, a sense of community, compassion, care and motivation.

So, I have found myself, of late, referring back to the founding legislation of Monash to remind myself of its main mission – the one laid out at its creation “to provide and maintain a teaching and learning environment of excellent quality offering higher education at an international standard (Monash Statement of Organization, 2009).” There is something comforting about recalling this amid the various meetings, training sessions, research plans, forms, and applications.

In the Monash legal charter is this direct reference to the institution’s educational mission. There is, of course, talk of scholarship, research, and even consultancy, but education comes first – which is as it should be. As someone working and teaching in the humanities tradition in the Arts Faculty, I approach this mission from a particular perspective – one that aligns with the legislation’s stated goal of serving the “the public interest by… promoting critical and free enquiry, informed intellectual discourse and public debate within the University and in the wider society (Monash Statement of Organization, 2009) .”

I write these words with some concern because of a looming anxiety about the fate of a liberal arts education in Australia and beyond. We live in an increasingly specialised and technology-saturated world in which any invocation of humanities reeks of dusty books and impracticality. Tech billionaires – the ones who are gaining increasing control over our information (and communication) environments – are admonishing young people not to delay the path to their first million by dallying in university (think of the Thiel Fellowship, which pays young people to start companies instead of attending university) (NYT, 2014).

At the same time, higher education is increasingly permeated by the online platforms that may one day subsume them. And yet, at the very moment when a liberal arts education is under pressure, it is arguably more relevant than ever. Thanks to the rise of the internet and the growing reach of its interactive platforms, more people than ever before can participate in the public conversation – which means more than ever before, they need to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to do so meaningfully, responsibly, and constructively. This type of preparation relies not simply on technical know-how – but on an engagement with the world of ideas, with the rich human history of art and culture, society, politics and the multifarious ways we have developed for understanding these.

At the very moment when a liberal arts education is under pressure, it is arguably more relevant than ever.

 As automated systems take on a growing range of tasks, humans may find themselves absolved of menial intellectual and technical tasks, but the ability to think about the big questions – about how to guide the machines that help run society, so they serve us and not the other way around – becomes more important than ever.

To respond to these shifts by shrinking away from the arts is to cede the most meaningful thinking to our machines. Such a response would be, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary that inhabits our discourses about technology, fundamentally anti-democratic. The rise of interactive media and, more recently, of artificial intelligence have been greeted as “empowering”, and “democratising” because they provide wider access to tools for creativity and mass communication. Anyone with a smart phone and an internet connection can become a publisher, a videographer, and more. But true empowerment requires more than access to tools. It relies upon the capacity to put these to use in ways that forward the goals of public participation and deliberation. It relies on a deep immersion in the human experience, on imagination; ethics; even courage and passion.

It’s in our classrooms where we need to continue to insist on learning from dialogues about multidisciplinary global challenges. Education must also instil in our students the lust for life, the drive to engage, participate, and be active, with values. Relationship-based education exists to help to produce a more discerning, caring person, attuned to difference, a more self-aware person. Whether our students are going to be physicians, educators, engineers or businessmen, musicians… possessing self-awareness that grounds them in the human condition will make them more effective, and more skilled practitioners of whatever profession they decide for.

The political theorist Wendy Brown (2015) has described the 20th century experiment in providing a liberal arts university education to a much broader segment of the population as, “nothing short of a radical democratic event” in which the population, “was being prepared through education for a life of freedom, understood as both individual sovereignty (choosing and pursuing one’s ends) and participation in collective self-rule (47).”

The current retreat from this democratic ambition of manifested policies that result in the shrinking of arts programs and faculties could not come at a worse time. Increasing economic inequality combined with the concentration of control over our communication infrastructures pose significant threats to our democracy, and to our collective, public spaces. There is a fantasy afoot in the tech world that political decisions may be more effectively managed by automated systems with the ability to process more information than any human or group of humans can meaningfully absorb. It is a fantasy of efficiency and control, but not of democracy. There is no high-tech shortcut to self-governance – it requires an informed and educated populace with an understanding of the irreducible interdependence and the rich history that inform human society. We have created tools that could enrich this society, but we need to cultivate the human knowledge and expertise to use them in the service of freedom and democracy.  Learning happens through engagement with one another and the rich history of human experience, and that allows for the formation of a compassionate, democratic, caring, cohesive society.

References

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos. Princeton University Press.

Monash Statement of Organisation and Functions of the University (2009). Accessible at https://www.monash.edu/legal/foi/statement/01-st

NYT (2014). Forgoing College to Pursue Dreams. Accessible at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/business/the-thiel-fellows-forgoing-college-to-pursue-dreams.html