An Excess of Academia

Sir: It was interesting to read Barry Spurr’s article in the September Quadrant, “Reclaiming the Teaching Profession”. I read it from the viewpoint of another profession, in my case, engineering.

Engineering is an example of the unwarranted influence of academia on many vocations. As one person remarked, “it is as if we handed foreign policy over to ammunition manufacturers”.

Society appears to have handed academics the role of gatekeepers, without recognising the innate conflict of interest. Perhaps the most highly regarded profession of all, surgery, is one of the last hold-outs. To become a surgeon you go through an apprenticeship process and are finally accepted by a guild of colleagues who set the standards.

The apprenticeship/guild model worked for hundreds of years. It still works now in Switzerland and other Central European countries. The result shows up in OECD statistics. Switzerland has perhaps the lowest level of youth unemployment in the world, and at the same time one of the lowest levels of university education in the same demographic.

Now that skills shortages in various trades are showing up, there is a growing recognition at government level of the need for more apprentice-type training, but almost no practical result.

It is necessary to recognise that many people are ready to enter the workforce from around fifteen years of age. On the other hand, there is immense pressure from teachers and parents to get children into university.

One suggestion is to cease federal taxpayer funding of vocation-oriented university courses. Instead, the funding could come from the future employers, such as education departments in the case of future teachers, or from professional societies, such as the AMA in the case of medical doctors. Obviously there would be a case for federal taxpayer funding of the professional bodies. The professional societies would be responsible for student selection, and for final recognition of capability.

It would be good to get Mr Spurr’s opinion of an apprenticeship approach to teacher training. Future teachers could be assigned to a school at the beginning of their training. They could be active at the school in many roles, assisting the teachers and other staff. For the academic part of teacher training they could do university subjects, part-time or as short courses. Their final certification would be by a panel of experienced teachers. This would eliminate the personal tragedy of future teachers being recruited by academics, spending three or four years of their lives to finally find that they don’t fit in to the actual practice of full-time teaching.

It is time to uncouple universities from vocational training in every area.

Richard Hill
via email

Hal Colebatch

Sir: The recent tributes carried in Quadrant’s pages to the late Hal Colebatch (October and November 2019) were highly deserved. As a poet, Colebatch commanded the art in its various modulations, from high formalism—rhyming quatrains and couplets, sonnets, and so on—to the rich variegations of modernist vers libre and variations on imagism, always delivered with a beautiful lyrical tone, especially where the natural world was concerned. His technical range is not matched by many other of our contemporary poets.

While he was a poet of deep sensitivity concerning the human condition, he was also capable of brilliant and acidulous satire when provoked by the mindless ideological and nihilistic crassness of the contemporary literary and political worlds. He was never short of material.

Colebatch deserves a major biographical study and a critical overview of his many literary achievements. He was a polymath, having written major works in fields as diverse as poetry, history, biography, science fiction and fantasy, and beyond. Very few modern Australian writers have a similar profile. Such a bio-literary study would be an ideal project for a PhD student.

However, given what appears to this outsider to academia to be the ruinous state of the humanities in Australian universities, such a suggestion would probably be the kiss of death for any candidate who suggested it. After all, Colebatch was an intellectual non-conformist and the contemporary university appears very much to be increasingly shackled in epistemological chains.

But I don’t think I am the only one who hopes that a liberal and humane mind might still emerge, beyond the wreckage of the university, to take on such a culturally and morally worthwhile project.

Rod Moran
Yanchep, WA

Richard Rodgers

Sir: I enjoyed William D. Rubinstein’s piece in the November Quadrant, in which Richard Rodgers was well appreciated. However, his music used on the television documentary Victory at Sea was nothing less than devine edification. As a sixteen-year-old, the first LP I purchased was Victory at Sea. “Under the Southern Cross” still brings me to tears of joy. The man was truly gifted and it showed in how popular the series was when we first got television in Australia. I still play it on the internet. Check it out, please. 

Bruce D. Scott
via email

“Be My Saturday Girl”

Sir: William D. Rubinstein notes the lack of Australian songs in the tradition of the “Great American Song Book”. I would like to suggest that there has been at least one.

“Be My Saturday Girl” is a lovely song that was often played on light music programs on radio and television in the 1960s. I remember Neil Williams singing it on ABC television, accompanied by Eric Jupp and his orchestra. My memory is of a lilting waltz, but the only recording I can find on YouTube, by Johnny O’Connor, is in a jazzy four-four arrangement.

The song was part of the Australian musical Lola Montez (1958), words by Peter Benjamin and music by Peter Stannard (both Australians). I don’t know the song’s context in the show, but its chaste, light-hearted plea doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that would have moved the heart of the worldly eponymous heroine.

George Thomas
Lara, Vic