A sentimental education

First in the US, now here: the fronts of the neocon culture war passing over the universities seem (surprise!) to be misguided.

An Australian Senate committee has turned up little evidence of left-wing bias in the academy.

The committee found Liberal student organisations were the main agitators for the inquiry and their submissions had a strongly "undergraduate" tone.

"Indeed, the committee believes that the case that Make Australia Fair [the Young Liberal group] makes for the existence of a leftist conspiracy in education faculties and schools borders on the farcical," it said.

Farcical!

This is not surprising. Having worked for a year side-by-side with these polo-shirted young idiots, they lack a coherent sense of their own politics, let alone an ability to coherently criticise (or characterise) someone else's politics.

It may be an optimistic position, but it seems like the mood has passed for this kind of thing. In Australia, that seems to have happened with the removal of John Howard from office. In the US, with the imminent departure of Bush. It has always been wrong to claim that these culture wars were a mere distraction from another, more important branch of the neoliberal-neoconservative family tree. But we now see a version of neoliberalism without the culture war tendencies. A version not without its own campaigns to be waged against neoliberal, managerial approaches to education. (Victoria University is out on strike and picket at this very moment, campaigning against the announced 270 job losses.)

Another barometer of a new mood might be Bryan Cooke's striking article on questions of education, history and politics—"Another Country"—in Traffic journal:

In what follows I would like to show how thinking about some of the different attitudes to the two different kinds of ‘countries’—those from which we are separated by space and those from which we are divided by time—can illuminate some of the assumptions that underlie many debates about the role of history in education. Comparing different modern attitudes to history and travel, I will discuss the question of why we might teach history in the first place, and why we might think it worthwhile to do so. In addition, I will use this comparison to try to show how attempts to ensure that teaching achieves certain outcomes (almost irrespective of what those outcomes are) can ironically end up preventing students from having any real encounter with the past, by imposing a kind of prophylactic between them and the historical material upon which they are supposed to be reflecting. In referring to a ‘real encounter’ I am not naively suggesting that the goal of history should be historical simulations of sufficient verisimilitude to fool a real Cathar or an actual Victorian chimney-sweep. The only necessary (although obviously not sufficient) condition for such an encounter to take place is that any confrontation with historical
materials is not totally subordinated in advance to the function of flattering one of the prevailing ideologies of the age. Such flattery can be directed at any number of contemporary prejudices, the prejudices of the ostensible left as much as the putative right; the vanity of the students as much as the designers of curricula. But history cannot, I argue, be history without entailing a risk—which can never be completely eliminated without turning teaching into ‘management’, as the corporate world uses the term. Such a replacement would itself be an unfortunate step towards the substitution of democratic and humanistic ideals for technocratic/managerial ones; a process that may be going a little too smoothly of its own accord without making
peremptory concessions.

And, while you're there, you can also find a publication of mine in the very same issue: it is concerned with ostalgie and German film. (But who isn't, I ask you?)