One World? One Culture?
One Education?

Opening address by Professor
Alice Tay, President, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, to
International Student Advisers Network of Australia (ISANA) Conference
"Beyond 2000, Renewing the Vision", Canberra, November 1998

Introduction

I am very pleased
to have been asked to open the 9th Conference of the International Student
Advisers Network of Australia (ISANA). I am pleased to welcome those who
come from abroad, to exchange ideas and thoughts with a variety of people
and across a range of disciplines and institutions.

However, at the outset,
I must confess to philosophical problems with the internationalising of
education that has occurred so rapidly in recent times. It is not possible
to read about ‘education’ without it being prefaced by ‘internationalisation’
and ‘globilisation’. These terms are, of course, fundamentally
economic in their character and thus they transform "education"
from a pursuit and a passion into a commodity. Education is now something
that we sell on a competitive world market – just as our primary
producers compete to sell cattle, wool, grain and coal.

The internationalising
of higher education will continue
to have far reaching consequences for universities in Australia beyond
2000. Cut-throat global competition is predicted, involving private investors
and companies as well as universities. Big money is involved. Trade in
knowledge and skills will grow exponentially as the pressure on governments
to create ‘high skill’ societies continues to intensify. As
business becomes global, so the advantages – indeed necessity –
of international qualifications will increase.

We in Australia are
already at the forefront of this trade. Just a few weeks ago a British
University report on "The Internationalisation of Higher Education"
rated Australia as a market leader in the international education industry.
It is true that Australian Universities have been extremely successful
in promoting prestigious but portable qualifications. Obviously others
have different views, however, I must say that I feel uncomfortable in
the role of a ‘salesperson’ for education. For me, education
is not about selling, it is about communicating.

The challenge, in
today’s globilised marketplace, is to hold firm to a conception of
education and learning that does not let itself be reduced merely to the
nature of a commodity to be exchanged. Education offers us so much more
than merely ‘qualifications’. The students that come from abroad
to study in our universities can add richness and depth to our institutions
and to us as individuals. This exchange of ideas and experiences is a
central part of a broad and lasting education.

We live in an increasingly
interdependent and interconnected world. Both economic and cultural life
are becoming more global as they are dominated by global market values.
Even in my own lifetime I have seen the erasure of distinct geographical
diversity and cultural variations in the process of the creation of a
common ‘McWorld’ of consumerist culture that sacrifices difference.
We have to find a better way to find common ground while still retaining
diverse, valuable cultural achievements.

I’d like to
take this opportunity to talk about the notion of culture and its relationship
with education. These are topics that speakers and workshops will continue
to touch on throughout this conference as they lay at the heart of ISANA’s
role and the challenges the industry will face beyond 2000.

Nationalism and
Culture

One of the challenges
facing Australia at present is the repair of damage done to our regional
reputation by recent eruptions of racism and nationalism. In recent years
the Hanson platform was more widely reported throughout the Asia Pacific
than any other issue in Australian politics. The impact of this has been
felt in investment, tourism and to some extent the student market.

To overcome the negative
perceptions of Australia generated by extreme ‘nationalist’
elements we must develop a more complete picture of ‘our’ culture.
A culture rich in contrasting values; one that recognises the full range
of human potentialities; one in which each diverse human gift will find
a fitting place.

"A nation"
says the nineteenth-century quip, "is a group of persons united by
a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbours."
The world has suffered much in the last hundred years from the elevation
of such nationalism. Nationalism has been many-faced and many-faceted.
Its most recent reemergence in Australia has been culturally and morally
restrictive, deadening our sensibilities to others.

To this end our cultural
reevaluation is not just a PR exercise. It is a necessary step in our
moral growth and cultural development. It should allow us to weave a less
arbitrary social fabric. And in the context of international education
it should assist us to maximise our experiences of cultural exchange,
cross cultural communication and cultural identity. Deepening our understanding
and reawakening our sensibilities to others.

The moral sentiment
we need to draw upon is that described by the philosopher David Hume as
sympathy - not sympathy as compassion, as feeling sorry for someone, but
sympathy as recognising that other people are ourselves once more, that
they suffer as we suffer, bleed as we bleed, yearn as we yearn.

In the twentieth
century that principle has moved to the centre of moral thought and discussion
throughout the world and in this lies our advance - perhaps our only significant
advance on past generations. It is, after all, taken for granted at a
forum like this.

But as we have seen,
there are still powerful forces at work against this recognition - fear,
insecurity, political and material self-seeking, the lust for power over
others and - perhaps as a product of all of them - ideological self-seeking
nationalism.

Moral understanding
is the key to confronting and overcoming aggressive nationalism. Culture
as an enterprise of the spirit seems to me to have been intimately connected,
throughout the ages, with such moral understanding. With recognising others
as ourselves once more and respecting their needs, wants and personality,
their dignity as human beings.

One Cultue? One
Education?

Culture is not, as
it is often taken to be, a random, accidental collection of arts and accomplishments.
It is not - despite much opinion to the contrary - the expression of a
wholly distinct national genius, though different nations cultivate different
talents. Culture above all is not bounded by race and place, incommunicable
to those who do not share your experiences. On the contrary, as Eugene
Kamenka has put it:

Culture rests on
the motto that nothing human is alien to me; it thrives on admiration
for and emulation of, the best that has been thought and said, felt and
done, anywhere. It finds that in Europe and in Asia, in Israel and in
Babylon. Culture promotes intellectual development and moral understanding,
it enriches lives and minds, through knowledge, criticism, imagination
and sensibility. It judges with compassion but also with precision. It
recognises complexity without losing a sense of order and direction; it
grasps the reality, power and intensity of evil and irrationality without
helplessly surrendering before them, or denying that they are properly
called evil or irrational.

Culture thrives not
on the joyful but passive surrender to nature, or the "people"
or the sense of nationhood, but on asphalt and overcrowding, on creative
tensions between suffering and hope, pride and despair, anxiety and ambition,
nationalism and internationalism; it rests, like revolution, on reality-centred
but unsatisfied longings, on a delicate balance between denial and affirmation,
criticism of, and respect for, the traditions and society in which the
cultured person lives.

The contexts and
conditions of culture are neither easily characterised nor capable themselves,
of guaranteeing or even producing culture itself. It appears in the most
surprising and unexpected times and places as we see the conditions that
helped to produce it, for the most part, only with hindsight. For culture
is not only firmly international in its nature and effects, it makes people
and peoples "transcend" themselves and their seemingly narrow,
time-and-space-bound capacities. Culture draws the, or is constituted
by their being drawn, into a continuing world-wide republic of art and
letters, knowledge and imagination; it gives them a universal, both cosmic
and human, dimension that transcends, without denying, both their historical
period and their geographical place.

Culture, in the words
of Matthew Arnold is "a stream of fresh and free thought upon our
stock notions and habits." It was a critical attachment to the abiding
forms of human achievement, to be found in the past as in the present,
in Japan, India, Greece and China as in France, Germany and England; it
was the finding of a way of life as contrasted with the mere acquisition
of a number of arts and accomplishments. It meant shaping ourselves, allowing
culture and cultural heroes, classical works and periods, profound thought
and what Arnold called "words of wisdom" to transform our desires
and our capabilities.

It stood for a morality
that was the very opposite of "expressing oneself," identifying
oneself with one’s "roots and one’s nation." "Culture"
was not one culture to be set up against "working class culture"
or "Asian and Islamic culture" or "twentieth century culture"
as merely an alternative form, but a universal and fundamental criticism
of all these "cultures" and an attempt to find what may be of
value in them.

Henry James once
said that we care what happens to people only in proportion as we know
what people are. I believe that education, and international education
in particular, is the key to unlocking the door of understanding into
the lives of others.

As someone who has
spent most of their career in the monastic cells of academic institutions,
education is a subject close to my heart. The philosophy of education
I support is quite simple. For me, education is not about moralising,
telling people what is good for them. It is not about indoctrination;
trying to convince others to think as I do. And it is not about providing
simplistic formulae, to suggest that things can be done without pain and
struggle, discipline and even sacrifice.

Education is grounded
in the gathering of knowledge, facts and information, rules and processes,
about the world around us and how it works. However, it is more broadly
a process of growth which takes an individual, a community, or an organisation
on a journey of understanding, intellectual development and considered
action.

Education prepares
us to make decent and proper choices. It enables us to experiment, to
innovate, to create and to change our lives and the lives of those who
come within our sphere of responsibility.

This philosophy of
education recognises the importance of experiences guiding our actions.
The end result, and chief goal, of education is that we become more effective
members of our community in whatever we are doing. It broadens our sensibilities
and deepens our understanding of the privileges and responsibilities of
being human.

Conclusion

Events of recent
years have shown how closely linked the nations of this region are: politically,
economically and socially.

In these times of
rapid globalisation, international education has the potential to play
a unique and significant role in deepening our understanding, our cultural
development and our sense of responsibility to each other. The globalisation
of society will bring about a revolution in the way we live, work and
learn.

In education and
training this revolution will necessitate greater openness and creativity
in schools, new approaches and methodologies in universities and new ways
of providing training and skills updating in the international workplace.
In addition it will bring about new challenges, as traditional geographical
boundaries disappear, there will be an even greater need for understanding
and cooperation.

In this, the fiftieth
year of the Universal Declaration Human Rights, self-reflection and self-criticism
are of the essence. The events of recent years are testimony to a harsh
reality. Intolerance, historical hatreds and cultural chauvinism have
resurfaced.

There has been a
world-wide decline in respect for the concept of culture I have presented
today. I believe it has been accompanied by a decline in the civic virtues,
intelligence, amenity, tolerance, acceptance. There is a conscious or
unconscious manifestation of disgust with society and with each other.
The transcendence of this disgust is only possible through education and
through the renewal of culture as an enterprise of the spirit. This is
a challenge confronting humanity as a whole.

How we rise to this
challenge, how we respond to a time of such severe turbulence is critical
to our global future. It is a time to accept responsibility. From this
point onward, in what we say, or more importantly, in what we do, we make
a statement about ourselves as a people. We make a statement about what
it will mean to be human in the twenty-first century.

In closing I would
like to remind you of a saying taught to many Chinese children when they
are very young. "All people with the four seas are brothers and sisters."
Whether this meant the Middle Kingdom or the Whole Kingdom of Humankind
in my own childhood, there is no doubt that today it means only one thing
– the whole of humanity. This should be the starting point of our
education at the dawn of the twenty first century.

Last
updated 1 December 2001