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Educational Products

It’s story time. I’m cross-legged on the floor of my local library. I have borrowed Olivia’s three-year-old so that I could get into this exclusive club, membership attained through connections in the small world.

The storyteller is a gigantic woman clad head-to-toe in green, with green tinsel in her hair. She has that over-enunciated, hyperbolic way of talking that kids seem to love. The children — some cautious, some gung-ho — gather at her ebullient forest-green skirt. They range in age from infant to five-ish. The expressions on their faces are ungovernable, a turgid flow of emotions.

My own charge, Maria, set out intrepidly for this excursion.

‘Dr Doyle is taking us to the library,’ her mother explained.

‘Ooooooh!’ said Maria. She beamed up at me, apple-cheeked and ready.

Now, though, she states plainly that this whole scene is scary.

Olivia did warn me. ‘Sometimes Maria doesn’t like to participate,’ she said as we left the house. ‘Sometimes she prefers to just scream over the top of everyone and then leave.’

I could relate.

After a welcome from the tinselled storyteller, the kids get up for a very noisy stomping-around song. Maria flops down, howling.

The children are instructed to become ‘big stomping bears’ and then ‘quiet little bunnies’. When the metamorphosis is complete, the storyteller begins. ‘Does anyone know a song about a frog to start off our story?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ the kids drone in monotone, assuming the position for ‘Galumph Went the Little Green Frog’.

‘I don’t like this sooooong,’ moans the boy next to me, throwing down on the grey carpet like a soldier anticipating fire.

Galumph went the little green frog one day . . .

The child spasms. I didn’t know that children this young had such developed aesthetics. Where do they come from?

The other kids galumph in staggered unison.

‘This is scary,’ Maria repeats.

The storyteller begins the tale of a frog who is desperate to go to the stars. He’s unsatisfied and agitated, this frog, soliciting all kinds of favours from interspecies neighbours in his cosmic quest. Fortunately, he has an epiphany, and realises he is happiest swimming in the stars as they are reflected in the pond of his birth.

Fairytales, myths, and fables have been instruments for shaping children’s imaginations forever. For the adults who write and share these stories, they can become, as Rebecca Solnit observes, ‘shorthand for an aspect of the human condition’ — a yearning for justice or recognition or adventure, disappointment when desire is thwarted or reconfigured. We tell these stories to prepare our children for their adult lives, but we also tell them to understand our realities, to reinforce our ideals, and to perpetuate the order our lives have had. I assess the room: it’s true that these kids are absorbing ideological messages, but something more complex is going on, too. Something in their nerves and blood that can’t be written adequately, or illustrated and read aloud. It’s a chaos of desire in here. A small redhead starts shrieking for no discernible reason. Another girl stands up and points at her, expressionless, like a twin from The Shining. A boy takes off into the latter Dewey Decimals; it’s only a matter of moments before he breaks into the disordered world beyond. This, then, is where the social foundations are laid; here is where the wild are asked to sit and listen.

Maria stamps impatiently, beckoning to the street.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Emile, one of the first books about childhood education, attempted to provide a comprehensive list of methods (from breastfeeding to bushwalking) to avoid the denaturing of children’s wild instincts. For Rousseau, children should learn to think unhindered by adult prejudice. Rousseau would probably have been unhappy with storytime at the library; he would have preferred to take the children to the pond and ask them what they thought the frog was saying.

What Rousseau understood implicitly is that children are important to the kind of adult social world we make. If a society wants to aim to rid the future of discrimination, dissatisfaction, superficiality, and fear, as Rousseau professed to, they need to begin this mission with the education of children. Conversely, if you want to know the dominant values of a moment in history, look at what the children are being taught.

My oldest friend, Lyndal, recently had to dress her six-year-old daughter up for Future Day at her primary school.

‘Future Day?’ I asked, impressed, imagining a classroom full of rockets and holograms — or, more likely, alien overlords and post-apocalyptic zombie children, hungry for brains.

‘They dress up as their future selves,’ Lyndal explained.

Unfortunately, little January was ill-prepared for this task of quotidian imagination. ‘Can I be a hairdresser like you?’ she asked her mother, who no doubt baulked at both the reduction of her complex managerial job and the alarming image of her child brandishing scissors over the heads of classmates.

‘Let’s think of something just for you,’ Lyndal countered.

This was not an easy task. After all, what exactly is it adults do? Not for the first time, I marvelled at Lyndal’s fortitude. We met when we were just eleven, and preceded to misspend our future days cutting class to hang out in the gym change rooms and light toilet paper on fire. Now she was a totally functional adult with a husband, two children, and a fancy job, but she still had to find a way to explain this to her daughter.

Finally, January decided to go as a teacher. Specifically, her own preparatory teacher. This was, after all, the only adult other than her parents and grandparents that she got to see on a regular basis. Lyndal showed me the photo of her, grinning beside her teacher in matching hair and clothes, a tiny single white female. The teacher was smiling in that false way that belies existential discomfort.

‘She only let me take one picture,’ Lyndal admitted.

Toddlers memorise taxonomies of the adult world: the fireman with his hat, the policeman with his truncheon, the nurse with her rosy cheeks and red crosses.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ they are asked, as soon as they have the words to answer. Squint. Remember the taxonomy. Pick the one with the nice smile, the cool outfit, or the gun.

At six, I was good at answering this question. The answer was inevitable, as though I were a beauty-pageant contestant smiling ‘world peace’ before I showed everyone how well I could tap dance. The right answer was precocious, and fit snugly with my parents’ values. The right answer was immediately rewarded. And the question was posed again, and again, its centrality emphasised in formal education from primary through to graduate school. Not having an answer implied a lack of direction, because growing up was about selecting a role and then training to occupy it. A child’s trajectory is supposed to be unfailingly towards adult success.

Getting children well situated in the school system early is a global trend among many of a certain social status. In New York City, you can hire a $300-an-hour playdate coach for your three-year-old, to iron out any social kinks that might hinder their admittance to one of the city’s elite kindergartens. Harder to get into than Harvard, these preschools are said to feed children directly into a bright future. ‘Many of my clients are high achievers who want the same for their offspring,’ a London daycare consultant told the Financial Times. In their playdate training, children are taught to perform sharing acts, and not to unconsciously suggest autism through their gait or inadequate eye contact.

While most parents do not go to such extremes with their children’s preparation for school, almost all agree on the importance of education. But in the twenty-first century, we have lost sight of a universal ideal for good education, and policy in this area has become a political battleground in a war over what the future will look like.

My compulsory schooling ran through the 1980s and 1990s. I graduated high school in the class of 2000, amid Y2K fears and future shock. A first-line millennial, I learned about the world during a period of great epistemological faffery, when what seemed like wild oscillations in education policy were ubiquitous across the Western world.

Though, when I thought about it, I realised: when is education not an ideological frontline? Western school systems hark back to Socratic ideas about the inseparability of education and politics, but the shape of the ideal citizen they are working to produce is subject to deliberation and change.

In 1957, when my Dad was just eight years old and the Russians launched Sputnik 1, Cold War America wanted to know why they had lost this first round in the Space Race. It must be the Russian schools, someone decided. They taught a hard-nosed, maths- and science-heavy curriculum and churned out engineers and fascists. This was the opposite of the so-called progressive agenda in US education, which valued airy-fairy concepts such as creativity and self-esteem. The US government think-tanked: how can we direct the energies of education, from elementary to tertiary, into the service of the military? They sent delegates over to check out Ruski High. Could American teenagers be sent to such a place? Did it align with what it meant to be an American? The United States began a series of educational reforms. Then in the 1970s, wearied by recession, they turned away from them. Education, it was decided, glumly, as the summer of love flipped over into many summers of stagflation, mattered far less than family background in influencing a person’s future. Sure, educational attainment was a boon to any child, but an individual’s success was influenced more by what the parents had achieved economically than by any well-meaning educational strategy. What was the point, then, in teaching foreign languages or advanced physics, or spending too long training teachers?

Test scores fell, moral panic ensued, and by the early 1980s there was backlash. Despite President Regan’s emphasis on school prayer and tuition tax credit, people began to insist that if educational standards were not improved, America ran the risk of being swallowed up in a great tide of mediocrity.

During the same period in Australia, ideas about what children should learn were going in and out of style like root perms. Policy-makers seemed hard-pressed to agree on what education was for. The reports say that the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a change in educational approach from vocational and academic to egalitarian. The reports say that values about the use of knowledge changed. Imagination and creativity came into vogue, and rote learning went out. By the 1990s, there was panic about children who couldn’t spell or construct a sentence. There was panic about a generation of Australian students who didn’t know anything about how ‘their’ country was ‘discovered’, or what the nation’s role was in the two world wars. Reports talked about a ‘root and branch’ approach to narrating the past, and about the importance of phonics and literacy.

What this looked like on the frontline: in the 1980s I spent a lot of time making picture books with cardboard, felt pens, and tape. No one really appeared to mind that I couldn’t spell — or if they did, they didn’t mention it to me — but I remember feeling ashamed of how asymmetrical my love hearts were. I played a lot of educational games in something called the ‘maths task centre’ (a storeroom filled with buckets of puzzles) because my tiny rural primary school had extra funding through something called the ‘disadvantaged schools program’, and a talented teacher who knew a thrifty and effective way to spend it. I received a partial scholarship to an Anglican-run school at ten, and for four years I was no longer subject to policy whims but engaged in a rigorous, well-funded traditional education that included maths, Latin, hockey, and fine arts. I learned what grammar I know in curabitur aliquet ultricies with scenarios involving some kid called Quintus, who was always hanging around in various rooms. Quintus est in curabitur aliquet ultricies; Quintus est in culina.

At private school I was also mildly hazed by rich boys, scolded for sitting with my legs apart (‘You could drive a bus through there,’ said one teacher, visibly repulsed), and sent to detention when caught eating or not wearing my blazer in public. I was judged and scrutinised continually, and I hated it.

Because of this experience, I was not surprised to read a Melbourne Institute report detailing a significant happiness drop between age fifteen and twenty-three in Australia, with the most significant year of misery being fourteen. In North America, 75 per cent of high-school students who answered a 2015 survey by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence responded negatively to the question ‘How are you feeling?’, citing stress and boredom as predominant emotions at school. In the United Kingdom in the same year, only 43 per cent of Year Eight students responded positively to their school experience in an international survey conducted by the Children’s Society, and English schoolchildren were found to be among the unhappiest of fifteen countries, including Ethiopia and Algeria. If adulthood is increasingly defined by isolation, battling through entrenched hierarchies, and being judged on attainment and acculturation, many young people have an educational experience that prepares them for it perfectly.

At thirteen, I moved states geographically and psychologically — from my mother’s to my father’s home. I repeated Medieval but somehow skipped Australian History, though I suspect this was a good thing, as most of my peers had learned a fiction by rote. Well ahead of my classmates, I cruised through my first year back at state school, which afforded me time to get fully ensconced in the way-cool social world of an inner-city art-focused high school. In my third-last year of secondary school, when I was fifteen, it felt as though half the form transferred to the vocational high school, where you studied the ‘entertainment industry’ and smoked ciggies in the canteen.

I took computer studies as a science for the high-school certificate, though in 1999 a lack of computers meant that we spent most of our time looking at a picture of one in a textbook while the teacher drew an algorithm on the board. To this day I don’t know where my spleen is, how to calculate velocity, or when I am splitting which infinitives, though my life does not feel depleted by this lack. The lessons that I do remember from high school were those where the disciplines collided and you found yourself learning modern history in drama class, or reading Brecht and realising that history was the world, not a fine white stream that ran alongside it.

The year I graduated, the curriculum for high-school attainment and scoring changed, and the tertiary sector was on the verge of review. Higher education was increasingly discussed in terms of a return on investment for students and the government. Reforms allowed universities to set their own student fees, in line with a government-determined cap, and increase the level of full-fee-paying students. In the early 2000s, universities competed with one another to attract fee-paying students with promises of glamorous university experiences and career outcomes.

I’ve outlined this potted history, which is small and local, but also common for many people my age, to illustrate how my education was marked and moulded by a market economy in which both it and I were stakes.

In 1929, British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the child should understand ideas and theories ‘here and now in the circumstances of his actual life’. He went on, ‘there is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations’. It seems to me that the way we currently understand education as a pathway to a professional identity, an investment in various futures, is formed as through a misreading of texts such as Whitehead’s. We still want our education to be applied; it is our concept of life that has become impoverished. At Future Day, we chose between the teacher and the hairdresser, knowing full well that it was the same outfit every time.

‘I’m just going to work in a call centre and go to parties for the rest of my life,’ I told my horrified mother when she asked me to address the taxonomy in my final year of high school.

It felt good. I was done with school, with answering questions about who I was and would be. Who I would be was dreamless and free, focused only on survival and pleasure.

Unusually, my long-separated parents formed a united front to pressure me into tertiary education. Dad started going on about how all the best parties were at uni. It was just a thrilling social scene, an unmissable event, a total mindblower.

‘Didn’t you drop out?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, but it was the ’60s. I had more interesting books to read, better things to do with my time.’

At seventeen, I’d never seen an American college, but I had seen a lot of teen movies. I understood the co-dependency and cachet of the sorority. I knew by heart the espresso sophistication of the New York film school, the old-money cocaine orgies in the halls of Connecticut and New England, the passions of varsity sport. I knew that college was a contentious political space that regulated class; that in America, college is where the aspirational age dawns.

But in Australia, we didn’t have that same cultural narrative. And I wasn’t buying Dad’s line. Universities seemed tragically uncool. The uni bars were clogged with awkward-looking weirdos, and all the students I knew were miserable, juggling classes and jobs, and commuting to attend lectures on sprawling suburban campuses. They worked long hours to pay their rent and lost their minds over essay deadlines. Even more, none of the adults in my life could lay out a convincing argument as to what these students were struggling for. Discussions about higher education usually descended into platitudes such as ‘education is important’, ‘get a head start’, and ‘it’s important to keep your options open’. But statistics about underemployed university graduates had been making headlines for a decade. I finished high school just before the ten-year publication anniversary of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, the cult 1991 novel that coined the term ‘McJobs’. I wasn’t interested in these kinds of ‘options’; I wanted independence, and whatever degree of freedom I could eke out.

The insistence that young people move straight into university or full-time work after high school is as much to do with our fear of what the young might do with their spare time as it is with our hopes for their future. Zero-tolerance policing; lockout laws in bars and nightclubs; and media furores over teen gangs, drug use, and delinquency are further evidence of this fear. Young people, with all their angst and energy, should be put to work lest chaos ensue, that’s the adult fantasy. My experience with youth culture — music and art scenes run on enthusiasm and the smell of an oily rag — disposes me against this logic. What young, un- and under-employed people were doing with their time in 2001 in Sydney, a city as fiercely anti-youth then as now, seemed much more important than how it was described by grown-ups. They were creating culture. A look through the history of music and art in many cities (New York, London, Melbourne, Berlin) shows the same cultural genesis repeated many times. Our society glamourises the early twenties as a time for finding oneself — it’s strange, then, how afraid we are of giving young people the time and encouragement to do so, particularly during politically and economically conservative periods.

Eventually, my parents conceded a reprieve. ‘A gap year,’ Mum said, desperately trying to reorder her ambition for me.

Dad bought me an old bakery van and my boyfriend built a fold-out bed-and-storage combination in the back. Annie and I packed it with tins of tomatoes, cans of mosquito repellent, and bottles of Stone’s Ginger Wine. We were off to see the country we had lived in all our lives. We’d pick mangoes when we hit the Top End, and then head back down again for who knows what. Girls! On the road!

It turned out to be a six-month holiday for Annie, who decided to start tertiary study in the next school year, leaving me displaced. When I came back to Sydney, savings depleted and puppy-Cassady in tow, I was hit with how hard it was to be young in that city at the dawn of the millennium. Live music venues across the city had shut their doors. The surveillance and zero-tolerance policies that accompanied the Olympics hung around for a long afterparty, and intensified following the September 11 attacks in New York. In 2001, as the United States adjusted to the George W. Bush presidency, conservative Australian prime minister John Howard won a third term and spent much of his acceptance speech talking about family barbeques, a breeding incentive program for young families called ‘the baby bonus’, and being tough on drugs. He said nothing of the welfare reforms that set the agenda for my day-to-day. I felt as though politics was a force that did not and could not recognise my existence, or that of many of my friends. This sense of exclusion probably defined how I came of age, and persisted in how I saw myself right up to that moment of adult reckoning.

Living below the poverty line, I worked for unemployment benefits doing, among other menial things, maintenance in local parks. After a year of this, university looked pretty good. My mother was thrilled. She remembered her student days as a time of great inspiration and independence, of teachers jumping atop tables to recite modernist poetry, and of a psychology professor cementing the direction of her own adult life when he claimed (dubiously, it has always seemed to me) that ‘psychology is a science without judgement’.

In 1972, when my parents were in their early twenties, progressive politician Gough Whitlam proclaimed that the answer to inequality and mediocrity was to ‘involve the creative energies of our children and our youth in a creative, concerned community’. He made promises that won him the election, and the nation fifteen years of free higher education. ‘It is our basic proposition that the people are entitled to know,’ he cried. ‘It is our basic belief that the people will respond to national needs once they know those needs. It is in education — the needs of our schools — that we will give prime expression to that proposition and that belief.’

These were not the ideals in 2002, when I began my undergraduate degree. There were more than two hundred students clogging the footpath on Harris Street for my first lecture. During my studies I submitted assignments for a pass/fail mark — a cunning workaround, I now realise, that eliminated marking pressure on sessional academics and tried to break recent high-school graduates of their obsession with grades. I couldn’t help but notice how few whole books we read. Everything was in extract, and often delivered with only the most rudimentary context. We subsisted on a diet of fragments, designed for delivery by sessional tutors who are not paid for the hours they spend reading, while student services were cut back. Critics describe this period as the beginning of the culture of competitiveness among academics, leading to lower teaching and research standards, soft marking, and disillusionment.

Nevertheless, I took a lot from my degree. And while I don’t remember the content of that first lecture, somewhere in the throng were a group who became my coterie, and with whom I navigated the next four years with enthusiasm and energy.

‘We developed a critical intimacy,’ my friend Alice remembered when I quizzed her about her memories of that time.

In the eleven years since we completed our first degree together, Alice has attained a PhD in cotutelle with an Ivy League college, and returned to Australia to work as a lecturer at one of the first universities established after the war to meet the needs of the baby boom.

Both Alice and I chose our university largely because of its inner-city location. It was a means to establish our independence; education was a bonus. This attitude inured us, in some sense, to the corporate culture emerging in universities and colleges: institutions now subject to economies of scale, increased enrolments, and high pressures on teaching staff.

‘The university is a set of resources, and the students who get the most out of it are those who use these resources to collaborate,’ Alice observed. It is as true now as when we were students, and it’s a logic that she thinks will become even more entrenched as universities vie for industry support and reputation. Her guess is that within a decade the most expensive seats of learning will be those with the tightest ties to industry, from which a student emerges with a guaranteed future.

A disturbing story recently hit the national news in my country and caused ripples in policy reform that represent another change for education. In it, a door-to-door degree hawker signed an intellectually disabled woman up to diplomas in online business and management. The salesperson promised her a free laptop as an incentive, and coached her on what to say to the call-centre operator during the enrolment confirmation. The woman waited in vain for her laptop, but began to worry when she received a slew of invoices instead. As it turned out, the courses she had been enrolled in were worth $36,000.

Unfortunately, this student had just $200 a week after rent. She had never held a job, but desperately wanted one.

‘I’m not good at reading,’ she told the reporter.

In the newspaper, a brightly coloured diagram mapped the educational racket like a children’s picture book on money laundering. A government grant trickles down to the educational provider and then to the sales reps (allowing for enticements such as the free laptop), and eventually to the student, who repays the original sum to the government, with interest.

Few would argue against the moral corruption of selling this woman a debt she had no way of repaying on the promise of a laptop and a better life. But some would say that this is a local, particularly egregious example of a trend that is happening on a much broader scale. In The End of College, Kevin Carey describes the sheer mass of private colleges in the United States offering ‘inexpensive online courses at large profit margins’, and reports on a congressional investigation that revealed similar practices in luring students into taking out loans to pay for ‘largely worthless courses’.

In Australia, the current-affairs program Four Corners ran a story in 2015 on the use of recruitment agents to attract international students to Australian universities. The recruitment teams could help with adjusting transcripts and could offer internal language tests that were easier than the standard test. They could guarantee offers of enrolment.

The program interviewed academics who reported pressure to pass students lacking sufficient language skills. It described the case of a nursing graduate working in aged care who could not read the label on a medicine bottle. A sessional academic turned whistleblower repeated the line, ‘Education is not an industry. It is not an industry.’

But she’s wrong.

In Australia, education is our third largest export, behind coal and iron ore, but ahead of tourism. In 2015, the Bureau of Statistics reported the total revenue generated from international students living in Australia was $19.2 billion, up $2.2 billion in just one year. In the United Kingdom, The Guardian reported that in 2014 universities generated £72 billion in value on a turnover of £27.3 billion. In both countries, while universities might not commonly run for profit (as they do in the United States), their value as an industry cannot be underestimated.

In his book Whackademia, academic Richard Hil tracks what he describes as the rise of the enterprise university. Since the late 1980s, higher-education facilities have been forced to build their businesses by attracting students with advertising campaigns, elaborate graduation ceremonies, high-tech everything. Universities seduce what Hil calls ‘student-shoppers’ by promising them a flexible educational program and a top job after graduating — but there is often little focus on educational enrichment beyond the skills needed for an entry-level job.

Though Hil’s nostalgic descriptions of traipsing the British halls of his ‘testosterone-charged’ college in ’68 to the dulcet tones of ‘Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and Van Morrison’ make me want to sick up in someone’s acoustic guitar, his critique of the contemporary university is incisive. Optimists such as Carey argue universities are at a threshold moment and hold forth an educational utopia for the future: the new university will be high-tech, democratic, and cheap-to-free. Students will complete courses at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale via responsive, personalised online learning environments. Thirteen-year-olds in Uganda will do advanced chemistry subjects at MIT and grow up to reverse drought. These are indeed exciting prospects. I worry, though, that most visions of the future of education — whether online courses that are universally accessible, regulated, and transparent, or industry-partnered specialty schools providing a near-guarantee of return on investment — are all so closely tied to economic imperatives: they smooth the transition from child to adult worker, leaving little space for personal and intellectual development. Carey’s utopia cannot counter Hil’s charge that universities ‘take it for granted that students want to or should become embedded in a world of enterprise and productivity logic that feeds into a corporatised, capitalist world’. Educational reform over the last century — including, throughout Western democracies, standardised testing, moves to national curriculums, and competitive tertiary entry scores, seem to work on behalf of employers and parent-investors first, allowing them to efficiently read a young person’s future without having to go to the trouble of listening to her. Education, from kindergarten coaching to big-ticket degrees, increasingly relies on the professionalisation of childhood and youth.

If there is an entrenched perception of degrees as essential in a competitive job market, it follows that high marks become important in order to stand out from the pack. Millennial students and those Generation Z pupils who follow them are responding to this with unhealthy levels of competitiveness. A distant cry from the class of ’68, some of today’s students are taking drugs, such as the narcolepsy medication Modafinil, not for recreation but to achieve and succeed. ‘You take it on an empty stomach first thing in the morning and then you work really hard all day,’ a British student dubbed Phoebe told The Guardian. ‘It kills your appetite and then if you go to the gym, you do a really good workout. So you lose weight, nail your exams, and go hard at the gym all at once.’ The workouts and motivation were great, but for Phoebe and the other students, the crook guts and lingering sense of fear were a definite downer. Also, the work they did was compromised, somehow. It had a narrower focus. The essays came thick and fast but they were . . . what’s the word? Shallow.

Lest this seem another report on a baseless moral panic, it is worth noting that in the United States, the use of drugs such as Modafinil and prescription amphetamines such as Adderall has become so widespread that some colleges have issued formal statements: using performance-enhancing drugs constitutes cheating.

Such statements seem at odds with our present mode of engaging with the world, though. Do what it takes to get ahead. Make no excuses. Seize every opportunity. These are the messages of our hyper-competitive culture, and they are predominantly aimed at young people. Phoebe’s description of a day on Modafinil reads like the affirmations that clog my social media newsfeeds. Lose weight! Nail your exams! Go hard at the gym! Succeed! I hear it with hashtags. What happens when you fulfil all these imperatives, become competent and poised for success, and yet it does not come? It’s an increasingly common experience for young adults, and yet, as university-course cohorts continue to swell, we are doing very little to spare each new group from graduating into this inevitable malaise.

‘I remind myself that the things that are frustrating about my job now are not the fault of my students,’ Alice told me, ‘or the fault of the university, but the fault of a broader cultural and economic reality. The way universities are forced to run in order to survive. The way students have to think about their economic prospects as a return on an investment in their studies. This is a global issue. The financialisation of our fucking souls.’

Alice worries that universities, in the midst of a heavy identity crisis, might end up promising the opposite of what they are set up to deliver. Which is not the same as saying that a jobless university graduate has a useless degree — a claim that has dominated the media for the last decade, and denigrates education, subsuming it to a capitalist logic. Despite corporatisation, good teachers still teach in schools everywhere, and engaged students still make opportunities to turn their ideas out into the community. Alice sees the classroom as the last frontier of education: it is still social, relatively unregulated, and can still be radical. If a degree program is not seen exclusively as a ticket to a particular kind of adult future, universities can be spaces where young people discuss and critique what one writer describes beautifully as ‘competing accounts of the good life’; that is, a place to try to nut out what a life well-lived, socially as well as economically productive, and meaningful on an individual and a cultural level, might look like.

‘The strength of universities is still criticality and intellectualism,’ she said. ‘But if you said those words to a focus group, they’d freak out. They are terms that are so old-fashioned, and associated with elitism.’

For Alice, when teaching, the question became, ‘How do I help my students value these things in a way that doesn’t conflict with what the university is promising them?’ She has tasked herself with helping students learn how to be critical of, and flourish within, a culture made of empty promises and continually changing social and vocational roles. It is not an easy brief.

Ultimately, I used the elective system to restructure my degree from the inside. Unlike the international students who need to return home with a bankable skill set, I dumped the more-vocational courses, and, without telling my mother she was right, picked units that looked more like what she had in mind when she pushed me through the gates. I remember one class particularly: a dozen students around a table talking about a book with a gifted teacher. The book, aptly, was Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale.

‘Let’s avoid indulging in moral gossip,’ insisted our teacher. ‘Instead, let’s think for the moment about the revolution.’

I loved these books where lost and naïve young people smacked unknowingly against the political and economic forces of their time, trying to find a way to live beside them. Maybe one day I would write one, I fantasised.

Today, it is even harder than it was in Flaubert’s age to have a conversation about education and adulthood without also considering debt. Degrees are more expensive than ever. In Australia, the latest proposed university fee deregulation has been scrapped, but a partial deregulation for specific courses is still on the table, as are higher student contributions and loan fees to cover the cost of our deferred payment system. Currently enrolled students study without knowing whether their courses will be impacted by these changes. In the United Kingdom, the fee cap was increased in 2014, effectively meaning that many students will emerge with £20,000 more debt than those who graduated four years earlier. North America, a leader in educational business models, has long since declared a ‘student debt emergency’. More money is owed on education than on all the credit cards in the nation combined, and students have an average of more than $30,000 debt when they graduate. In 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that 81 per cent of college-educated millennials in the United States have a source of long-term debt, and 34 per cent of high-income debtors and 54 per cent of all debtors over thirty worried about their ability to repay student loans.

In each of these countries, the reality was incomparable for my parents’ generation. The post-war generation could graduate from higher education with comparably minimal debt, and began their lives with a degree of financial independence that a university-educated twenty-five-year-old today would be privileged to experience.

If we accept the imperative for adult lives to contain houses, cars, and children, it’s easy to see one reason young people are delaying these financial commitments — they don’t want to (or can’t) get in even more debt. If we are looking for answers to how to build a meaningful adult life, debt has a role here, too: it’s impossible to work out what gives value to your life when you are spending a great deal of your time and energy servicing and worrying about debt. Debt in this model is the waithood; it’s what makes the kiddult and the adultescent. It is the economic responsibility for today’s adult: if Rosie riveted, we borrow.

But we are borrowing a sense of forward momentum at the expense of actual security. As economic growth has slowed in most developed countries, young workers without inherited wealth need more time to save for a home, a family, and retirement, yet many also start with a large debt. If welfare and public services continue to be privatised at the rate they have been in the last twenty years, this problem will be compounded. It is not possible for one cohort to disrupt this trajectory. We sledge baby boomers, we lay our punches; the bell tolls, we do it again — but actually, we need to direct our efforts to fighting such a long-term reality. Otherwise, generations that are worse off financially than their parents will become the norm, not the outrage-inducing exception. What we will lose in all this will be a sense of the history of humanity as a progression towards a better life. Despite my petulant insistence on a commitment-free existence when I finished high school, I know now that the person who focuses only on survival is not free.

Writing in The Huffington Post, cultural commentator Amanda Oliver defended her peers against accusations of more millennial angst. The student debt emergency is real and unprecedented, she insisted. In the United States, tuition has risen 1,120 per cent since 1978 and, particularly for young people who were the first in their family to attend university, ‘it is very likely that neither us nor our parents fully understood the lifetime burden we were foisting on ourselves when we took out these loans’. She spoke to more than two hundred people for her research on the subject, and reported that almost one-third enrolled in qualifications in addition to their first degree to increase their employability in a severe economic downturn where even experienced professionals lacked job security. This is sound in theory, but in practice it also means more debt.

The heavyweights in intergenerational sledging are not impressed by any of this. After all, aren’t debtors just bad adults who can’t handle money? Exploring this logic, The Wall Street Journal reported on a study that found only 24 per cent of millennials passed a basic financial literacy test. Unable to let an online quiz lie dormant, I surfed over to the OECD website and scored 4/5 — a win for my team! For me, though, the rising anxiety came not from working out the answers to the questions but the scenarios about invoices to pay, interest to calculate, and investments to make. Here are some maths problems I have worked on that do not make the financial literacy test: if Doyle has a $20,000 student-loan debt accumulating at low interest over a long period, and a $5,000 credit-card debt at high interest over a short term, which one should she make repayments on first? If Employer X owes Doyle $1,000 but probably won’t pay the invoice for twelve weeks, how many weeks will Doyle need to buy groceries on her credit card, and at what point should she apply for a zero-interest balance transfer to equipoise her debt against her savings and give the illusion of control?

Fortunately, I had early debt training. ‘You can’t get blood from a stone,’ I remember my dad saying as he tossed the third eviction notice in the bin and lit a cigarette. Having been a child who hid tenners in hairspray cans, major credit sounds too much like gambling to me. Maybe this is wisdom accrued from a parent’s sins, or maybe it will keep me poor forever. I don’t know. But these days, when I listen to my partner, Serge, on the phone to the debt collectors again, patiently trying to explain how, if they keep calling his main freelance client and bugging them, he is even less likely to get the work he needs to make payment on his debt, I’m pretty sure the stone can bleed.

Serge’s debt breaks my heart. He has missed holidays because he can’t afford them and I can’t afford to carry him. But more than this, he feels utterly paralysed in the face of his own future. He can’t talk to me about next year, let alone next decade, because right now his whole raison d’être looks like this: pay back debt.

It’s a common story, if the case studies in the media are to be believed. Student debt, credit-card debt amassed when unemployed, or loans taken out against the promise of a bright future are wearing young people down. This situation is so common it raises the question: what are we not learning in school? The combination of expensive educations with aspiration as a condition of becoming, easy credit, and precarious employment is potent — it combines to make an adult life for which my generation is not adequately prepared. If the majority want millennials and those who follow to grow up and get on with it, mitigating the flow-on effects of student debt will be an important place to begin. There are lots of different ways to do this, from regulating what a university can promise a student in return for their fees, to indexing repayments to income (as is the case in Australia), and to individual debtor bailouts based on longer-term economic realities. Safeguards that prevent profiteering on educational debt by capping or eliminating interest on existing loans, and preventing the on-selling of student debt, alongside deadlines that ensure low-to-mid-income student debtors aren’t making repayments in their fifties, would prevent a worsening situation.

Of course, the other option is providing free or low-cost education for all.

In 2016, I graduated from a minor university with my terminal degree. I stood in line with the other postgraduates in a balmy West Australian twilight. My peers had studied autism and slime mould, rare birds and dung beetles, in research degrees sponsored by industry partners whose logos were writ large across the program of ceremonies.

‘Briohny Doyle: the postapocalyptic imagination,’ read the dean, and I strode across the stage to receive my certificate. I held the handshake and smiled for the camera, for Serge and Annie and Mum and Dad, who had travelled across the country to be with me at this moment. They each knew, in their particular way, how disconnected I had been feeling as I laboured on this dissertation, mourned Cassady, and tried to strategise ways to take hold of my life. Baffled or proud, they each wanted to demonstrate that this work, my work, had value, and I was grateful to them for it. I crossed the stage and took my place on the shadowy, crowded rostrum.

During my candidacy, I lived more than 3,000 kilometres away from the university campus. I met with my supervisor through Skype, and when he came to town for a conference on nuclear ephemera or to see one of his other remote students. I made no friends in graduate school. Almost ten years after my first experience of tertiary study, the student body was being removed from the university.

At my graduation, I met the physical reality of university today. The ceremony went for four hours. At one point a biologist handed me her degree to hold while she texted her babysitter. ‘We won’t be home until midnight!’ she said.

The undergraduates just kept coming. The audience was a sea of mortarboards that seemed to reach as far as the horizon — far more than could ever fit in the collection of buildings beyond — each one atop an individual with a piece of paper they hoped would secure their future. After the degrees were awarded, a bombastic promotional video was played, showing serious-looking young adults staring into microscopes and unfurling blueprints, a digital Earth turning on its axis, a polar bear standing perilously on a sheet of ice.

Thinking about it now reminds me of a course-outcome descriptor that Alice paraphrased: ‘How will this course prepare a student to contribute to a world in crisis?’

I considered my fellow graduates, our red polyester gowns polka-dotted with mozzies. Were we prepared for this world in crisis? The video suggested that our very presence was a correction to it. But that was just a video. An advertisement for our own sense of self.

The twentieth-century philosopher Jean-François Lyotard insisted that the ‘human’ is something we work to produce. It sits in opposition to two forms of inhuman. The first is a system or technology produced by humans, yet bigger than us and annihilating in its power: radical free-market economics, say, or nuclear warheads. The second form is more ethereal and wondrous. ‘Inhuman’ in this sense designates an unknown space that the child does not enter because they are too busy learning to be human via the educational apparatus. This idea captivates me. What if there was no taxonomy of adult? No fireman, no stethoscope, no bridal veil, no gun? What if there was no Future Day, and even no future? What then?

My post-apocalyptic imagination thrummed. The Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I Gotta Feeling’ crackled through the speakers overhead. Fireworks were let off. Beach balls were sent across the crowd. I got my money / let’s spend it up / go out and smash it / like, oh my God. We paraded down the red carpet, past our proud (and slightly shell-shocked, due to the beach balls) families and through the sea of graduates, each with their bright future and piece of paper that made it so as the song urged them on: Let’s do it, let’s do it / let’s do it, and do it, and do it . . . and then we’ll do it again.

Maybe Lyotard’s idea of the inhuman partly explains why people are fascinated by the stories of feral children raised by animals. The woman who was kidnapped, abandoned in the jungle, and subsequently taken in (up?) by monkeys, who taught her to pluck birds off branches and catch rabbits in their holes. The toddler kept alive on the streets of Chile by feral cats that fed her and kept her warm at night — a feline blanket in a dark alleyway. The Siberian four-year-old who escaped his alcoholic father to live with a pack of wild dogs for two freezing years. Feral children hiss and bark and smell their food before they eat it. Feral children are caught like animals, by leaving scraps of food out, or by throwing a blanket over their crouching bodies.

With help from his pack, the Siberian dog-boy escaped his human ‘saviours’ several times — an image I can’t help seeing Disney-style, exaggerated and bright. Finally, social services sent him to military school to join the lower ranks of a different kind of pack. I couldn’t find any information about what happened to the dogs.

But what if he had not become a soldier? What if he had gone to a regular high school — which is not so unlike a pack, or a number of packs fighting for alpha status? Would he have retained a dog’s understanding of the social world? Would he have gone to university, and if so, what would he have studied? How would he parent? What insights would he have had about living and survival that we do not?

On graduation night, we former university students switched the position of our tassels and marched forth into a world we had been taught was one way, knowing that we would most likely experience it in another way entirely.