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Weekly UpdatesIt is impossible to envision an innovative city without innovative people. To respond to the many challenges innovative cities will face, such cities must have citizens with a passion for discovery, and institutions ready to implement new ideas: but this is not enough. Innovative cities will also depend on education systems that are capable of producing people with open minds; who are willing and able to solve new problems and acquire new skills in contexts of continuing challenge and change. Citizens of innovative cities will need to acquire and exercise a complex combination of knowledges, skills and social capacities that were never expected of their parents or grandparents. In their study of US firms that were responding to the demands of global competition, economists Richard Murnane and Frank Levy found that these firms started looking for employees who, in addition to having substantial competencies in reading, mathematics and oral communication, were also able to 'solve semi-structured problems, originate improvements ... (and) work in teams' (1996: 21). However challenging this may be for educators, their responsibilities will go beyond the preparation of multiskilled and flexible employees. Innovative cities will also need to establish and support schools in which young people learn and also practice new social capacities. These will include, for example, the ability to live and work harmoniously with fellow citizens whose languages, religions and cultures may be very different from their own.
In contrast with this vision, the current structure, culture, and curriculum of most secondary schools are not well adapted to meet these challenges. Curriculum options tend to divide 'academic' learning from 'vocational' training, deliver computing and information technology classes that are seriously out of date, and rely on linear, 'chalk and talk' methods of knowledge transfer. While much is being done by regions, states, and even local schools to alter the provision of education to young people, the overall leadership fashioning the policies of large school systems often appears to be stagnant, and caught in bureaucratic inertia. Many schools persist in privileging a curriculum that is geared to students who are university-bound and ignores or marginalizes those with different interests or learning needs. In addition, the structure of schooling often finds schools isolated from their communities, workplaces, and other educational institutions.
This article focuses on three of the most pressing issues facing educational systems as they attempt to respond to present and future challenges. Prior to discussing these challenges, the article provides a brief overview of the institutional structures and changes affecting Australian secondary education over the past sixty years.
The first challenge is the emergence of a digital divide between less adapted digital users known as 'digital immigrants' and the surprisingly different mind sets of children who have grown up as 'digital natives' (Prensky 2001). These 'digital natives' have been born into, and are familiar with, such a wide range of technologies that their approach to learning, knowledge acquisition and even social relationships, is vastly different from that of their parents and elders who are often their teachers. How are educational systems to be devised that will respond to these technological natives, yet also deliver knowledge, opportunity and experience that will equip students with the abilities to meet the challenges ahead of them?
The second challenge refers to the problems inherent in mass secondary education. The OECD identifies completing a full upper secondary education with a recognised qualification for work, tertiary study, or both as central to the social and economic well-being of individuals, communities and nations (OECD 2006). The challenge of ensuring that all students complete a high school qualification is exacerbated by the increasing diversity of the populations some schools are expected to serve. Given the degree of uniformity and centralization imposed on them by the systems in which they are embedded, most high schools in low-income areas struggle to deliver what is needed. Part of the solution to this problem will lie in developing partnerships where employers and social institutions collaborate with education systems in creating effective pathways for learning and transition to adult life.
The third challenge is associated with the changing nature of cities themselves, reflecting the increasing exclusion of particular populations on the basis of geographical location, cultural discrimination, gross income inequality, and poor access to resources. In Australia, these excluded populations are often composed of the poor, Aboriginal Australians, recent immigrants, and refugees. The issue for educational systems is how to create meaningful forms of education to meet the diversified needs of a wide range of students, providing them with opportunities and hope, rather than furthering their exclusion. Crucial as well is the provision of all students with the social capacities, knowledges and skills required to adapt and function within innovative cities.
EDUCATION AND CHANGE IN AUSTRALIA SINCE 1950
Looking back at the provision of secondary education in Australia over the past sixty years, one can identify two more-or-less distinct periods. The first period began in the 1950s, with the goal of accommodating a greatly expanded 'boomer' population, offering them four years of junior secondary education on a universal basis. After completing this junior phase, a talented minority of students continued on to complete Year 12 certificates which were essentially designed around university admissions requirements. Although opportunity existed for any motivated and capable student to complete a Year 12 certificate, the senior secondary curriculum offered by each of Australia's education systems was uniform in its focus. Almost without exception, the institutional framework was narrowly academic and competitive (Collins 1992). Nevertheless, high school completion rates increased incrementally, so that by the mid-1970s, approximately one in three of Australia's young people were completing Year 12. It was taken for granted that the other two-thirds would leave school at age 15 and gain whatever training they needed on the job. During this period, production technologies were relatively stable. Thus, internal (often apprenticeship) training was provided by large organizations that had well-known and well-established needs for particular craft, trade or clerical skills. The many small businesses that filled the interstices were largely ignored by the education system.
The second period owes its impetus to a series of seismic shifts in the organisation of economic life that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These economic changes are associated in part with structural adjustments, such as the reduction of tariff barriers, and in part with the introduction of major technological innovations, especially in computing and information technologies. As these changes permeated Australia's economic base, there was an overall reduction in import-substitution activity, a significant outsourcing of the nation's relatively small manufacturing base, and a very substantial expansion of the service economy.
These changes have had two conspicuous effects on young people of high school age. The first was the collapse of the full-time youth labour market. Between 1975 and 1995, more than half of all full-time jobs for teenage males disappeared, while for females the equivalent figure was over two thirds (Wooden 1996). The second effect was to a large extent related to the first for, as teenage jobs disappeared, more and more young people stayed on at school. Between 1981 and 1991, the proportion of young people staying on to complete Year 12 in Australia more than doubled, increasing from 34 percent to 75 percent (Lamb et al. 2004). During the first period, it was generally thought that only a talented minority should complete Year 12. With most young people now staying on, the completion of Year 12 has become a key indicator of individual success. As a series of reports on young people's post-school pathways has shown, only a disadvantaged minority of young people now fail to complete Year 12 (Long 2005).
It would be grossly misleading to suggest that the senior secondary curriculum in Australia's schools has not changed over the past three decades. Whereas the pre-1980 senior curriculum was entirely academic, the current senior secondary curricula contain numerous vocational subjects and provide some opportunities for work placements. Reflecting the broader purposes served by the Year 12 certificate, the proportion of students completing Year 12 without qualifying for university admission has increased substantially.
Nevertheless, with few exceptions, the education departments that control and direct the work of schools continue to function according to an ethos that is reminiscent of the industrial past: they are huge, inflexible, monolithic, and centralised. The enormous diversity of the student body, in terms of who the students are and where they want to end up in the economic structure, stands in stark contrast with the uniformity of the institutional structures in which they are embedded. In conformity with the regulations that govern the education system and their schools, almost all Year 12 students must choose their subjects from the same menu, attend schools that operate on a full-time basis and do not offer part-time enrolments, and are required to conform to rigid timetables that operate from 9am to 4pm Monday to Friday. As discussed below, in a context where at least half of all senior secondary students juggle school and part-time employment, these constraints are extraordinarily limiting. They are especially inappropriate in the face of evidence which suggests that for those young people who are not on track to a university, part-time student jobs are themselves a key element to their future employment prospects (Vickers, Lamb & Hinkley 2003).
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