Global Education/ Precarious Lives

Serap (not her real name) is studying at university but has not yet been accepted into the Bachelor of Arts. My university runs a scheme whereby aspiring students can pay to enrol for a half-time course load. If they pass they are admitted to the degree. Many of these provisional students, including Serap, have poor literacy skills. Many are also the first from their families to progress beyond school and have little understanding of what is expected of them at university. The liberal humanist pedagogy we practice, encouraging students to be critical and independent, is foreign to those used to treating the teacher’s word as gospel. In Turkey, where Serap spent most of her High School years, rote learning was the norm. The habits of deference are hard to break and she addresses me as ‘sir’, declining to call me by my first name, despite being prompted to do so.

She spent her early years in Sydney’s Western Suburbs but was taken back to Turkey as a young teenager where her parents ran a business in a regional city. They brought Serap back to Sydney to allow her to pursue her studies but are ambivalent about this decision. She tells me her father has threatened to take her back to the homeland, to arranged marriage and a life of domestic servitude if she does not succeed at university. ‘But you’re an adult’ I tell her, ‘you can’t be forced to do anything’. She responds with a look of weary resignation that communicates much more than words. How could I understand the consequences of defying her family? Beyond the Turkish community she lacks even the most rudimentary social networks without which the stability and social mobility she craves are well beyond reach. She is caught between the dreams of independence and patriarchal communal expectation.

So far as Serap is concerned I am a gatekeeper, and she deals with me with politeness and frequent visits to my office for counsel and direction. She implores me to go easy on her work, tells me how important it is for her to pass the course. Can I read a draft of her essay? Is she on the right track? Can I give her some hints about the content of the exam? Funding cuts and increases in student numbers has produced a conveyor-belt educational culture and it is very difficult to provide the close attention she demands. But I give her my time and attention anyway.

Her early marks are not encouraging. Students are asked to summarise an opinion piece from The Guardian and it is clear that she cannot write in clear sentences and has difficulty in comprehending the material. The work is littered with grammatical errors. Google, computer checking functions and the assistance of friends and family can mask shortcomings in prepared essays. But many of those who are called on to produce in pressured circumstances are often very dramatically exposed. I do not like to assess students by examination but the epidemic of internet-assisted plagiarism has forced academics to do so more often now.

Mine is an invidious task. Most of those, like Serap, whose lives are on a knife edge, are shy or unassertive and do not come forward with such narratives. I am conscious that by allocating fail grades I consign many earnest and well-intentioned young people to lives very different to the ones they had planned for themselves. But I am frequently angered when students I know are unable to write intelligibly are allowed to slip through by colleagues who are reluctant to take the difficult decision to fail them. The qualification must have some integrity. I am even angrier that my cash-strapped employers enrol students whose intellectual and cultural resources are insufficient to give them good prospects of passing. We try to cater for cultural difference but there is no time to provide the strugglers with the intensive assistance they require. In the end, and whatever we might think about it, English is the language of power and it is our responsibility in part to evaluate the students’ proficiency in it.

Occasionally someone like Serap pierces the cloak of bureaucratic indifference in which we wrap ourselves to remind us that education is a global business and many of our students are playing for very high stakes. As academics we have for some time been aware that universities are no longer the province of the elite, as Western governments have dealt with youth unemployment by directing more and more young people towards degree and diploma courses. But we are only just beginning to understand our pivotal role in global migration flows and in the inter-generational conflicts in which many students from cultural minorities are embroiled. While their children cultivate First World aspirations, migration to the West can frequently lead first generation migrants towards a fierce and embattled traditionalism. Such an outlook threatens to constrain their daughters much more than their sons.