Schooling, economy, work and the curriculum

HM
by Heath McCallum5 views·Updated Mar 30, 2021
Create your own

Chapters

Images: 1-3, DFAT, https://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/minisite/tradethroughtimegovau/site/index.html 4 https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.HFT-8vlHX53Vk3zwPiB87AHaEK&pid=Api 5 https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.dD5jXXpwASmuZF35V9juFgAAAA&pid=Api 6 https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.KV_IEYgBXub79V-_pP7jMQHaHa&pid=Api 7 https://www.dese.gov.au/integrated-data-research/benefits-educational-attainment/income

Audio TranscriptAuto-generated

  1. today we're going to be looking at the way the
  2. Australian economy has shaped its education system over time.
  3. The start off.
  4. We're thinking about what the Australian economy looked like in
  5. 1900. Now, of course, back then were still colony of
  6. England and most of the things that were exported we
  7. sent directly back to England.
  8. In particular, this man walked from shape, gold and oil
  9. from Wales.
  10. And of course, these three things and most of the
  11. economy at the time was very rural e based.
  12. That was the reason that England sent people to Australia
  13. in the first place to work on farms and in
  14. minds. And when you have a largely rural economy, that
  15. means you've got mostly small towns dotted across the country.
  16. But this has changed significantly over time.
  17. If we look at this chart, it looks at the
  18. employment by industry.
  19. So what percentage of the Australian population is working in
  20. different industries?
  21. Down the bottom and pink, you conceive mining.
  22. It never really made up a huge part of the
  23. Australian workforce, but that decreased rapidly.
  24. It was about 8% in 1900 today it's less than
  25. 2% of the Australian economy.
  26. Agriculture, on the other hand, was about a quarter of
  27. the workforce 1900.
  28. Matt has reduced significantly over time.
  29. Today it's less than 4%.
  30. Manufacturing increased and increased into the fifties.
  31. But that, too has decreased is about 10% today.
  32. Services is the really interesting one, though, because it was
  33. about 50% of the economy at the start of century.
  34. But today it's over 85% sort of services main.
  35. It's a very broad term, but it's anything that serves
  36. other people.
  37. Schools, hospitals, even supermarkets are all services.
  38. Police officers are services.
  39. The tourism industry is services.
  40. There is something that is primarily designed to serve another
  41. part of the population.
  42. Today, agriculture is less than 4% of the Australian gross
  43. domestic product and 4% of the workforce.
  44. So the GDP basically just bends the economy to agriculture.
  45. The reason that Australia was settled in the first place
  46. as decreased in its relevance to Australia over time 4%
  47. of the workforce is not very much.
  48. It's an important percentage, but it's not a massive percentage.
  49. The way that we can think about that is by
  50. looking at these two photos on the right.
  51. You see what agriculture looked like in 19 hundreds.
  52. Two people would spend all day plowing.
  53. A field will take another day for them, too.
  54. So the field and many more days to harvest on
  55. the left.
  56. You have two people that are operating to very complex
  57. pieces of massive machinery.
  58. And in those machines, those two people can do a
  59. lot more work.
  60. It's much more efficient.
  61. That means that less and less people are working in
  62. agriculture as less people are working directly in the farms.
  63. That means that they need to get work elsewhere and
  64. in most parts of the world, because what the biggest
  65. driver is for urbanization.
  66. People are moving from the rural areas towards bigger and
  67. bigger cities in the cities.
  68. They can find jobs in the services industry, and that's
  69. why the economy has changed so much over time.
  70. If you look at this statistic, it helps us to
  71. understand the differences in the requirements between agriculture and in
  72. the services industry.
  73. So between 1986 and 2000 and three, there are about
  74. 1.8 million new jobs created in Australia, over half of
  75. those were higher skilled jobs managers, professionals or semi rations.
  76. That's everything in the services industry, its engineers, its police
  77. officers. It's people in the army, doctors, lawyers.
  78. These are jobs that require much higher levels of specialization
  79. than working on a farm.
  80. You can think about this because cities are very different
  81. than rural areas.
  82. The bigger city is that means things like crime occur.
  83. We need more police and judges and lawyers, bigger and
  84. bigger hospitals, which allow for increased specialization instead of just
  85. having one rural GP.
  86. You could then have people that are specialist in cancers
  87. or skin diseases.
  88. People are getting more and more.
  89. Specialist. Government also needs to require much more specialist people
  90. to deliver all of the services.
  91. So you have bigger schools, which means you need people
  92. that are good at running.
  93. Schools have universities as the university's get bigger and bigger.
  94. They can specialists.
  95. The government's get bigger.
  96. You need town planning specialists.
  97. You need people who are specialists In road design.
  98. You need people that can run very complex waste disposal
  99. or plumbing.
  100. We also have the arts and culture sector.
  101. It's very hard for a very small community to be
  102. efficient enough to have an arts and culture sector.
  103. But in a big city like Sydney or Melbourne or
  104. Adelaide means that people can.
  105. Now they can paint, and then they can sell those
  106. paintings to other people.
  107. You can put on a play, and there's enough people
  108. to go to that play to make enough income to
  109. make it financially viable.
  110. So these jobs require more and more skilled people.
  111. And it's the point of education to do that.
  112. Training as the specialization for jobs increases, you need a
  113. higher level of education.
  114. And because people are more specialist, they become more in
  115. demand and they get paid more.
  116. You look at this graph here it shows the average
  117. incomes right, the different levels of education that people have.
  118. So somebody who only finishes you 11 can expect to
  119. get about $47,000 as their median total income.
  120. If you get an undergraduate degree, this goes up significantly
  121. to $76,000.
  122. You get a doctorate.
  123. We're looking at over $100,000 as the average.
  124. When people are more and more specialist, they can demand
  125. better conditions and more money from their employer But this
  126. also means that the education system needs to be able
  127. to train those people.
  128. If you think back to the start of this presentation,
  129. remember thinking about most people working in farms.
  130. What do you need to do to train people to
  131. work in a farm?
  132. Obviously, it doesn't make sense to have doctorate level educations.
  133. You might need to teach people basic mechanics so they
  134. can operate machinery, basic biology so that they can understand
  135. the way plants grow in the different requirements that they
  136. have. Has that changed over time?
  137. We get more and more specialist.
  138. The role of education has changed.
  139. If you think of a school in Adelaide today, that
  140. school needs to cater for a huge variety of different
  141. people. In this class, we might have doctors and lawyers
  142. and nurses and teachers.
  143. We might still have farmers.
  144. It's a much broader base that the education needs to
  145. serve. So it's not the only job of education system
  146. to plan people to serve and make money for the
  147. economy. But it is a really important part