These projects include the technology initiatives of the AUKUS pact, artificial intelligence applications, quantum computing breakthroughs and new cyber capabilities. There is also the $9.9bn REDSPICE initiative to expand Australia’s cyber intelligence workforce by 2000 people.
Meanwhile the Australian Defence Force is hoping to grow by an additional 18,500 personnel and the federal government wants to add a further 3000 civilian workers to the departments and agencies of our wider national security community.
Taking these programs together, we are undertaking the most far-reaching mobilisation of Australians into the security state since World War II.
While there has been much analysis about the cost and timeliness of these initiatives, especially AUKUS, no serious examination has been revealed about the combined implications of these programs for Australia’s education system.
Indeed, there has been an almost flippant assumption from Australia’s national security community that our schools and universities will yield scores of PhD-qualified nuclear submariners, computer scientists, analysts, prospective fighter pilots and policy experts to fill the governments ranks. But the evidence suggests that on its current performance Australia’s education system will encounter huge challenges to meet these new demands.
The task of crewing nuclear-powered submarines is a critical case. France produces about 150 PhD-qualified nuclear physicists each year to sustain its nuclear energy, nuclear weapons and nuclear submarine programs. About 50 of these are submariners. In contrast to the French system, in a given year Australia’s universities produce about three such scientists. While we may have some time to lift these numbers to support our submarine program, the education task in just the field of nuclear science is formidable.
More urgent is the need for highly skilled graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines to contribute to the strategic effort of achieving decisive digital breakthroughs and to meet the insatiable demand for cyber security practitioners from government and the private sector.
Yet on numerous national and international rankings Australia’s performance in the basics of literacy and numeracy is sluggish at best for a nation of our wealth. This is despite impressive injections of additional funding under the Gonski 2.0 scheme. Make no mistake, increased funding is essential but it is not a singular solution. To borrow Julia Gillard’s phrase, we need nothing short of an education revolution. On the opposing barricades of this required revolution stands three particular forces that must be overcome.
First, industrial relations reform in the education sector is well overdue. Not only do we require many more teachers to reduce class sizes, we also need teachers with a wider range of qualifications, not just general education degrees.
We must come to treat teaching, especially primary and secondary teaching, as an elite profession. Australian children deserve nothing less. We need nationally consistent teaching qualifications and registrations to streamline the movement of teachers across the country. For example, NSW does not automatically recognise interstate teacher accreditations. Similarly, as we need to attract the best teachers from overseas, we must implement a more adaptable framework for recognising overseas experience and qualifications. Such a framework also needs to expedite transitioning experts from other fields into teaching, as currently it can take two to four years for someone to move into teaching from a previous career.
The second challenge to be overcome is the crisis of attention wrought on young minds by ever more distracting technologies.
We live in an attention economy where the digital systems we use are engineered to continually draw our focus. In his book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari says many adults now are able to focus on a single task for only about three minutes; for university students it is less than half. If we expect students to become fighter pilots and strategists, we must allow them to learn in environments that aren’t actively hostile to deep focus and retention of complex information.
The NSW government’s recent decision to ban mobiles on school campuses is a positive measure, needed nationwide, to reclaim schools as spaces for distraction-free learning.
And as an elite profession teachers should receive much higher pay but also higher degrees of accountability for student performance. This could include performance-based pay, a common feature of many other professions, or other measures to incentivise excellence.
Our third great challenge also concerns technology: the looming destruction of traditional pedagogy by artificial intelligence.
Aside from final exams, how we test for comprehension in most subjects at the secondary and tertiary levels is through assessments undertaken outside the classroom. As a method this has allowed for larger class sizes because evaluating assessments can be undertaken en masse outside teaching hours, often with the assistance of tutors in the case of universities.
This model is simply dead – or at least on life support – as a result of AI tools that increasingly make it unfeasible for teachers to verify most unsupervised assessments. ChatGPT and other future cognitive intelligence aids will improve students access to information, but not necessarily their retention or comprehension of information.
To test students properly we will likely need to return to in-person testing and oral demonstrations of reasoning and debate, which in turn will require smaller class sizes and more teachers.
Expanding the security workforce is just one of many grand national tasks resting on our educators’ shoulders. But policymakers have linked national security so closely to the performance of our education system that it is incomplete to speak of our future defence and intelligence requirements without laying down a strategy for revolutionising our education system.
Dr William Stoltz is a visiting fellow at the Pacific Forum and senior fellow at the Australian National University’s National Security College.
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