The Chief Scientist has published an editorial in Universities Australia’s quarterly newsletter, HIGHER ED.ITION.

The full text is below, or you can read it online at the Universities Australia website.

We must remind ourselves of the value of teachers

A few weeks ago the UK Government released its long-awaited Green Paper on higher education. It is an interesting read, if only for the novel proposition it advances that teaching is an important function of the university.

The measures put forward have been described by Minister Jo Johnson as “a reshaping”, and by the sector as “the most disruptive changes to higher education for more than 20 years”. I leave it to others to decide on its merits.

What intrigues me is how little of the underpinning logic is truly new.

Master teachers, engaging content, eloquent delivery – these were the foundation of the great universities of medieval Europe. If we have neglected the importance of great teaching in more recent times, our students are certainly still seeking it, and they need it as much today as ever before.

Why is it, after all, that young people with access to ten thousand times the content that even a thorough university course could provide, at perhaps one ten-thousandth of the price, would pay for a degree and not just an internet connection?

Why would they want to pursue a course of study, for at least three years and maybe considerably longer, when the jobs it might prepare them for will probably vanish?

Why take on the certainty of debt for no certainty of useful knowledge or skills?

The answer has to be that university education gives us something our curiosity alone cannot; and that something has to have enduring value in rapidly changing times. However hard it is to define, surely it has people and the way they influence us at its core.

Content is undoubtedly important – when has it ever been easy for even the most capable of students to master a field efficiently without a logical sequence to follow? But good content comes about through great teachers, loses much of its value without them, and is ultimately just a fraction of what universities need to provide beyond the internet connection. Teachers contribute much of the rest, from experiences to attitudes to role models. We would do well to think about how we encourage and support them, if we expect them to help us make our twenty-first century workers in turn.

Of course, we have to persuade ourselves to take an interest first.

Dr Albert Rowe, one-time Vice-Chancellor of Adelaide University, observed in his 1960 memoir that Australians, above all other nations, were supremely disinterested in what universities taught or how they went about it. As long as the graduates appeared to be 'immediately useful’, and so armed with content that they would never be troubled to learn more, all parties were satisfied with their share of the bargain.

It formed a curious contrast to his observations of the United States, where, he noted, the 'big men’ in industry were very clear in their expectations.

“They did not want graduates to be specialists crammed with factual material; rather they wanted men with a broad knowledge of cognate subjects, educated, trained in the fundamentals and able to adapt themselves later to a rapidly changing world.”

As a result, Rowe noted, they took a close interest in university teaching – not because they wanted to rigidify the curriculum but because they understood the limitations of a fossilised study program. Broaden 'men’ to 'people’, and acknowledge that some, perhaps many graduates will seek to be entrepreneurs as well as employees, and the words could have been written about the purpose of education today.

It is not just an imperative for university teaching staff. As I have observed in the past, if students come to university convinced that innovation and education are mutually exclusive options, the most outstanding university lecturer would struggle to change them. It might be very nice icing on an otherwise average brick, but it would not make the brick a Christmas cake.

So schools are part of the challenge. So too are the industries which rely on capable graduates but rarely think to engage directly with universities, as Business Council president Catherine Livingstone recently observed.

We all need to do a better job of articulating to students the value of education, in its richest and best sense. We cannot do it unless we remind ourselves of the value of teachers.