The Impact of Opportunity: Reflections of a TASA 2024 Bursary Recipient by Neville Buch
In the last few years The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) has been very kind to this older scholar of a 41-year career, across the humanities and social science. With a doctorate in American-Australian religious history, a teacher’s diploma in education, and a diploma of formal training in philosophy proper, the organisation’s sociologists could see my worth in the discipline. I am more deeply read in American sociology than any training in Australian sociology. The ability to see worth in a person when institutions fail so badly, at this simple act of kindness, extended to appoint me a convenor in the Sociology of Education thematic group. The appointment was, however, with merit, as well as kindness. In that 41 years of work, I had developed a sociology of education tome of thinking from a long examination of Australian-American relational histories, as well an expertise in the intellectual history of broad and liberal religious education against the face of too many dogmatist thinkers. I was also a higher education policy researcher employed by the University of Melbourne for a decade.
Kindness is not held exclusively by any ideologue or disinterested bystander. The academy, in the last three decades, had created this broad misunderstanding through its obsession with specialisation, as a game-scoring mechanism, even as the giants of education during the 20th century pointed out the problems in the disconnections between the academy and public understanding. And today we have Trumpism.
My bursary program has allowed me to present my paper, “The Socio-Political Landscapes of the New Sociology of Culture and Cognition: A Tour through the History of Education field (1970-2030).” From appearance, the author is the only Australian, in the last several years, to forge a research pathway in the study of culture and cognition. “The New Study of Culture and Cognition” has been a long time coming after the 1990s Australian educationalist authorities undone much of the good work of the 1970s educationalist theories which emphasised ‘understanding,’ personal cognition, and communitive action, such as Ivan Illich’s challenge to the concept of ‘schooling’. I do not believe successive governments have achieved their aims, in neither education nor training. The thinking has been too narrow, disregarding comprehensive education.
I must thank the audience for their patience. A deep field of interdisciplinary learning is not easy. It has taken me 41 years to finally see what has been happening, and I feel like Hegel’s owl of dusk. The concepts and models of my work needs closer examination, and which were detailed in the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society (ANZHES) conference, also late this year:
- Concepts;
- Depowering institutional politics;
- Negotiated and Reasoned conversations;
- Fighting the stupid conclusions of appearances and foolish observations;
- Socialization;
- Understanding multi-layered worldview;
- Responsibility for our Anglo-American Major Belief-Doubt Systems;
- Act Principally;
- Think in Historical Sociology;
- Get out facts and accounts straight;
- Look for the process-philosophical insights;
- Relate;
- Remember; and as Pink Floyd say
- Keep on Talk’in.
That is put it the language of public discourse, but there are many sociological models involved, discussed every day in the global academic literature. So, the obvious question is why Australia lags behind the rest of the educated world in critical thinking? The answer: Australian governance thinking and the outcome in failed policies.
One of these areas of discussion is what was once taught in the universities, “Technology and Society.” I must thank the I.T. folk of Curtin University. It is never easy but made ten-times worse with university policies which obsesses about control, and protecting privilege against scoundrels like me.
I am deeply grateful to Sally Daly, Penny Toth, and Sharon Aris for their kindness and support. I wholehearted thank each for their wonderful service to me and the rest of TASA.
I also thank my local Brisbane team who keep my business going (ABN: 86703686642): Dr Michael Macklin, a former Dean at the University of New England, and Dr Neil Peach, a leading continental philosopher in Australia, and a local leader of The Philosophy Café Brisbane Meet-Up group of leading thinkers; several with Ph.D.’s and master’s degrees. Sociological thinking is never too far away. I also grateful for the support of my old teacher of the UQ 1980s, Joseph Siracusa, Professor Global Futures, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University. We had some good answers back then; pity the spiral of forgetfulness.