Castlereagh Statement
There’s this thing called the Castlereagh Statement. Many, many pages that no one will ever read.
In plain terms it is a call for Australia to stop treating AI in education as a cheating management problem and start treating it as an employment problem, namely we need to keep paying academics to teach.
When in doubt, stand in front of the tank with a very reasonable protest sign.
You just got to make sure said sign isn’t AI generated.
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The old education system assumes that you train people for jobs. However, AI is changing this environment faster than the universities can respond.
They have three awkward possibilities to consider:
• they train people for jobs that will not exist.
• they train people for jobs that still exist, but no longer require the same number of people.
• they train people for jobs that exist, but where the useful skill is no longer doing the task, it is supervising, specifying, checking, correcting and integrating machine output.
The Castlereagh Statement is basically an attempt to move from the first two categories into the third without admitting how much of the current system becomes redundant on the way.
It talks about “future-ready skills,” “capability-focused curriculum,” “learning how to learn,” assessment reform and coherent lifelong pathways, which is a polite way of saying: we no longer know which occupational promises are safe to make.
And since we’ve never really cared about student job opportunities, we’re not about to start now.
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Shame on you all for ever turning tertiary education into job preparation, I say.
offshore westerly 