Both personally and as Chairman of Australia21, I am
disappointed to hear that there is to be a spill of full-time positions at the
Australian National University’s wonderful School of Music, so that the 32
full-time staff have to apply for positions in a reduced establishment of 20.
Disappointed because I think we as a society should be
moving in the other direction – more engagement with music as high art – and I
have begun considering how to frame an Australia21 project that could examine
the social wellbeing benefits of the Venezuelan program known as El Sistema (“the
system”) and how the lessons from that might be applied in an Australian
context.
El Sistema is a state foundation which watches over
Venezuela's 102 youth orchestras, 55 children’s orchestras and 270 music
centres, and the instrumental training programmes which make them possible.
While the organisation has 31 symphony orchestras, its greatest achievement is
the 310,000 to 370,000 children who attend its music schools around the country
where it is estimated that 70 to 90 percent of them come from poor
socio-economic backgrounds. The program
is known for rescuing young people in extremely impoverished circumstances from
the environment of drug abuse and crime into which they would likely otherwise
be drawn.
Interestingly, it has always been located under the wing of social
services ministries, not the Ministry of Culture, a fact which has helped it to
survive several changes of government, and political persuasions of government,
over a period of more than 30 years. We
are talking about classical music as a positive force for personal development
and a benefit to society, not simply as recreation, important as the enjoyment
aspect is. As Abreu himself puts it:
Music has to be recognized as an ... agent of social development in the
highest sense, because it transmits the highest values -- solidarity, harmony,
mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to
express sublime feelings.
A detailed account of El Sistema’s achievements and history,
including its spread to the United States and the United Kingdom, may be found
in the relevant Wikipedia entry. A video of Abreu talking about El Sistema on
the TED website on the occasion of being awarded the TED Prize may be accessed here,
and a June 2010 TED Blog post on the graduation in Boston of 10 young musicians
from the the El Sistema USA program at New
England Conservatory may be accessed here. These young
musicians were to spread out to seven centres across the United States and
establish “nucleos” – programs and centres that will “teach children to play music,
believe in themselves, and reach for their dreams”.
I would like to see Australia as one of the next to take up
El Sistema, but sadly, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. To mix
the metaphors, we seem to see music as the icing on the cake, not as core
business. But for people “doing it tough”,
and especially their children, music offers great benefits and opportunities.
The following opinion piece by Australia 21 Director Richard Eckersley was published in The Age, Friday 27 August 2010. Access the original here.
Fiddling while the earth burns
No more 'politics as usual' should mean having enough courage to tackle the sickness of mindless consumption.
Nearly every decade from the 1970s has been declared a decade of reckoning, the time when we must deal decisively with looming national and global environmental crises. And as each decade passes, we postpone the deadline another 10 years. With the failure of the Copenhagen conference on climate change last year, the 2010s are now the critical decade of action.
This means the environmental ''emergency'' will have lasted half a century, or two generations. It is not just climate change that we must address, but also land and water degradation, food security, peak oil, population and biodiversity loss. And it is not that nothing worthwhile has been achieved; it is that our responses have failed to match the growing magnitude of the problems.
We have to accept that we cannot meet these challenges with ''politics as usual'' approaches, which seek to offend no one, yield to vested interests, and require no ''sacrifices'' in our way of life.
Beyond the election commentary about political executions, spin, negativity, leaks, botched or boring campaigns, risk aversion and lack of policy substance, we need also to acknowledge the systemic failure of our politics to deal with our problems. This deep current is largely ignored, while politicians, commentators and analysts focus on the swirling surface eddies.
The failure to act on climate change hurt Labor. But its shelved carbon pollution reduction scheme was a lemon anyway, an inadequate response. Also, it is unclear whether the key to voter disillusion was concern about climate change or the reneging on a core ''moral'' commitment. Both dimensions are important: climate change is a real threat to our future, but it is also an emblem of the wider challenge to our quality of life.
Mental health is another example of systemic political failure. Yes, mental health made the campaign agenda, but the whole focus of debate was on services. There was no consideration of why we face a crisis in mental health.
This is a Western problem, not just an Australian one. New US research suggests a fivefold increase since the 1930s in the proportion of college students experiencing psychological problems, and that more than half of young Americans today suffer a clinical mental disorder by the age of 21. If such findings are true, how are we to respond?
From a deep-current perspective, all these issues - environmental, social and economic - have their source in a world view that sees the central purpose of our society as pursuing ever more material enrichment in order to allow us to consume more. Not only does this put pressure on resources and lead to the financial excesses that produced the global financial crisis, it ultimately lies behind the crisis in mental health.
Evidence suggests rising mental illness, especially in the young, is the result of the cultural emphasis on materialism and individualism, manifest in changes in the family, work, the media, religion, education and diet. One specific factor is a shift towards defining ourselves in terms of our extrinsic achievements, in the external trappings of the successful life, including wealth, status, recognition and appearances.
The shift emphasises goals that distract us from what is most important to our well-being: the quality of our relationships with each other and our world, which contribute to a sense of intrinsic worth and existential certainty. As Goethe warned, things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.
Fixing this situation goes beyond politics; it requires leadership at all levels of society. But politics has a role to play. Politicians and the electorates they serve must have the courage to enact sweeping policy changes that shift the course of the deep current, not just stir up the surface eddies.
It means recognising that economic growth measures progress very imperfectly, that the content of growth is more important than its rate, and that we need to direct economic activity away from consumption for short-term personal gratification towards long-term investment in the social transformation necessary to address all the challenges of our century and ensure our future.
And that will mean radical reforms, such as limiting or banning political donations by corporations and other vested interests, making polluters pay for greenhouse gas emissions through effective carbon pricing, abolishing tax deductibility for advertising to ease the pressures on us to spend and spend, and creating jobs where they are socially needed and useful, not where confected demand dictates.
Neither politicians nor citizens fully grasp the size of the gulf between political priorities and social realities. In an Australian National University poll late last year (when Labor's stocks were high), 70 per cent of Australians said they were satisfied with ''the way the country is heading'' (a political question), but only 24 per cent thought quality of life in Australia was getting better (a social question).
It makes for a volatile situation, revealed these days in how quickly our political leaders disappoint us. The results of the election, with the shift in power to independents and the Greens, might shake loose the rusted shackles of the political status quo and make deep change possible. The Prime Minister has acknowledged that the Australian people want something different from ''business as usual''. Can we achieve something different enough, in both process and policy?
Richard Eckersley is a director of Australia21, an independent, non-profit research company, and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University
The following article by Australia 21 Director and Fellow Richard Eckersley was published in The Canberra Times, 24 June 2010. See the article as published here.
Cash grab hurting wellbeing
Cultural changes towards extrinsic goals – like financial success – are adding to pressures on young people, Richard Eckersley writes.
The resignation of the Federal Government’s top mental health adviser, John Mendoza, is just the latest episode in the unfolding mental health crisis in Australia. Professor Mendoza, the chair of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health, quit last week saying he was deeply disappointed at the Government’s lack of vision and commitment to mental health.
The crisis goes deeper than even many psychiatrists and psychologists, let alone governments and the public, realise. Addressing it requires more than increasing funding for mental health services. Our understanding of the causes of the situation remains a contentious matter among researchers, but there is growing evidence that they lie deep in the psychological impacts of the changing culture of Australia and other Western societies.
Most mental illness begins in adolescence and early adulthood and concerns about mental health care for young people are a prominent feature of the current debate, championed by the 2010 Australian of the Year, Professor Pat McGorry.
Earlier this year, American psychologist Jean Twenge and her colleagues published the findings of a remarkable study, in which they compared the results of the oddly named but widely used psychological test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, going back to the 1930s.
The researchers found a steady decline in the mental health of college students between 1938 and 2007 and high-school students between 1951 and 2002. Five times as many college students now score high enough to indicate psychological problems as they did in 1938. The increases translate into a greater likelihood of characteristics such as moodiness, restlessness, dissatisfaction and instability; unrealistically positive self-appraisal, overactivity and low self-control; feeling isolated and misunderstood; sensitivity and sentimentality; and being narcissistic, self-centred and antisocial.
The findings are not conclusive. Critics point out that people might just be becoming more willing to endorse items indicating psychological problems (although Twenge says the MMPI allows researchers to test for this bias, which they did; the trends remain).
Another new study, conducted by British psychologist Stephan Collishaw and colleagues, found that English adolescents experienced considerably higher rates of emotional problems in 2006 than they did in 1986, especially girls. The greatest changes were for worry, irritability, fatigue, sleep disturbance, panic and feeling worn out or under strain; the more severe the reported symptoms, the larger the increase over the two decades.
A few months ago, I looked up the most recent results of national surveys conducted by the American College Health Association. The survey shows that large proportions of students report strong negative emotions for both the previous twelve months and the previous two weeks. For example, 47 per cent in the last twelve months (and 17 per cent in the last two weeks) had felt things were hopeless; 87 per cent (54 per cent) had felt overwhelmed by all they had to do; 82 per cent (50 per cent) had felt exhausted; 31 per cent (10 per cent) had felt so depressed that it was difficult to function; 49 per cent (19 per cent) had felt overwhelming anxiety; and 39 per cent (12 per cent) had felt overwhelming anger.
Although I have been steeped in data like these for over 20 years, I find the figures shocking, even hard to believe. I’ve asked colleagues here and in the United States and Britain what the findings mean. I think it is fair to say that we don’t know for sure. They are certainly not the whole story of young people’s lives.
Had they been asked, 80-90 per cent of the students would have said they were happy and satisfied with their lives; most would be leading seemingly normal lives: attending lectures, completing assignments, working, partying and dating. At the same time, I think these findings tell us something about being young today, including specific social problems such as youth violence and binge-drinking.
The disturbing picture is likely to be broadly true of Australians (we lack comparable data over time to assess trends here). What explains it? There are many possibilities, including changes in family life such as more family conflict and breakdown, increasing work-life pressures and changes in parenting. The growth of the media and communications technologies, the weakening influence of religion, more junk food and other changes in diet, and even chemical pollution might be involved.
Twenge and her colleagues considered – and rejected – the possibility that economic factors were responsible. Instead they favoured a cultural explanation – in particular, a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic values and goals. An intrinsic orientation means doing things for their own sake – because we want to do them. It is ‘self –transcending’ and is good for our wellbeing.
An extrinsic orientation means doing things in the hope or expectation of other rewards - status, money, appearance, recognition. It is ‘self-enhancing’ in the sense of being concerned with self-image. It is not good for our wellbeing. A focus on the external trappings of success and ‘the good life’ encourages unrealistic and misguided expectations and increases the pressure to perform and achieve, leading to stress, frustration, resentment and dissatisfaction.
One American student says in an Associated Press article on Twenge’s findings that she feels pressure to be financially successful, even when she doesn't want to be. ‘The unrealistic feelings that are ingrained in us from a young age — that we need to have massive amounts of money to be considered a success — not only lead us to a higher likelihood of feeling inadequate, anxious or depressed, but also make us think that the only value in getting an education is to make a lot of money, which is the wrong way to look at it.’
The results of regular surveys over more than forty years of how American college students rate the importance of various life goals confirm her observation. The biggest change has occurred in the two goals of ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life’ and ‘being very well off financially’. Meaning declined sharply in importance during the 1970s and 1980s, while money rose to become the highest rated goal.
Youth problems today are more the result of existential and relational deprivation than material and economic deprivation. Our individualistic, consumer culture relentlessly and ruthlessly promotes extrinsic values and norms, making it harder for us to develop a grounded sense of who we are and what we want in life, and distracting us from what matters most to our wellbeing: our relationships with other people.
Australian novelist Ruth Park, in describing growing up in New Zealand during the Depression, says of young people then: ‘Whatever hardship came our way was all on the outside. Inside we knew, without doubt, that Life was aware of us and somehow had us in its care’. It strikes me as a good description of intrinsic worth and existential certainty and confidence.
Richard Eckersley is a director of Australia 21, an independent, non-profit research company and a visiting fellow at the AustralianNationalUniversity.
