She is in her second year at university, so she doesn’t win with this decision.
So, if she finishes her degree after 2026 she will no longer be eligible for fees-free study payments of any kind and she feels hard done by.
Interestingly, this triggered something in her … and I say hallelujah to that! Because my experience with this younger generation has been frustrating.
When I was lecturing a while ago, and over a 10-year period, I noticed a change in students’ behaviour that concerned me. When I started, students would take their time to ask questions, before and after class, and quiz me in detail - really keep me on my toes. I absolutely loved that about teaching.
Gradually, the questions stopped coming. Students spent time behind the screen of their laptop, on their phone, and became more disengaged. It got to the point where I would deliberately share wrong information and quiz them on it to see if they would catch me out or challenge me. I mean, this is a university, questioning and inquiring is everything.
I also noted the difference between these students and when I was studying. In my time, we did a lot of protesting on the union lawn. I changed in the first two years at university. I became angry about Te Tiriti issues (as I learnt the reality of history). I started to voice my opinions (right or wrong). I stared racism in the face, I questioned, I took strike action, I campaigned and I really started to find myself.
As a lecturer, I was seeing barely any of these remonstrations nor was I sensing a fire in the belly of students.
I personally don’t think that squeezing humanities is helping the picture here, we need to be encouraging debate and challenging the status quo. It’s a bit like the death of languages worldwide, which is happening right in front of us without anyone seeming to notice. Linguists estimate there are currently more than 7000 languages spoken globally.
However, due to globalisation and the rapid decline of oral indigenous languages, scholars predict that in 50 years, this could shrink drastically to between 500 and 1500 actively spoken languages. What we lose here is diversity and the ability to think differently and that is a tragedy worse than any natural disaster.
All in all I was pretty confused and I never really followed up on the sort of dispassionate trail of students I kept encountering.
So, my daughter went to protest about the removal of fees free. She was angry and she talked to me about who she should be voting for and policies and politics and I was so pleased that this issue had sparked some passion in her, some fight.
The fact that she was taking an interest in an issue that effects the country - good or bad - is so important to me.
Her father and I spent our time debating with our children from the moment they could communicate. We challenged their thinking on everything from religion to colonisation, skewed histories, racism, food sovereignty and more. Tahu worked hard to educate them through the history of music, books, media and his amazing bedtime tribal narratives - that were often frightening and incredibly age inappropriate.
He was a massive believer in sharing everything with our children and worked on developing their critical eye and ability to debate and argue. I would roll my eyes at this fairly regularly but the debate, the laughs, the lens with which our children started to see the world was actually marvellous and awe-inspiring. As they have matured into adulthood, that critical eye is in all of them and I am proud of that.
I know that the issue of losing fees free has upset my daughter but I am glad that she has been able to put a voice to this and vent her frustration and it has also prompted her to consider the wider ramifications of these political decisions. I actually asked her, "What should I write for this article, babes?". And she said, "Losing fees free!".
Amine to that.
