Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 10 student in Mandurah, Western Australia, Australia.
The two writers disagree about who has the authority to define progress, and what that disagreement reveals is worth examining carefully. The first writer holds that progress can only be meaningfully defined by those who have experienced the conditions in question — that the authority to judge whether a change represents improvement belongs to those it affects, not to external observers with different material circumstances. What this position correctly identifies is that definitions of progress that are imposed from outside often reflect the definer’s values, interests and assumptions rather than the lived reality of those they describe. Historical examples support this: colonial narratives of progress routinely defined traditional practices as backwardness and imposed external frameworks in ways that caused harm rather than improvement. The second writer argues for a more universal account. Some changes, on this view, are improvements by standards that transcend particular perspectives: reductions in mortality, increases in literacy and declines in arbitrary violence represent progress regardless of who is defining them. What this position correctly captures is that rejecting universal standards of progress entirely risks a form of relativism in which nothing can be criticised from outside — including practices that cause genuine suffering to those within the system. The first writer’s position, taken to its logical limit, would prevent any form of outside advocacy for people who lack the power to define their own conditions. Where each position runs into difficulty is instructive. The first writer’s insistence on insider authority risks becoming a defence of existing power structures within communities: who counts as the insider whose definition matters? The second writer’s universal standards risk importing particular cultural frameworks under the guise of neutral measurement — literacy rates and mortality figures are not culturally neutral indicators in the way they are often presented. What the disagreement reveals is a genuine epistemological problem: progress cannot be defined without making judgements, and all judgements are made from somewhere. The most defensible position does not dissolve this difficulty but holds it: it requires taking seriously both the experiential authority of those whose lives are at stake and the possibility of cross-cultural standards, while remaining rigorous about which standards are genuinely universal and which are disguised particulars.