Professionalism is in
danger of becoming an empty rhetoric. This is not to say that invocations
of profession and professionalism are to be disregarded. It is to
say rather that the concept must have a precise meaning if it is to
be a standard to which to appeal effectively.
Yet I do not know anywhere
where the concept is rigorously defined as a regulative norm so that
it does not just stand as a mantra or an incantation.
So I am going to come
to the cusp right away. I am going to specify a criterion of "professional"
by an exact definiens. In this way its meaning is not left impressionistic,
question-begging or presupposed - as in virtually all the educational
discourse that I have read.
If my criterion is neither
too broad nor too narrow, then it is sound. If it is also clear as
a guide to thought and action, then it is a standard one can rely
on in standing for the profession against what endangers it. One cannot
stand for what one does not understand. In the current political field
of fear and reaction within which the dominant culture is held, teachers
too seem to have lost their anchor of meaning. Even the title of this
conference hides the vocation of its actors in anonymous acronyms.
The steering concepts of "education" and "teacher"
disappear. The Deans of Education of Ontario and the Ontario Teachers
Federation - colours you should be proud to nail to the mast - have
been reduced to a cluster of initials which might as well represent
insurance brokers or tire salesmen. A true profession is a calling
that serves the world and knows what it bearers stand for. To be precise:
A professional is a
self-governing knower of a field of understanding and practice whose
work is sought by others as of value.
There are many professions
which meet this criterion, and doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers,
and so on clearly qualify (although not the so-called "first
profession"). The field of understanding and practice that distinguishes
the teaching profession is learning. I will say much about
learning ahead, including what it means. This may seem unnecessary
with a professional educator audience. But again, I have come across
no defining principle of learning in the educationese I have read,
including endless documents from ministries of education and teacher
federations. That is the problem, I think. Educators have lost the
bearings of their profession, the meaning of learning and education
itself.
The result of these lost
bearings of meaning is that we now have a government that seeks re-election
by declaring that passing secret-content tests stands for "better
student reading, writing and math", and gets away with it. No-one
in the opposition or the press or even teacher organizations points
out that dubious tests which an ad hoc bureaucratic apparatus has
minted have no proven learning value whatever. They also merely echo
private U.S. testing agencies which have made their testing schemes
a very profitable business in places like Texas - the home state of
the current dyslexic "education President".
That there is no evident
learning by these costly and time-consuming tests has not, however,
inhibited their expanding imposition. That their content is kept closed
from all independent examination by students, teachers and researchers
so they cannot be critically scrutinized indicates a massive indoctrination
apparatus - but who has noticed? That these tests hide behind an absolute
prohibition of reflective examination or interrogation of them by
teachers and students reveals an anti-learning project in principle,
but who has not acquiesced? How can any set of questions and answers
be education, as distinguished from coercive programming, when classroom
review of their meaning and students' responses to them are totally
forbidden? Yet no teaching professional organization has yet confronted
this regime.
The extraordinary fact
that these tests have not even an available model to study and rule
out all specific learning feedback to the students writing them demonstrates
as plainly as possible their bias against learning in the very regulating
structure of the enterprise. For exact and open corrective feedback
on performances is the basis of all learning.
The question arises. How
could all this get past any true profession whose vocation is education?
There have been complaints from the profession about their high-handed
imposition by government and the fear they cause in children. But
these complaints miss the much more basic fact that this regime is,
in principle, an attack on the nature of learning itself.
More evident to critics,
this regime also undermines what is most needed in schools - the essential
motivation of all learning, the curiosity and interest of the learner,
and the vocation of teachers to bridge to it in all they do. Rule
by generalized fear and anonymous forces is, instead, the terror-button
that this regime pushes at every step, which is revealingly in keeping
with the culture of fear now politically ascendant in the U.S. and
its sphere of influence. But the deeper structure of attack on learning
itself has been so overlooked by even teacher critics that one wonders
what is left that the profession stands for.
A profoundly disturbing
meaning emerges here. There has been little or no notice of the complete
confusion between programmed form-testing and education itself.
More precisely, there has been no distinction between the consciousness
of students and the lock-step of machines, or between assigned numbers
to performance of mechanical sequences and the life of the young mind
learning about the world and expressing independently literate responses.
Yet if these tests undermine
rather than enable the learning process, if an anti-educational logic
is built into every level of their prescription and processing, how
can professionals actively collaborate in enforcing them? For the
regime is structured to prevent learning and education. It
abolishes the first demand of all learning and scholarly excellence
- openness to the criticism and question of the educational community.
It rules out the very structure of all true learning advancement -
learning by exactly known mistakes. And it shields the incompetence
of the tests and their capacity to teach from all academic accountability
to learning standards.
There is a second-order failure in responding to these testing mechanisms
which is perhaps most disquieting of all. I have not seen one criticism
of these tests - and there are many - that exposes the contradictions
between their secretive mechanical apparatus and the nature of learning.
Instead, criticism forms behind market-style opinion polls of teachers
that do not reveal anything about learning. In this way, the profession
imitates the devices of politics instead of standing up for the vocation
of learning itself. It pains me to say this to the audience that has
invited me to speak. But teaching federations and colleges of education
as well as the ministry of education appear not to have been professional
about learning. If they were, they would have stood from the start
and in every classroom against a regime which prohibits the learning
process in the name of public education. The question arises. Why
is there not a strike for public education instead of higher teacher
salaries? Such a stand would resonate at a new level.
There is a lot of talk about basics. But it seems as if no-one in
the education system has gotten down to the basics of what learning
is so that they can distinguish it from a ritual of instant reactions
to closed-door questions with added number aggregates substituting
for the advance of knowing itself.
How has this happened?
I will come to the point on a very profound matter as directly as
I can. There is a mechanism of mass indoctrination and reduction of
the mind to observable uniform sequences which has long been at work
in the for-profit factory and office, and which now seeks to rule
"the educational industry" within the classroom itself.
But because we do not comprehend the inner logic of this corporate
method, we do not recognise its pseudo-scientific meaning - to abolish
the conditions of learning and teaching so as to substitute for them
the logic of industrial mechanics and the predictable functions of
servo-mechanisms.
This unseen mega-project
has masqueraded under legislative titles like "Educational Quality
Improvement Act" and "Educational Accountability Act".
The Orwellian language within which it is dressed expresses a general
malaise. It was, perhaps, no accident that in recent months the earliest
history of human civilisation was systematically destroyed by the
same transnational forces with no public outcry at the war-machine
crime.1 There is a life-blind mechanics now ruling by force
across the world, and its regulating form runs deeper than we have
seen in increasingly locked and pre-conscious assumptions.
The Inner Logic of Deprofessionalization and the Anti-Educational
Machine
Scientific method in itself
is the most useful instrument in the history of human evolution. But
like any set of dominant ideas which is applied beyond its proper
domain, scientific method can become a dangerous metaphysic if it
locks the mind within a total program of thought. The total program
of thought that seeks to regulate all that exists on the face of the
earth is, as we know, "the money sequence of value" - a
sequence in which inputs of money demand become outputs of maximally
more money demand for money investors.2 Scientific method
as a means of such a program mutates into a system that disaggregates
and re-aggregates the world as a vast money-making machine for rich
stockholders - "the soulless mega-machine", to use Lewis
Munford's apt phrase.
The first principle of
scientific method is that only externally observable, quantifiable
data count as information. This principle is beneficial as long
as it is not believed to be the ground of all knowledge. But if it
is believed that only what is externally observable and quantifiable
is real, then a momentous implication follows. Whatever is not
externally observable and quantifiable is ruled out as false or illusory.
B.F. Skinner went so far
as to assert that the inner lives of humans and their freedom to think
are illusions. This followed from his assumption that only what scientific
method validates is true. Here we see a principle of scientific method
turned into a metaphysic.
This reduction of all
reality to what is external and countable leads to "management
technology" - a scientific regime for controlling people in every
economic role. According to the doctrine, all behavioral outputs are
determined by conditioning inputs, and that is all there is to know.
A scientific schedule of behavioral re-enforcements - such as mass-conditioning
advertising or human resource management - is imposed on all systematically,
and anyone who deviates is conceived as "non-cooperative".
Contemporary economics
exemplifies this lockstep of thought. Its "scientific method"
presupposes an engineering model of understanding in which life requirements
have no place in any equation, and only self-maximizing profit and
consumer functions remain. Money prices and exchanges are the sole
medium of meaning. In consequence, human and environmental life are
ruled out of view as "externalities".
The second principle of
this scientific method concerns the order which externally observable
and quantifiable data must take. The underlying principle here is
that nothing counts as scientifically valid except invariant sequences
which are reproducible by others. For example, any life experience
which cannot be made exactly the same elsewhere is invalid because
it is "not replicatable". A personal transformation of view
which is not verifiable by others cannot register as meaningful. Such
uniformity of behaviour may apply to inanimate particles and protoplasms,
but to think that such predictable redundancy sets the bounds of
truth and reality is perfectly deranged.
Yet this mega-machine
view is now so dominant that education is assumed to be programmable,
predictable and testable with whatever does not fit the programming
system or the uniform testing mechanisms being ruled out as subversive
or invalid. Hence the perpetual call for "uniform standards"
really means reducing the world of learning to a one-size-fits-all
which is assumed by the unthinking group-mind to be a good thing.
When the meta-program's demands are idealized as Science, Technology
and Competitive Efficiency all at once, a very sinister pattern comes
to rule. The living mind is reconstructed as non-living software and
non-thinking behavioural repertoires are programmed into students
"just like a computer" - to use Ross Perot's battle-cry
for the promised "education Presidency" of George Bush Jr.
Students now are made, at best, to succeed in "making the grade"
of the globally homogenizing master system, or becoming social refuse.
The life of the mind of the next generation is thus effectively pithed,
which is in fact precisely the preconscious function of this ruling
paradigm - to produce mind-obedient cogs of the corporate money-sequence
system.
What above all does not
fit into this homogenizing reduction system is thinking life itself.
It is precisely individuated and creative and not the same
across places and times. But everywhere we find corporations, governments
and academics calculating all that exists in the terms only of formulae
of predictable repetition, which come back in the end to making money
into more money for those with more money than they need. The assembly-line
method of industrial production is the most famous and universalized
form of this program - a lock-step regime which most students must
eventually fit into in some form to survive in "the brutal global
market competition". To achieve ever greater economies of time
and motion, the successive phases of what is still called "education"
are made to mimic uniform assembly-line sequences which are prescriptively
broken into ever more controlled steps of detail-function - from Grade
1 curriculum and testing onto employment as scripted telemarketers
and servo-mechanism functions after graduation.
Every manufacturing system
follows the rules of this economic paradigm of "efficiency".
The "education industry" is no different. As "business
methods" increasingly penetrate education, life everywhere is
rapidly and "inevitably" made to conform as service and
consumption functions of the Global Machine. We see now the movement
of this universal mechanization moving into speed-up to condition
obedient routine at every level of thought with no time for anything
else. Although the compulsive conversion of the organic into the inorganic
was analysed by Sigmund Freud as "the death instinct", in
education it is now sold as "raising standards". The life
of learning itself is thus systematically reduced to the logic of
a centrally programmed hierarchy of multiple, graded assembly lines
ever more ubiquitously tested for controlled and prescribed outcomes.
There is underlying master
principle of rule. Every form of production and reproduction is
analysed into its constituent phases, and every step is cost-reduced
and fixed into controlled moments of money-producing circuits.
The factory assembly-line is the master plan of this program, itself
derived from the military system for total control by top-down command
and hierarchy presiding over exactly detailed and lock-stepped sequences
of mass training.
The public's schools in
this way become, as they have been structured from the beginning to
be, conditioning systems to produce graduate employees who efficiently
serve the system goal of maximizing profits for private business.
But "the education industry" is new insofar as it expropriates
the teaching functions of the classroom itself from professional educators
to mechanize their operations in accordance with an imposed central
plan which exactly follows the inner logic explained above.
Already the textbook
industry dominated by transnational U.S. corporations had turned curriculum
into a system-wide homogenization of mind by central curriculum prescriptions
providing a quasi-monopoly marketing site for their mass-products
designed and manufactured for the purpose of mass sales by no-controversy
pap. The teaching profession never complained about that, paving the
way for future corporate control. Elite teachers, instead, tailor-made
manuscripts to sell to branchplant offices as government-prescribed
texts (as I once did myself). Such a regime inexorably homogenizes
and dumbs down the teaching and learning process as a mass-conditioning
operation within which one fits to succeed because the academic freedom
to challenge, criticize or choose alternatives does not exist.
Next came the political
scheme to save public money on texts by mass government purchase and
hand-me-down books on the prescribed lists. Now students couldn't
even underline or annotate their books for dialogue and question on
the mind scripts. Preventing this independent interaction of students
with books unintentionally disables their learning, intellectual engagement
and long-term reflection on their contents almost as effectively as
burning them. So there has been a long history to the externally dictated
dumb-down of public education which has preceded the full-court press
on learning today by the edu-business model.
What is new today is that
public school systems have been invaded at other levels as their boundlessly
lucrative markets, training and consumer-conditioning opportunities
have become clear. Accordingly, a lot more of the school system has
been occupied - mass markets for computers in every classroom, corporate
sugar beverages in the halls, commercial ads on class-TV monitors,
and so on. Government defunding of public education paves the way
for corporate takeover of it. The entire vast budgets of public education
are now the target for takeover, as leaders of edu-commerce make very
clear.
There are two main steps
to the corporate occupation of the public schools - first to reduce
the teacher to programmable command functions enforced by ever more
detailed and uniform curricula sequences and mass-test mechanisms
to ensure system-wide compliance; and second, to replace the teacher
by new electronic commodities and centrally prescribed contents for
every step of the market conditioning process. In the end, all public
education funding going straight to corporations to build, equip and
manage schools is the pure-type ideal. This formula is already being
implemented in U.S. for-profit schools and Blair-Britain charter schools.
Ontario is on the same road now, and all of its recent "education
reforms" can be explained in the light of the master logic I
have spelled out above.
But listen to the leaders
of "the education industry themselves". They express the
underlying pattern as true believers, although with no understanding
of the regulating syntax of invasion of which they are symptoms.
The goal of the new "educational
maintenance organizations" was put starkly by the October 7,
1998 "Canadian Education Industry Summit". Its conference
news release glowed at the prospect of the public riches to be unlocked
and appropriated. "Last Year's summit introduced the $700 billion
education growth industry" of North America, it enthused. "This
education for profit industry will continue to grow." The Conference
featured sessions with titles like "Bandwidth - - Very Soon to
Replace the Classroom". Sessions made it clear that technology
was to be the justification to speed up privatization. Advice was
given on how to circumvent regulations and how to attack critics in
seizing this "fruit ripe for the picking".3 Not
mentioned were the places most needing education resources whose governments
had already been looted. As the major British NGO, Volunteer Overseas
Services has put it, lack of educational resources where they are
most needed in the Third World is "the most virulent epidemic
of modern times". For-profit education seeks public funds to
appropriate, not schools without funds.
Backing the corporate takeover of the public and university education
system is the World Bank. On the opening of its coincidentally timed
domination of the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, October
5-9, 1998, it issued a privatization manifesto on "world-wide
education reform" of universities. The World Bank paper spelled
out its program of "radical restructuring" in systematic
detail. Education decision-making, it says, must "shift not only
from government, but from higher education institutions - and especially
from faculty [teachers] - - [and from] inappropriate curricula - -
Performance budgeting will undoubtedly [be tied] - - to acceptance
of principles of - - rational [ie. self-maximising] actors who respond
to [monetary] incentives".4 Review these words from
the World Bank education planners. They advocate a complete takeover
of learning institutions and the teaching profession by the corporate
agenda - all decision-making, the disciplinary curricula, and the
educational vocation itself, which is to be replaced by monetary self-seeking
as overriding goal. Note too that these demands for market totalization
are prescribed in your face with no critical reflection, as with a
fanatic cult program.
Students, the Report states
with serene incompetence, are "consumers"(p.3) and should
pay "the full cost" of their service, and borrow at "market-set
bank rates". "Entrepreneurship on the part of institutions,
departments and individual faculty", it concludes, "is [already]
growing almost everywhere - - adding revenue to institutions and benefit
to society".5 Note, again, the stupefying ignorance
of the nature of education, and of the conditions required to enable
learning. This is an openly totalitarian program.
Local functionaries of
the corporate agenda are seldom so frank in their declarations. They
prefer the discourse of edu-speak which saturates schools and universities
with endless slogans of "innovation", "new challenges",
"the need to adapt to change", "required efficiencies",
"new freedoms", "choice", "entrepreneurship",
"learner centredness", "on-line education", "integration
with the workplace", "skills development", "performance
indicators", "accountability" and an inexhaustible
babble-flow of ideological spin words which the record shows mean
only one thing - to turn education into a set of services for profitable
corporate functions.
The defining assumption
of the educationally incompetent marketeers who demand the corporatization
of public and higher education is that all knowledge can be turned
into a commodity with a one-way process of delivery. The president
of Educom, a transnational corporate consortium, expresses this ruling
assumption very clearly. The depth of market enthusiasm married to
ignorance should not be underestimated in its will to rule for self
advantage. "The potential", this ed-com leader proclaims,
"to remove all human mediation [teachers and dialogue]
- - and replace it with automation - - is tremendous. Its gotta [sic]
happen".6
The Canadian federal government
actively promotes this transnational privatization of public education,
while denying they are doing so. One year after the World Bank privatization
manifesto, the monthly business relations organ for Canada's Department
of Foreign Affairs and International Trade pushed the stakes higher,
enthusing at the opportunities of "the $2 trillion global education
market", which it approvingly termed "an academic goldrush".7
Observe that the corporate agenda is here declared from the tax-paid
podium of the national government itself. Having slashed educational
funding for years with its junior partners, the neo-liberal state
calls for a business feeding frenzy on the public educational funds
that remain elsewhere, thereby promoting a reciprocal raid on Canada's
education budgets by the same transnational corporate forces as required
by the new regime of "free trade in services". "Educational
accountability" means, in fact, accountability to the global
corporate agenda at every level of its "control and delivery".
But first public learning institutions themselves must be re-engineered
to fit the program, as the public school and university systems have
been for over 10 years. Every step of the long arc of crisis travels
a trajectory of "education reform" towards an inconceivably
rich prize - the restructuring of all public and higher education
into a vastly lucrative and permanent for-profit market, with ongoing
mass outputs of publicly-financed trainees to serve it.
Ontario's own ministry
of education was at the forefront of abject collaboration of educational
bureaucrats with the corporate takeover of public schools and universities.
To his everlasting shame, Deputy Minister of Colleges and Universities,
Dr. Tom Brzutowski, said over a decade ago: "I contend that the
one global object of education must be for the people of Ontario to
create wealth [sic] - - export products in which our knowledge and
skills provide the value added [ie., profit margins] - - to develop
new services which we can offer in trade in the world market".8
As in any occupation by an alien power, Quislings are necessary to
proclaim the invasion as the national purpose.
The invasion does not
spare publicly funded research. The Canadian government has distributed
the following instruction to university Research Offices across the
country (emphases added): "Increasing competition for research
funding - - will demand that Canada identifies its research
strengths and capabilities to focus on those areas with highest
value and return on investment - - Priorities for applied
research are set by the marketplace via partnerships eg. industry
funds research that fits their priorities. - - Augmented private
sector participation in research priority setting will - - ensure
scientists have access to the appropriate market signals, are
aware of the technology requirements of industry, and can focus
their research appropriately".9
Reflect on the regulating
principles at work here beneath these many different assertions of
government and corporate policy. Public education and research is
to be:
(1) increasingly appropriated
by "the private sector" to maximize corporate private profit;
thereby also
(2) making schools and
universities increasingly "accountable" to corporate demands;
and thus
(3) ensuring the production
of student graduates who are trained to serve private corporate requirements
"to make Canada competitive in the global market".
This is what the code phrases of "private-sector partnerships",
"accountability", and "outcome-based education"
mean beneath the rhetorical resonance. An historically unprecedented
expropriation and colonization of trillions of dollars of public wealth
and of populations trained from childhood on to serve the corporate
agenda can be locked in bit by bit as each terrain, function
and service of the schooling system becomes subordinated to the corporate
agenda with the collaboration of the educational profession. The consequence
of irreversibility is prescribed by transnational trade regulations
which effectively prohibit government recovery of any privatized-for-profit
sector.
All of this has been accomplished
in under 10 years. Administrators ape corporate managerial methods,
researchers are afraid of speaking out lest they jeopardise their
funding or corporate publishers, and - in clearest exhibition of the
anti-educational agenda - scientific results are repressed if they
are contra-indicative of what corporate funders want.
What we are seeing, in
short, is the step-by-step fulfilment of a many-sided corporate plan
to convert public and higher education to its permanent and guaranteed
profitable exploitation, with the unstated terminus ad quem
of this process the reproduction of all present and future students
as consumers and employees whose desires for commodities and willingness
to compete for corporate functions are imprinted reliably into their
neuronal processes from the moment they enter school to their graduation.
The Contradictions Between Corporate and Educational Principles
The response from public
authority has been by and large to abandon the public interest as
indistinguishable from the needs of market corporations. This collapse
of mind-set is selected for by the structural fact that party leaderships
are constrained to compete for the favour of the corporate press and
the financial support of those who advertise in them so as to gain
public recognition. Sustaining this political surrender of governments
to corporate control is an ideological assumption that has been pervasively
dinned into the public mind: the metaphysical belief that the market
works by an "invisible hand" which by the laws of supply
and demand automatically translates corporate self-maximization into
fulfilment of the common interest. All that is required is for educators
and the public in general to "work harder" to help national
corporations compete.
This metaphysic is the
ruling superstition of our era, as I explain in my recent books. But
it is programmed into students by teachers themselves as an
unexamined assumption of their teaching and their curricula. Educators
in this way miseducate students into unquestioning belief in the very
external forces that are invading public education systems for anti-educational
purposes. It has been convenient for opportunist careerists at all
levels of the system to become true believers in the proposition that
education's primary function is to "enable students to compete
in the global marketplace".
While critics have protested
such a reductionist goal for public education, they have failed to
discern a much deeper problem - the contradictions in principle
between the market paradigm and sound education. Let us consider
these concealed contradictions which reveal the corporate agenda for
education as not only invasive and incompetent, but absurd.
(1) The impartiality
of good reasoning and research in education requires educators to
address problems independent of their money payoff, to penetrate behind
conventional and conditioned beliefs, and to permit no external interest
to deter learned inquiry from the quest for knowledge and truth. In
contradiction to this principle, the ruling principle of the market
is interest-biased by definition - seeking to maximise private
money returns as a regulating principle of thought, and selecting
against any knowledge or advance of knowledge which does not fulfil
or which conflicts with this goal.10 Thus its entailments
for education are: Do not address any problem which does not promise
opportunity for financial returns. Reject all evidence which are contra-indicative
to profitable results. Reduce the cost of work input to the minimum
possible. Always represent your product as unique and without flaw.
The consumer is always right. Do you recognize these very patterns
of market values already at work in your students?
(2) The free dissemination
of knowledge required by education repudiates the demanding of
a money price for the knowledge communicated to students or exchanged
with colleagues, and the best educators and students work extra hard
hours without expectation of monetary returns for the sake of the
education itself. In direct opposition to this regulating value of
public education, private patent and copyright control of every piece
of knowledge and information that a corporation can legally monopolise
is enforced, and the maximum price people are willing and able to
pay is imposed on every service which can be identified, with no service
to anyone if it is not money-profitable.11
Consider, then, a place
of education operated in accordance with this market principle. It
would price all learning transactions, require its agents to do no
more than required by commercial contract with student buyers, and
marketize the school's and library's information for its profit. Even
if the price system is set aside, dissemination in the market is by
conditioning and soliciting appetites, as opposed to disseminating
what can be substantiated by evidence and reason.
(3) Independent literacy
and problem-solving capabilities are required of teachers and
students for recognition of either's educational attainment, and the
value of each's recognised education corresponds to what each knows
and can do autonomously. In profound contradiction, the agent
in the competitive market requires only money demand - which establishes
all market value - to claim right to the good. Thus at the macro level,
the corporate market develops more and more products and services
to do people's thinking and acting for them. This increasing
dependency is formally recognized by neo-classical doctrine's foundational
principle of "non-satiety", or unlimited consumer wants
for services and commodities.
Yet if a student or a
teacher voluntarily exchanged for any price that he or she could get
for the goods - course essays, tests and assignments - he or she as
a student would be expelled as a cheat.
Are commercial services
for passing secret-content tests the lawful new edu-market to come?
(4) In any educational
institution worthy of the concept, problems of evidence or reason
are discovered, opened to question and critically discussed to
educate understanding, with no top-down interference permitted. In
contradiction to this defining method of education, the corporate
institution commands from the top what is and is not to be communicated
by its agents, rules out any question in even its research divisions
which does not comply with these orders, and repudiates any who transgress
this chain of command.
It is exactly with (4),
however, that school administrators have joined external corporate
interests in militating against the essential conditions of learning
and discovery within the schools themselves by imposing a corporate
managerial model which undermines the authority of the essential educational
standards of critical inquiry and academic freedom. The schools in
this way have become structured as places of conditioned obedience
and indoctrination rather than learning - as we may see from their
anti-intellectual atmosphere and culture of commandism.
Even professional education
researchers do not see the these ultimate conflicts between the principles
of the market and public education. Thus the conclusion of the Peel
University Partnership Study (a multi-year investigation, 1996-2001,
involving the Peel Board of Education-York University and OISE) concludes
under the heading, "Moving Forward", with the question:
"What kinds of curriculum and ways of bringing it to life in
the classroom can we create that will energize and stimulate a
creative and competitive economy?" Insofar as educators so
assume the global market agenda for education as the prime reason
of education, they effectively assist the corporate occupation of
our schools, and universities. Our deepest problem may be the internalization
of the global corporate agenda by teachers and administrators as their
higher goal, an engineering of the soul proclaimed by the profession's
leaders themselves. Is it because they have lost the meaning of education
itself, and thus offer a vacuum for the agenda to occupy?
Since educators are, in fact, obliged to teach from a standpoint of
education, and not the private demands of external interests whose
regulating concern is money gain, it follows that anyone in any educator
position who advocates or serves this anti-educational goal should
be recognised and identified as a violator of education's standards
and integrity.
Yet in the face of this obligation of public educators, the new Ontario
College of Teachers has served up an official Standards of Practice
for the Teaching Profession which is a normative document without
principled substance. An aimless list of mostly feel-good phrases,
its diffuse coordinates provide no footing of defined educational
standard which would rule out the corporate agenda from subjugating
public education.
Only at page 6 do we get
any mention of knowledge or a subject matter. The most basic values
and capabilities of any education - reading, writing and reasoning
in one or other form - are never mentioned. The lifeblood liberty
of reasoned thought and imagination in any field of learning and discovery
that we know, academic freedom, is kept out of the statement
of standards altogether. Education that could stand up to an external
power seeking to subvert learning and inquiry to its educationally
incompetent demands is not available to self-understanding. These
"standards of practice for the teaching profession", in
short, could have been cobbled by a corporate edu-server.12
Again I ask, has the profession
lost its soul - to advance the learning of the next generation in
the codes of meaning won over centuries against tyrannies of the mind?
Has the profession forgotten what it stands for - the life of the
mind and imagination educated to the best that has ever been thought
and said?
Regrounding in the Meaning of Education
No educational standard
now protects the free pursuit of learning and question in the schools.
Not even the standards of critically disciplined inquiry in established
subject fields trump principals and pressure groups' right to repress.
The authority of learning has been inverted into its opposite. It
is for this reason that the adventure of learning-why, which young
people yearn for from the age of speech, now confronts us instead
as student boredom and stupefaction. This inverted regime has not
yet been self-understood. The public education system itself appears
to have lost the bearings of public education.
The objection may be -
Who knows how to define educational standards? Or, who in the
end can teach anyone anything? Or, knowledge is all relative to contingent
world views. And so on. Postmodernism and relativism are the doctrinal
leaders here, and have deceived a lot of people with an incoherent
jargon of plurality which represents itself as the moving line of
freedom and novel thought. Yet, ironically, they are merely theoretical
correlatives of the consumer market in which desire and bizarre difference
rule out integrity of meaning. All these variations on the loss of
moral compass symptomize a deeper problem. The corporate market culture
has ceased to be instrumental to material human well-being, but has
come instead to rule the mind itself as a closed program - the program
of monetary value-adding as the ultimate meaning of life.
In truth, the guiding
principle of education is definable. It has been lost, however, by
an organizational drift to serve market demand as the final purpose
of life. But genuine education, as we will see below, is opposite
in principle to commodity sale to others for maximum revenue returns
to oneself. Whatever form it takes, all genuine education - as its
Latin root "educare" suggests - causes its students to
gain a better comprehension of the world by codes of meaning which
bear the best that has yet been discovered. Whatever interferes
with the mission of education and the life-value it bears on any other
ground than education does not belong in a place of education - whether
it be the corporate agenda, the school principal's use of power, or
inertia of mind. The student is there to internalise this vocation
of education that distinguishes civilized humanity, and to advance
this true value adding: extending and deepening life capabilities
of understanding.
Unfortunately, schools
have long been rather anti-intellectual places, promoting authoritarians
as administrators and graduating a teacher and premier whose favorite
book was Mr. Silly. Yet the contradictions between education's
open pursuit of knowledge and learning, on the one hand, and of dominant
external interests seeking to impose their monetary agenda, on the
other, is not a lost cause. On a legal level, "commercial solicitations"
in schools can be argued as contrary to the mission of the school
and provincial Education Acts. More securely, rules protecting learning
and knowledge advance can be enshrined (as they are in universities)
in collective agreements and in the institution's calendars, and be
effectively appealed to against any interference with teaching or
learning on other than academic grounds. The baseline of the institution
is uplifted, and its instructors and students are released from the
corporate bureaucracy's chain of command in educational matters. Instead,
truth and knowledge are recognized as the educational authority.
Now the obligation to respect the historically won rules of reasoning,
evidence and their free expression before all else is prescribed as
the condition of acceptable behaviour in a place of education. None
may obstruct or repress inquiry without being in recognised violation
of the constitutional objective of the learning institution. Learning
is the authority, not the administration, or consumers' desires, or
the corporate agenda.
The norm of free inquiry
is the very basis of authentic education and learning, and has been
won over centuries of the human mind struggling to achieve shared
understanding not imprisoned by dominant special interests and powers
to harm those who disagree. How can such an educational norm be enforced?
The standard definition of the right to academic freedom in university
constitutions and university-faculty contracts states: "The University
is committed to the pursuit of truth, the advancement of learning
and the dissemination of knowledge. Academic freedom is the freedom
to examine, question, teach, and learn, and it involves the right
to investigate, speculate, and comment without deference to prescribed
doctrine, as well as the right to criticize the University and society
at large".
The current executive
director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, James
Turk, further spells out this meaning as follows: "- - there
can be critical appraisals of ideas, actions, policies, products,
processes and theories unconstrained by conventional wisdom, powerful
interests, accepted knowledge, dominant paradigms, custom, habit,
or tradition - - without fear of retribution, discipline, discrimination
or eventual termination of employment because of exercise of this
right".13
The effective norm of
free speech and inquiry is not only the difference between a dictatorship
and a democracy. It is also the difference between an institutional
structure of indoctrination and a place of education. The experience
I first had as a teenager going to university - the sense of being
let out of a kind of prison - remains vivid in my mind today. The
experience occurred at a new level and in a new way when I left my
work as a secondary school teacher to qualify for university teaching.
I can testify from many years of experience at both that codified
protection of academic freedom makes a decisive difference in the
learning situation every moment - in the classroom, out of the classroom,
and in preparation for the classroom. Because the pursuit of knowledge
and learning are freed from external repression, accountability shifts
from serving a bureaucratic hierarchy to serving the advancement of
learning and knowledge as ends-in-themselves.
The culture of free inquiry
makes the difference between going-through-the-motions in an anti-intellectual
routine and being able to question and investigate at a progressively
deeper level of learning engagement - in my judgement, starting at
the age of speech. My experience over almost 40 years of teaching
at all levels is that even the students who have not yet chosen the
demands of thinking through soon stop kicking up and being bored when
they see how interesting the action of free inquiry is.
The authority of learning
is borne by three champions - the learned, the learning process and
the learner joining in one life-field of advancing understanding which
cannot be trumped by any other demand. Humanity has taken its entire
evolution and history to get this far, and not even the principal
or the director of education should have the right to stand in the
way, any more than the police may break up a seminar because it is
perceived to be "uncooperative with authority". The sole
ground for intervention has to be the violation in some way of truth
or the pursuit of truth. Only with this freedom of cooperative inquiry
and the advance of learning as the determining authority will the
schools be educational, and the learning process alive.
In approaching this basic
task of public education, there is a very deep fact that needs to
be recognised to comprehend fully its importance in our global society
today. Corporate culture is structured against the advancement
of knowledge and learning because the lines of corporate command and
market competition have no criteria of knowledge, truth or literacy
to which they are accountable. As a result, society-wide assertions
and commercials are false, inflated or outlandish. Facts are repressed
and denied as a matter of course. Basic logical or grammatical construction
are overridden at will. You can look in vain through every corporate
charter and the "global information economy" to find a single
measure whereby knowledge can be told from falsehood, or truth from
propaganda.
Yet the pervasive cognitive
slippage of the global market's communications systems do not occur
to its corporate leadership as a problem. This is because the global
market is a very different kind of value system. It recognizes money-demand
alone as its guide and goal. Not even documentation of life-and-death
news is an issue of truth telling, but a vehicle of entertainment
to sell audiences to advertising sponsors. Business and corporate
representatives are, it follows, far from competent to enter "partnerships"
with places of education - let alone as commanders of educational
priorities and methods. Their incessantly repeated claim that schools
and universities must "adapt to the new knowledge economy"
is unable even to distinguish between knowledge and indoctrination,
or between teachers and electronic circuits of transmission. Consider
the systematic depth of ignorance that is at work here. Why is this
pervasive educational incompetence not challenged by educators head-on?
This is why teachers should
become proactive in standing for their profession and for learning
in the classroom - by revealing and explaining the corporate market
culture of self-bias and falsehood wherever its claims bear on reading,
writing and reasoning and subject disciplines, which is almost everywhere.
In this way, learning can move by the light of educated analysis,
reasoning and informed imagination to fulfil the task they are meant
to - public education.
No misrule can stand up
to such scrutiny for long. Public understanding cannot be left by
default to corporate mass-entertainment systems which select against
the standards of education by their nature. Yet even now, corporate
advertising vehicles wrapped in disconnected news events still misguide
teacher comprehension of reality, and are even used as information
sources in classrooms. In the end, we might say, public education
confronts in the corporate regime seeking to subjugate it its ultimate
test as public education.
Taking Back the Classroom by the Authority and Profession of Learning
Let me move beyond the
debasement of education to the "real basics" to which the
public education system and the teaching profession need to commit
to if they are to be true to their meaning.
(1) Sound education
lies in the multiple codes of reading, writing, and reasoning in the
traditional subject matters, and creative understanding and expression
in the arts.
(2) Education in and out
of subject matters is always defined by the learning it enables.
More exactly, there is one inner logic of all education whatever,
and that is that it enables a greater range of capability of understanding
and expression in those who participate in it. This is the touchstone
to guide us in all that we do as teachers, and do not do.
(3) Educational value
can be assessed in every dissemination of subject matter, question
or answer by the life capability or understanding it advances further
than without it.
We can see how much of
what goes on in the schools is ruled out as of nil or negative educational
value by these criteria. Examples which come to mind are redundant
busy work, principal and teacher positioning to enforce non-educational
commands, and exclusion of provocative issues and questions deemed
to be controversial.14
In a real place of education,
the professional is the one who knows her stuff, stands for
the knowledge process she has learned and has been certified for knowing
by experts, and self-directs in the fields of expertise she has learned
to be self-standing on. To know a discipline or a code of meaning
of a subject matter a professional teaches is the necessary condition
of being a professional. But this baseline of the discourse of professionalism
is almost never mentioned. The intellectual challenge of the subject
matter and the need to be up to it, moving on the edge of its forward
meaning, aware of and open to the deep simple questions is never alluded
to in any public teaching document I've seen.
The reason teachers are
not treated as professionals is that they do not stand up as professionals:
that is, people who know their subject matters as professionals in
its understanding, and demand that learning advance is the regulating
standard of whatever they do, and demand that learning advance is
the regulating standard of whatever they accept from anyone. This
is respect for the profession's standards. Yet I have read hundreds
of pages pro-and-con government policy on education, many thousands
of pages on primary and secondary education policy and on the recent
testing regime, and I have not once seen standards of learning or
academic freedom mentioned.
Professionals and those
who teach professionals in colleges of education are both fooling
themselves unless they institute the authority of learning and standards
of academic freedom as a first principle of the teaching and learning
process. All the way down. Otherwise we are not professionals, but
become paid indoctrinators.
The other dimension of
the teaching professional is the preparation and specialised knowledge
involved in not just knowing, but teaching what one knows to a younger
generation. There are mountains of educationese on this derivative
function of the teacher, and it almost never relates it back to the
subject disciplines being taught. That is what one would expect from
an indoctrinating process. It represses questions of the doctrines
being taught, and puts all the emphasis on the how of indoctrination
- the authority of superiors not of the subject matter itself, and
the conditions required for the injection of predictable repertoires
reproducible on demand - for example, financial inputs into the system,
teacher status, physical structures, parental socioeconomic status,
first language facility, and so on.15 This is all the documents
I have read from the OSSTF and others talk about. The meaning or
truth of the prescribed curriculum and its centralized testing is
effectively out of bounds to discuss.
That is why what I am
saying here about this meaning is so unfamiliar. Indoctrination never
questions itself, and it stays that way by fencing off inquiry regarding
all of the demands of thought obedience it prescribes from the centre.
At its height of closing the mind, it tests all the minds in timed
performance and monopolizes control over all of the questions and
answers so that no deeper question can arise. What you cannot see
cannot be discussed. Yet which professional has even raised this indoctrinating
method as an issue?
The greatest irony of
this capitulation to centrally prescribed routine is that it rules
out the very motivation to learn that is the necessary condition of
all learning. That is why so many students are apathetic and mutinous.
They are being prohibited the direct conditions of education and free
inquiry. I've told students throughout my teaching career that intelligence
is interest. Find your interest, and you'll find your intelligence.
Nothing interests pre-pubescent and adolescents so much as open inquiry
- the interrogation of what is normally accepted as well as finding
out some secret they did not know before. These are the moving lines
of their learning and their motivation to learn. But both are so hedged
around by the school's authority of rank and age in place of the authority
of learning and freedom of critical question that their minds are
"turned off". In place of learning comes the need for one-way,
television-style entertainment.
With the very young and
pre-adolescent, the why's never stop to begin with if the teaching
relates to the vital experience of finding out about the world and
all its wonders. This is where the motivational dimension of the professional
teacher comes in. Teaching the next generation in any subject matter
is as exciting and sacred a trust as the evolved human mind itself.
The good teacher must
not only know how to explain the subject matter inside out, down to
the most basic questions the freshest mind can ask. Profession comes
from the etymological root, to profess, as in a vow. The vow includes
telling the truth as best one can know it, sharing that truth as a
teacher as best one can explain to the young mind not knowing it,
and keeping all of it open to question about its meaning.
For the adolescent, the
school should become - as it is in all the best places of education
- a hotbed of learning controversy where the advancement of knowledge
and learning is the ruling standard of the action. For the younger,
the wondering-why needs to be led by the professional's questions
and explanations to open the mind to all that can found out from centuries
of investigation.
True accountability is
to the learning dynamic and to the knowledge of what is said. One
is not accountable to a principal or a parent or even the student,
but to the love and teaching of what the most learned have come to
understand, and to the most self-governed understanding and expression
of it the student can learn. The high adventure of being human as
the only being which can learn without limit is our species vocation.
Insofar as psychologists, business representatives, parents, or administrators
can help in this public education trust for which teachers are professionals
in bridging one generation to the next in an ever growing shared love
of learning and its individual expression, they too have a role. But
the roles of all must defer to the only true educational authority
- the learnedly open process of learning itself. The rest is distraction,
or a mask for indoctrination.
My pessimism is that teachers
and the colleges of education teaching them have lost their bearings,
that they are not given to the learning vocation but to career self-advancement
in an anti-educational game where corporately-financed political parties
use them to turn public education into a business servo-mechanism.
My optimism is that the
boredom of the students, the demoralisation of the teachers and the
bureaucratic sludge of the discourse so obviously signal a system
that has lost its internal direction that the people who care about
the life of the mind will wake up and stand for education all the
way down. It is time to serve only the advancement of learning in
the students we are teaching. Nothing worthwhile will be lost. It
is time to draw the line for learning and against anything from business,
politicians, parents or principals which obstructs it. This is what
being a teaching professional entails.