A Few Modest Prophecies:
The WTO, Globalization and the Future of Public Education
David Geoffrey Smith
Department of Secondary Education
University of Alberta
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Abstract
This paper deconstructs events leading up to the civil unrest at the
recent World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Seattle WA by examining
the effects of neo-liberal social and economic reforms in Britain and
New Zealand. It is suggested that the Seattle civic action is a
reflection of a new kind of broadly based social consciousness on the
part of citizens who are demanding greater transparency and
accountability from global organizations, the operations of which deeply
affect the lives of ordinary people. The road ahead may see new
manifestations of anarchy and unrest as Enlightenment models of human
reasoning fall away with no new forms of authority able to currently
carry the day.
Seattle
Witnessing Charlene Barshevsky berate delegates at one of the plenary
sessions of the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle was
enough to send a chill down the spine of any person burdened with a
sense of history. As Chief U.S. Trade Representative to the talks, and
host convenor, Ms. Barshevsky chastised members for their inability to
arrive at consensus on any of the major issues before them. In a
menacing tone, she declared that, as program convenor, she had the
right, "...and I will use that right," to alter the
decision-making process to make it "smaller, more efficient, more
exclusive" (CNN 1999). That same day, the Organization of African
Unity threatened to walk out, protesting, "There is no transparency
in the proceedings and African countries are being marginalized and
generally excluded on issues of vital importance"(Morton 1999,
A12).
The Seattle meeting had been proclaimed as an opportunity to plan the
globalization agenda for the next millennium. Elimination of trade
barriers between nations and states was identified as the top priority,
to enable the free flow of goods and services in a way that would ensure
the prosperity of all the world's people. Everything from biotechnology
to financial services, from clothing manufacture to post-graduate
education, was to be subject to negotiation under new liberalized trade
rules designed to provide the least impediment to social, cultural and
capital flows. The collapse of the talks, at least on their public face,
may point to the essential futility of such a vision, and may also mark
a fundamental turning point in the rhetoric of globalization that has
been in the air for the last ten years or so.
As John Gray of the London School of Economics has pointed out, the
contemporary globalization vision represented by the WTO is primarily an
American inspiration, and is a remnant of the eighteenth century
Enlightenment ideal of universal reason, transposed to economic theory.
According to this view, reason is a universal quality, and by instilling
it everywhere, or better, by uncovering it everywhere, by allowing it to
flourish freely without restraint, universal concord and human happiness
will be the result. In Gray's words, the United States is "the
world's last great Enlightenment regime" (Gray 1999, 2).
Unfortunately, or fortunately, too much has happened since the
eighteenth century to support this utopian dream any longer. All
evidence suggests that reason cannot be ripped out of its social,
cultural and political contexts, and that although reason, as the
capacity to think and make sense of life, may indeed be a universal
quality, people and cultures make sense in their own ways, according to
the circumstances that life has laid before them. Unless this situated
character of reason is acknowledged, totalitarianism can be the result,
as the second last great Enlightenment regime, the Soviet Union, amply
demonstrated: ownership of the technical and political means to control
the manifest rules of reason comes to rule the game. Henceforth,
everyone else can be labeled unreasonable, unstable, wild,
underdeveloped, feminine, weak, niggardly, primitive, childish,
immature, and ideological.
Globalization
The mantra of globalization that has enchanted conservative economists
since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher may be, instead of
a celebration of enlightenment, a sign of a supernova, which, according
to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a star that suddenly
increases very greatly in brightness because of an explosion ejecting
most of its mass." In other words, we may be witnessing, if only in
its early stages, the burning out of a two hundred-year-old vision.
Look at what has happened in Britain and New Zealand since the
proponents of American-style free trade engineered their social and
political designs in the name of global competitiveness. The examples
are instructive for Canadians, given the way the governments of Alberta
and Ontario have taken them as worthy of imitation. Not only have the
original political proponents of neo-liberal economics been voted out of
office in both Britain and New Zealand, but they have left in their wake
radically reordered societies that now bear the seeds of increased
social anarchy because of intensified inequities, the loss of the middle
class, and people's widespread feeling of being shut out of due
political process.
In Britain, "labor market mobility" became one of the keynote
terms of Thatcherite reform. Essentially it was a gloss to cover a
plethora of reconfigurations in the relation of labor to production. To
be competitive globally, companies needed to be more efficient, which
meant dismantling the ability of labor unions to define the conditions
of work. Work now tended to be contract-based, "just-in-time",
without health or pension benefits. The day of career labor with one or
two firms was ended.
The instability and insecurity that these reforms inaugurated was
reflected most clearly in the quality of family life, once regarded as
the mainstay of a healthy British culture. A recent study by Matthew
D'Ancona (1996) shows the strong connection between a deregulated labor
market and family breakdown. If families have to constantly move to
where the jobs are, and accept increasingly lower wages, what is
disrupted is the capacity of family members to bond with one another and
with members of their surrounding communities. By 1991 Britain had the
highest divorce rate of any country in the European Union (EU),
comparable only with the United States.
Another striking feature in Britain was the unexpected creation of a
large underclass of workless people. Grey (1999, 237) cites a study in
the Observer (January 10, 1997, 10) by Paul Gregg and Jonathon Wadsworth
of the London School of Economics showing that from 1975 to 1994, the
percentage of non-pensioner households in which not a single person was
working, rose from 6.5 percent to 19.1 percent. In Britain today, about
one in five households (not counting pensioners) has no active income
earner. This represents a magnitude of social disenfranchisement unknown
in any other EU country. One of the chief factors in the emergence of
the underclass was the Thatcherite move to privatize all municipal
housing, which ironically tended to create a new form of dependency
culture. If you have no place to live, you have no place to prepare and
nurture yourself for work. Then if you do find work, you cannot afford
any available housing; so work itself becomes counter-productive.
Free Market Reforms
One of the most compelling contradictions of current free-market reform
is that it works to weaken all of the traditional social institutions on
which it has depended in the past. In Britain, the disintegration of
public education is clearly linkable to the decline of simple civility
and a sense of the common good. The shift in educational policy making
from pedagogically oriented thinking to market oriented thinking, driven
by concern for knowledge and skills acquisition over character formation
and civic responsibility, has produced an "enterprise culture"
that is hyper-competitive and socially divisive (Morris 1994, 21).
In 1997 the Conservative Party lost to a new Labor Party that now has as
its mandate the rebuilding of social-democratic values in the context of
a society in which the historic institutions and policies of social
democracy have been almost completely eroded. As John (1999, 22-54) has
pointed out, neo-liberal, free-market globalization is essentially, deep
in its inherent nature, anti-democratic, and thereby contains within
itself the seeds of its own destruction. If the link between politics
and economics is elided, such that economic theory holds no
accountability to the peoples and places in which it is enacted, social
anarchy and violence can be virtually assured, as people's need for a
sense of participation in the work of life-making begins to come into
play.
Given that much political and economic leadership in Canada in recent
years has taken its lead from the neo-liberal, free-trade globalization
agenda of New Zealand (which took its cue from Margaret Thatcher), it is
instructive to examine the social effects of those policies, especially
now that the successive political parties that brought them into being
have been thrown out of office as of November 1999.
The most profound change in moving New Zealand from a social democratic
state to a state with its eyes on the new globalization agenda was to
open the economy to unregulated capital flows, which in turn conferred
on transnational capital an effective veto over public policy. As Jane
Kelsey (1995, 5) describes it, within a period of ten years, virtually
all aspects of public service had been converted to a free market model.
Public hospitals were changed to commercial enterprises and compelled to
compete with private suppliers of medical care. Education was
restructured, with responsibility for the delivery of educational
services devolved to local school boards. Schools levied fees for their
services and were required to supplement their budgets by commercial
activities. Entitlement to welfare benefits was severely cut. Economic
and political power shifted outside the rule of the central state into a
kind of privatization of power.
By 1991, almost twenty percent of the New Zealand population lived below
the poverty line, and as Kelsey notes, the only areas of growth in the
public sector were police, courts and prisons. This turn to a
preoccupation with public security is characteristic of all societies
that have ridden the free market globalization agenda since the 1980s
under the guidance of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
the predecessor of the WTO. According to John Grey (1999, 44), "The
principal cost of New Zealand's experiment has been a loss of social
cohesion. Its political aftershock has been a meltdown in which the
electoral system was repudiated and all the major parties have been
fragmented."
In drawing attention to these examples, the point is not to launch into
a nostalgic drive for a return to an earlier day. Not only is that
impossible, but it ignores the fundamental changes that have taken place
in the world picture, especially since the 1970s. Contemporary
globalization theory came into being largely as a consequence of two
factors, the computer technology revolution, which brought into being
profound changes in the way business could be conducted, and, later, the
end of the Cold War. By the late 1970s Euro-American firms began to move
off-shore to capitalize on cheap labor in new hi-tech production plants.
The "Asian Miracle" nations were able to produce goods more
efficiently and cheaply than their American counterparts. And computers
made possible the virtualization of international finance, such that
national and state governments became unprecedentedly vulnerable to the
ebbs and flows of money markets. There is absolutely no possibility
going back to life B.C. (Before Computers).
If the demonstrations on the streets of Seattle against the WTO mean one
thing, it may be that ordinary citizens have begun to declare that
globalization theory needs to be publicly demystified. The calls for
greater transparency in the operations of the WTO, such as that of the
Organization of African Unity, speak of the way that more and more
people feel that they are being excluded from decisions that will
ultimately and deeply affect their lives, in terms of fundamental issues
like security of place, working conditions, and the possibility of
holding on to a future dream for themselves, their families, their tribe
or nation.
Contradictions
What will be revealed through the work of demystification, however, is a
sleeping giant contradiction that at present no one seems happily
inclined to awaken, which is why the times are very dangerous, and why
violence and anarchy may be the dominant realities of the next twenty
years or so. The contradiction resides in the fact that democracy and
radical free market globalization are completely incompatible entities.
This has been true historically since the very beginning of the
internationalization of markets in their current form in the nineteenth
century. The tension within the contradiction will become even more
pronounced in the Western industrialized world, because there, the
illusion of the link between freedom of markets and freedom of persons
has been consistently taught as common sense, even while market freedom
wrought social and cultural havoc everywhere else in the world. So
people in the West, and maybe especially young people, are now gradually
waking up to the fact that for generations they have been lied to - lied
to by their elders, by their teachers, and by their politicians. There
may be no more shattering experience than the experience of betrayal,
and its byproducts are rage, paranoia, the desire for vengeance, and
various forms of vigilantism as individuals and groups struggle to take
control of their lives after the loss of trust.
The Role of Teachers
Teachers and others actively involved in public education may have an
important and even unique role to play in the future as it unfolds. This
role can be said to emerge straight from the heart of teaching itself.
It has something to do with what seasoned, mature and successful
teachers begin to understand after years of experience living and
working with young people, and standing in witness to human life as it
opens out in everyone's mutual presence. And that is that a "good
life" together has certain normative requirements, certain
essential necessities, without which those more cynical students will
charge their failing teacher to "Get a life!"
What are those normative requirements? In brief, it can be claimed with
some certainty that a successful classroom is a place where each student
feels that indeed they have a place; a place, over time, where
relationships can be trusted, where inner dreams as well as demons can
be shared without ridicule by both teachers and students alike, where
individual differences of color, creed and origin are seen as
contributive to a shared future whose final character is not for anyone
in the present to know completely, except as a foretaste, yet the
quality of which will depend on how those differences are negotiated in
the "now" of everyday experience.
The foundational ethic of those negotiations will arise from a deep
awareness that the myth of the rational autonomous self, which has
anchored the self identity of Western civilization for the last three
hundred years or so, from Protestant individualism through Enlightenment
rationalism, is indeed a myth, not a fact, and that a far more profound
truth may be that there is no Self without Others, no Me without You.
Instead of Descartes' private enterprise model of epistemological and
ontological certainty, "I think therefore I am," today it may
be more appropriate to say "We are, therefore I am." I am
always born into a community, a tradition, and a way of life, which is
always already present before me, and without which my life could not be
possible. Of course I can, indeed must, work to change the conditions
into which I am born, if they seem unfair, cruel, dull, lifeless, but I
cannot begin without reference to them, so that it is always work with
others. Without communities, individuals die, from loneliness, from an
alienated relation to something larger than themselves, or from the most
common disease of private enterprise culture, namely the delusion of
self-enclosure.
Teachers in public education today are caught in the center of a social,
political and cultural whirlwind, as broader forces contend for the
right to interpret the world to the young, and it is not clear what the
outcome of the contentions will be. Much of what is falling away in
public education had to fall away, such as teacher dominated
instruction, and the excessive specialization of teacher discourse in
the name of professionalism, which only served to alienate teachers from
common sense and from the ordinary people they are called to serve. The
central crisis of identity for teachers today, however, and in the near
future, will reside in the question of whether or not they can find a
creative way through the dominant conceit of their received tradition,
which is the very same conceit that drives the globalization agenda of
the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International
Monetary Fund, and which is currently destroying not just public
education but the very idea of a public. And that is the conceit of
Western culture's specific form of reason being translated into specific
institutional forms (like the public school and the globalized financial
system) in the name of universal reason.
Conclusions
What make the times so precarious is the increasingly recognized
untenability of the Western conceit even while there is no other logic
or voice that seems capable of coming forward to secure the globalizing
human community as a community. But maybe that is the point, which is
the need for a new kind of dialogue amongst the world's people regarding
the conditions of a shared future. The logic of global competitiveness
is nothing other than the logic of war,1 and increasingly thoughtful
people around the world may soon be called upon to fight it for a more
common survival. In the aftermath, teacherly wisdom may have some
important things to say about how to live together, better.
Notes
1 This insight was suggested to me by a remark of Ursula Franklin at a
conference
organized by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, on the
theme,
Universities in the Public Interest," held in Ottawa, Ontario,
October 29-31, 1999.
Franklin said in a public address, "Global competitiveness is the
practice of war."
References
CNN. 1999. Coverage of the World Trade Talks, Seattle WA, December 3rd.
D'Ancona, M. 1997. The Ties that Bind. London: Social Market
Foundations.
Gray, J. 1999. False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. London:
Granta Books.
Kavanagh, D., and A. Sheldon 1994. The Major Effect. London: Macmillan.
Kelsey, J. Economic Fundamentalism. London and East Haven CT: Pluto
Press.
Morris, T. 1994. In The Major Effect. ed. D. Kavanagh and A. Sheldon.
London and East
Haven: Pluto Press.
Morton, P. 1999. "Extended Trade Conference Grows 'Creatively'
Tense." National
Post, Saturday, December 3rd.
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