Education for Sale: Public Education and the Creation of the ‘Learning Services’ Industry
Table of Contents
I. Fundamental Principles of Public Education
II. Public Education: Limitations at the K-12 Level
III. Education in the Information Economy
IV. GATS and the risk of Internationalized ‘Competitive’ Private Education
V. E-learning and the Information Highway as a Replacement for Public Education?
VI. Mortimer and the Meaning of Lifelong Learning
VII. Conclusion: Digital Democracy or Information Aristocracy/ A Guide for Reform
VII. Bibliography
VIII. Endnotes
Canadian public education faces several threats to its mandate to serve and enrich citizens in a meaningful and responsible manner. Among critics of the system, right wing think tanks and their conservative constituents have lambasted public K-12 and post-secondary institutions as “government monopolies”, which deprive parents and students of “independent” schooling options that apparently offer greater benefits for less cost. While this may be true in some cases, the overall criticism that services are insufficient may have less to do with deprivation of freedoms and monopolies but rather with funding cuts to education that roughly correspond to the period of time in which public confidence in the education system is said to have fallen. An education system, no matter what definition of “efficiency” it operates under, cannot provide superior services without funding for quality instruction, up-to-date classroom materials and increasingly “the latest educational technologies”. It is this latest requirement, and its implications for how education risks being redefined in service to the “knowledge economy” that poses an even greater threat to public education than the slow erosion of funding.
Before we can properly evaluate what these risks are, we must first be reminded of the purpose of public education: a means for promoting enlightenment, egalitarianism, cultural acceptance and democracy among citizens (among others). The intention behind reminding ourselves of the traditional purpose of public education is to try to preserve the benefits of this tradition while not ignoring the imperative to remain current with economic and societal realities. Once we have a certain benchmark with which to examine proposed developments and alterations to the education system, we equip ourselves with an important but neglected set of criteria with which to examine the risks and benefits of making technology a central part of the education system. When public education is already in crisis from spending cuts, we must be first reminded why public education is important – hopefully in order to restore funding - but also to define the threats to public education from technology. In the radical fervour to wire public schools and prepare graduates for the business world of “skills” and “life-long learning”, classroom education as we know it risks replacement instead of supplementation by technology facilitated e-learning and distance education programs. As public education is increasingly funded and serviced by the private sector, international agreements on trade in services may soon rule that public education in Canada is “anti-competitive” and constitutes a “barrier” to free trade in “education services”. When and if this definition of education prevails, public education and the underlying cultural, social and democratic benefits may be lost irrevocably.
Fundamental Principles of Public Education
It is appropriate to question why the government doesn’t just leave the education of the citizenry up to the market. After all, it might be argued, western society is defined as much by the ideal of capitalism as it is by any other philosophy. However, western society cannot be defined only as capitalist: it is also liberal and democratic as well (at least procedurally). And yet the two other significant philosophies of western society, those of liberalism and democracy find themselves in an increasingly antagonistic relationship with the economic tendencies of the first. Canada and other nations with strong social-democratic values have established publicly funded education systems in order to inculcate students/citizens with the cultural, social and political understandings relevant for their participation in the democratic order. The government, realizing the immense importance of this task has taken it upon itself to provide this service on behalf of the governed. Given this, what core principles should be emphasized, over and above the general ones provided above? The role of public education in liberal, democratic societies has been to educate the citizen as to his or her rights and responsibilities and to introduce them to the controversies and complexities of their world: to give them tools to think with, not to tell them what to think. According to a Washington based public education advocacy group, education in a liberal democratic society should be help up to the following criteria:
1. Effective preparation for life, work and citizenship
2. Social cohesion and shared culture
3. Universal access and free cost
4. Equity and non-discrimination
5. Public Accountability and responsiveness
6. Religious neutrality
(Center on Education Policy, 2002)
While other categories could certainly be found, these six criteria emphasize a balanced and broad purpose for education. It is not to be the preserve of elites, or the rich: it must be accessible to all and provide ‘effective preparation’ not only for a persons economic life, but for the quality of their life in general and also for their life as a citizen in a democracy. It is these criteria that must be kept in mind when evaluating market definitions of education and the soundness of technological means of ‘enhancing’ learning.
Public Education: Limitations at the K-12 Level
While the threat to public education at the K-12 level is as evident as it is at the post-secondary level, there are limits to how much political awareness can be ‘injected’ into students, who are admittedly forced to attend. Public education administrators face a difficult challenge in attempting to inculcate democratic and civil virtues in K-12 students while at the same time preparing them (potentially) for a university education and the world of work. As it is, successful graduates of high school may have been exposed to the idea of parliamentary democracy and civil obligation, but actual participation and working knowledge is hardly a prerequisite for graduation. Without a significant expansion and alteration of the public education system, albeit of a different kind than the Fraser Institute or C.D. Howe institute might recommend, education at the K-12 level is generally insufficient in providing many of the intrinsic benefits of a liberal education. The Fraser Institute and market reformists are correct in pointing out the flaws of the public education system, but erroneous in ignoring its benefits. The flaw they identify is that individuals are ‘forced’ to attend K-12 schools, resulting in a mix of committed, motivated students and all other students who generally don’t perform as well.
Market advocates generally recommend a tiered system, where the unmotivated students are ‘phased’ into vocational training early on, and those pursuing liberal educations are selected early on for university educations. Leaving aside any critique of this rather elitist model for now, we have only the university as a reliable institution of liberal education in which motivated individuals are exposed to the liberal intrinsic values of education. As American classical theorist and educational philosopher Mortimer J. Adler writes:
Liberal education is education for leisure; it is general in character; it is for an intrinsic and not an extrinsic end; and, as compared with vocational training, which is the education of slaves and workers, liberal education is the education of free men
Although this is a clear cut and rather extreme way of defining the ‘university’ education from the ‘skills-training’ education, it has merit. But where does this leave democracy if most of the informed, participants in the democratic process are from the educated elite? For one, it emphasizes that democracy cannot truly flourish if significant proportions of the citizenry lack the knowledge (or time) to pursue participative politics. A recommendation to correct this measure might be to either democratize the media as media scholar Robert McChesney advocates (so that received or ‘dominant’ knowledge doesn’t work against the best interests of the citizen), or to regulate all education (even vocational education) to include some liberal education. Although this is a question that cannot be fully tackled here, two conclusions can be drawn.
Firstly, the K-12 public education system as it currently exists can be criticized as insufficient in fully educating citizens about their responsibilities and obligations in a democratic society (i.e. it often ignores any critical repertoire of theory which invites students to question the received ‘working knowledge’ of the world they would otherwise attain – the kind of knowledge that often inhibits meaningful democracy i.e. critical media theory, Marxism, etc). Secondly, although the university is best equipped to provide this kind of liberal education, it is still a limited and elite institution incapable of educating everyone due to the unwillingness of some to learn, the fact that it is not free (unlike k-12 education) and the discriminatory acceptance requirements. So, without even debating whether ‘private education’ is the answer – which I will argue it isn’t in most cases – public education does at best a cursory job of inculcating liberal democratic values in each generation of students. It is little surprise that those best equipped to ‘understand the world’ in terms outside of everyday ‘received knowledge’, are those that either attend university or go to the library often. Although imperfect, it is critical that we as a society protect these institutions and preserve their character: our democracy as we know it depends on it. Enter the information economy…
Education in the Information Economy
Public education in Canada has never before faced the argument that it must radically accustom itself to new technologies in order to fulfill a useful purpose for its students and society. It has been persuasively argued that the Internet and computer technology must become part of the national public education system in order for our graduates to remain competitive with those of other countries. Of all the purposes of education, imparting information technology skills has become an overriding qualification required of students in the ‘knowledge economy’. According to the ‘mission statement’ of Industry Canada’s 1995 report by the Information Highway Advisory Council (IHAC),
learning and training comprise an integral part of the knowledge economy. Canada will provide an environment for lifelong learning in which all Canadians have access to the widest possible variety of learning opportunities and tools in order to succeed in such an economy (rec. 14.1) (IHAC - Connection Community Content, 62)
To be fair, this is written by a government body charged with stimulating economic growth; education and economic growth are certainly related. Just as it would be folly to ignore economics entirely in pursuit of an ‘enlightened republic’, so too would it be disastrous to view education as a means to an economic end.
Unfortunately that seems to be the prevailing oversight of not only the industry stakeholders in the IHAC committee, but of the final IHAC reports as well. Enveloped in the rhetoric of ‘old economy’ vs. ‘new economy’ which enjoyed such popularity before the dot com crash, the 1995 IHAC paper advocated for a new kind of ‘education’ in which ‘traditional teaching’ takes a backseat:
Training the trainers in existing learning professions and organizations is a must. The current generation of trainers, educators, librarians and school administrations were trained for learning and training in traditional institutions and need to be retrained for the new communications environment. They need to understand and use the technologies, so that they, in turn, can facilitate learning the information highway… (IHAC - Connection Community Content, 67)
The IHAC saw in the combination of ‘education’ and ‘technology’ a potential for economic benefit for private “partners” and ostensibly for Canada as a whole. But what of the consequences for education in the sense of a meaningful contribution to the lives of students and communities? Who are these ‘trainers’ in ‘traditional institutions’ that must be instructed of the vitality and importance of the information highway? It seems unlikely that the public benefit can match the obvious benefits to private technology, software and Internet services providers. Certainly, information technologies are important and the Internet has helped productivity and provided numerous benefits as much in academia as in the private sector. And yet the importance of ‘training the trainers’ would seem to be aimed at Canadian public universities, and not just private skills training institutes (where the risk to democratic education is already negligible).
Despite the struggling financial position of Canada’s public universities the IHAC has positioned information technology integration with the private sector at the top of the list of priorities. Is this where it should be? Who benefits the most from these partnerships, and what are the risks to education when education is focused on facilitating learning on the information highway when other priorities are being neglected? Many critics allege that the private sector is positioned to accumulate profits by fulfilling the role of technology and education providers, while students and faculty face the risk of rising tuition rates and decreasing control over course content.
GATS and the risk of Internationalized ‘Competitive’ Private Education
A primary justification for technological interventions in public educational institutions at the K-12 and University level is ‘competition’, both nationally and internationally. Due to globalization and Canada’s membership in both the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the World Trade Organization, Canada and all its economic and pseudo-economic institutions (education for example) are obligated to compete on an international level. The IHAC justifies its recommendations for massive changes to the infrastructure of Canadian public schools and universities because they are the training ground for the future workforce. In order for Canada’s workforce to compete, its workforce must possess the skill set to be competitive internationally. Industry Canada and the IHAC committee stress the positive aspects of this potentially deleterious situation. The overarching sentiment of most of the IHAC reports is that the moment must be seized to gain an advantage, or it will be lost and along with it all the attendant economic benefit. Although it is easy to criticize this position for what it leaves out concerning all the other purposes and benefits of ‘traditional teaching’, the laying of the foundation necessary for
Canada to become a net exporter of education services is on the agenda:
Distance learning must be accredited. Increasingly, learners will want to access courseware and learning and training materials from distant national and international sources. If learning and training institutions are to benefit from a larger pool of students and customers they must make their courses transferable from institution to institution. (IHAC - Connection Community Content, 67)
Although traditional classroom education has been essentially marginalized in this description, two potentials are implied here. The first, as already mentioned, is that Canada can and must seize the opportunity to liberalize and technologize its educational ‘services’ institutions by all means possible. By doing so, Canadians and private sector companies (whether these will be ‘Canadian’ or not is up for debate) will benefit from their leveraged position in the education services market. The alternative and more likely scenario is that Canada will liberalize its formerly public educational institutions only to see them become net importers of copyrighted educational content and curriculums from US private universities and private ‘education services’ providers such as IBM and Microsoft. This potential for Canada’s current framework of public/private universities to devolve into sites of privatized sties of standardized, global education content.
The risk of public/private partnerships in education is that the line between purely public education and private education is blurred. Foreign education services providers can see what may seem to be a university with some private partnerships as a private education provider with ‘subsidized’ government assistance. Under General Agreement on Trade in Service (GATS) rules, a member nation is not allowed to subsidize domestic ‘services’ industries, especially those that compete with commercial suppliers. Public education viewed in this way fails to meet the requirement of services that are “provided in the exercise of governmental authority” (CFS, 2001). Since it is not 100% publicly funded, public education systems in Canada are at risk of losing their subsidies if a complaint is launched by international education services companies wishing to take part in Canada’s $56.4 billion dollar “education industry” (Gutstein, 1999, p. 197). Although the liberal government has expressed its solid mandate not to put education services on the GATS agenda, this policy will face increasing resistance
due to Canada’s GATS membership. As the Canadian Federation of Students fact sheet on ‘How the GATS threatens Post Secondary Education’, warns
“GATS is not final. Its goal is “a progressively higher level of liberalization” through “successive rounds of negotiations”. The aim then, is to eliminate all exceptions” (CFS, 2001)
The implication is that current policy will only last until a particular round of negotiations results in the full reduction of “barriers to trade” in education “services”. As public/private education partnerships emerge, fully private funded business colleges and learning centres that teach business and technology courses similar to those taught at the university will seek to use trade legislation as a means of leveling the playing field against ‘government monopoly’. Examples of such IHAC facilitated ventures at the K-12 and university level include the schoolnet (and Canarie network), scholars.com, and telecampus, which connect companies such as Microsoft and IBM to eventual participants in the ‘knowledge economy’.
E-learning and the Information Highway as a Replacement for Public Education?
It is worth pondering the logical conclusion of a domestic education system which is fully technologized, even allowing for the possibility of this process being undertaken by mostly Canadian private technology and education services companies. If education were reduced to a series of market transactions, how would the educational ‘product’ change? How would education be made ‘more efficient’? One example of what efficient education looks like is distance education, formerly known as correspondence. And yet, the most efficient or cost effective method of education is not without its advantages in some situations. According to the Washington based Center for Education Policy
(admittedly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation):
“when effectively designed and implemented, virtual education…can expand the range of course offerings in rural schools, small schools…and increase the educational options for [students who otherwise can’t attend traditional classes] and [better meet the needs of] students with different learning styles…or those who aren’t succeeding in traditional classrooms.”
Although the efficiency may be maximized, the quality of social interaction and the spontaneity of the learning process is reduced. Like the home office, distance education or e-learning is not for everyone and certainly shouldn’t be viewed as a sina qua non replacement for the traditional classroom.
Likewise, the view that distance education is not an attempt by profiteering education service providers to absent the teacher from the educational experience depends on whether teachers are still used to mark online course content. Unless all education can be reduced to multiple choice quizzes (lets hope not!) teachers will still be required to mark all of the online course content produced by students. This is not to say that their traditional role and the number of teachers required in an online education system would not be drastically reduced – it would. As education critic David Noble warns, if education is propertized completely, then curricula and course materials may become the copyrighted intellectual property of a given education center, and may be leased or rented to a particular ‘teaching employee’ for use with a particular class of students. Under contract law, the employee/teacher may be forced to sign away his or her own course materials as a prerequisite for access to teaching facilities. Under such a regime, education may be reduced to a formulaic, repetitious process in which pedagogical innovation and creativity is drastically suppressed. The quality of the instruction could easily suffer dramatically under this scenario as well.
As evidence of the plausibility and historical context of this claim, author and critic David Noble has documented the ‘corporatization of higher education’ in his book ‘Digital Diploma Mills: the Automation of Higher education’. In the work, he recounts efforts on the part of the university administrations of Canada’s York University to illegally copyright course content that was ‘owned’ by instructors at the school, in order to solicit private participation in course material construction. The unprecedented action resulted in a successful (two month long) faculty strike on the part of York University faculty to obtain “formal contractual protection against precisely the kind of administrative action being taken by [another university attempting the same manoeuvre] UCLA” (Noble) . Although these circumstances have been documented and even publicized by authors such as Noble, they have not achieved widespread currency and awareness among the voting public. Simon Fraser University professor and education technology critic Donald Gutstein provides a well documented explanation of how an ‘alliance’ of government, media and commercial ‘boosterism’ on the technology/education front has led to widespread ignorance of the implications and effects of Noble’s ‘digital diploma mills’.
According to Gutstein, the first step in ‘getting the public onside’ involves the positioning of information technology as a viable ‘fix’ for the problem of cuts to public education funding. He identifies right wing think tanks as a continual source of ‘hysteria’ “churning out a steady stream of studies claiming that deficits [will] destroy the country , so we’d better cut spending on social programs and education” (Gutstein, 200). The media are also implicated in an effort to shift public opinion into embracing technology as a solution to cutbacks, institutionally biased as they are towards advertising funding: “the globe [and mail] distributed a ten-page advertising supplement from IBM Canada…The Canadian Education Industry”(Gutstein, 195). Lastly, both provincial and federal Canadian governments (whether conservative or liberal) are described as willing participants in forcing the issue on educational technology by boosting spending on educational technologies while simultaneously cutting overall school funding. The public, left with a Faustian bargain between “no education” or “education with technology” ultimately buys into the corporate/government propaganda campaign. While this particular depiction is credible and backed up by a convincing array of facts, it suggests a level of intentional deception and corruption that seems hard to accept (although the outcome might be the same regardless of whether the deception is intentional or not).
In any case, the argument presented by critics of e-learning is that the industry, which is inevitably involved in the partnerships that result in the installation and use of these new technologies, are motivated by a desire to sell their products and services, and not to ‘educate’ people. Not least of all, the word education has been curiously ostracized from most of the literature on e-learning, and the knowledge economy. Why is this? It could be that ‘education services’ and ‘learning and teaching’ imply a more applied and business-amenable sense of the term. Education in its broadest sense, is as discussed earlier, concerned with the interaction between students, teachers (social values) and the materials and interactions designed to assist the learning process (generally discussion and readings). It is a process best not reduced to a series of market transactions.
Mortimer and the Meaning of “life long learning”
Skills training for the knowledge economy in general serve two purposes: it provides the student not with ‘knowledge’, but with a degree of applicable understanding which is relevant in the job market and valued by an employer: what Mortimer refers to as the “education of slaves and workers”. There are important and vital distinctions between these two views of education. The first, education is concerned with imparting and expanding knowledge of a particular art or science, applied or not. Skills training involves the development of a narrow set of skills for use in a particular industrial context. When the skills are redundant, and no longer relevant, they will need to be updated at usually the ‘learners’ expense. Although this relationship can easily be parasitic, and lead to a situation where ‘lifelong’ learning is a form of bondage, beyond which those entrapped by the need for ‘up-to-date marketable skills’ are doomed to subscribe to. Leaving this criticism behind, education in mechanical trades and arts have existed for centuries and provided a significant part of the population with the skills required to practice their trade. The problem arises when ‘education services’ is put forward as a replacement for ‘education’ in general, or seen in competition with public education (the kind that provides cultural, social and political benefits as well as economic benefits).
As digital technologies expanded over the course of the past two decades, the business and education community have become inextricably interlinked. Workers in the ‘information economy’ have been faced with the need to continually update their skills in order to remain current with technology. Software development firms such as IBM and Microsoft have conveniently offered special education services programs designed specifically to educate people on how to use their products, as well as supply ‘teachers’ and learning methods appropriate for developing skills and understanding. As the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada position paper on GATS and higher education states, “Microsoft’s 1,700 Certified Technical Education Centers show how firms are moving into the vocational education market” (AUCC, 2003)
In closing, a Marxist interpretation of the ‘life-long’ learning vs. liberal higher education model provides an overview of the critical interpretation of the role commercial technology can play in the liberalization of public education.
Conclusion: Digital Democracy or Information Aristocracy/ A Guide for Reform
What are the consequences for democracy when public education is no longer public? If public education loses extensive public support, who will be able to afford to attend traditional universities? Who will attend the ‘learning’ centres, and what will they learn? Generally, the move to technologize education and remove the teacher and public funding from the equation has exacerbated the already insufficient two tiered model of education which existed before (i.e. the high school/vocational education vs. the high school/university education). If this circumstance continues, most of society will continue to be enriched with a particular kind of “information” education– the skills based kind- while a shrinking elite attend university and attain their “knowledge” education. One class acquires the short-term skills useful for short-term corporate productivity, while another acquires the knowledge required to understand how society and its social, economic and cultural institutions and policies work, and moreover ‘how to think’. One class learns the skills required to stay on the shop floor – that is to stay employed and “productive” while another learns the thinking skills required to manage and control society. It’s a Marxist-informed view of how technology based education will supplant the broader purposes of public education and contribute to economic “class warfare”.
This scenario describes the potential consequences of a society that surrenders its cultural and educational institutions to market control. However, this is a future in which many of the purposes that the IHAC has seen for ‘education services’ are fulfilled: it is a future in which jobs are created, and productivity is increased. Whether those jobs are meaningful and more broadly, whether the education that is provided fulfills any criteria for fostering citizenship, or cultural or social goals is the subject of much criticism (i.e. the CEP mandate to enable students to ‘lead fulfilling and contributing lives). And yet, it does not have to be this way: a balanced private/public education system is possible, and one such proposal for how it should be regulated, structured and set up will be outlined.
Public education must remain public if it is to avoid being lumped in with all the other technology and ‘quick-fix’ private education providers. As recommended in the AUCC background paper on the GATS “Canadian Higher Education and the GATS: AUCC Background Paper”, a clearer and more practical separation between liberal arts education and business or technology “applied” education can be practically obtained.
And yet in proposing recommendations for the Canadian education system, we must be cognizant of the overriding purpose of education in Canada, and not just providing graduates with the skills required of them by the global workplace. The Canadian public education system must incorporate the broad humanistic and normative tradition of Western Enlightenment thought, and not succumb to the pressure to produce ‘job ready graduates’.
Two issues emerge out of this quandary: the first, that university enrollment may decline if graduates are not equipped with the skills required to obtain decent initial salaries: obviously, programs cannot be focused entirely on theory, and philosophy. And yet, compromising all of these valuable notions of what an ‘education’ is, in order to satisfy market demand is foolish. Our societies depend on freely available, high quality public education. A new doctrine of Canadian education must be created in order to answer the question of the purpose and future outlook for public education in our nation. It must engage with the enclosure of K-12, Secondary and Post Secondary public education systems by a host of commercial technology ‘improvements’ including distance education, e-learning, schoolnet and others. Protections must be declared for public education and research in Canada, and ratified in parliament. It is not sufficient for the government of the day to declare that education is not on the table in trade negotiations. With enough economic pressure, Canada will eventually be forced to make concessions in order to remain a standing member in GATTs. In order to avoid such a circumstance, Canada must establish a statute providing for the protection of public education, outlining where public education begins and where private ‘competitive’ education takes over (avoiding K-12, and secondary education entirely).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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