Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
From the 19th century

Educators and doctors and social workers today – as did priests and lawyers formerly – gain legal power to create the need that, by law, they alone will be allowed to serve. They turn the modern state into a holding corporation of enterprises that facilitate the operation of their self- certified competencies.

Ivan Illich, “Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies.”
In Toward a History of Needs from 1978

Two very opposite ideas about the value of professionals in our society, the 19th century communist version sees professionals as deserving of our great respect and the 1978 Illich version fears the professionals’ power over us.

Ralph V. Barrett and Diane E. Meaghan, both professors at Seneca (community) College in Toronto[1] used the Marx and Engels’ quote in a paper they delivered at a communism conference in Cuba. As postsecondary teachers they place themselves among those professionals deserving of our reverence, and in their paper they, as does York University professor David Noble, portray postsecondary administrations as evil “bourgeoisie” representatives whose goal is to “proletarianize” teachers as they bow to government funding cuts to colleges and universities. This “proletarianization” takes place as postsecondary administrations attempt to transform their colleges and universities from the so-called teaching-centred model to the learning-centred model. The learning-centred model changes the role of the postsecondary teacher from that of “sage on the stage” to one of “guide on the side.” Technologies both old and new are to be used in this transformation, technologies that are being sold by the capitalist enterprises.

Social philosopher Ivan Illich’s distrust of professionals is also premised in his “deschooling” essays.[2] Using education as an example, he argues that educators and their systems have hijacked learning by insisting that learning on one’s own is unreliable, and that it can only take place within a “school” under the watchful eyes of lecturing teachers and system caretakers. Illich also argues that the expense and ineffectiveness of these systems is unsustainable, and is harmful to the world’s social and economic well-being.

It is a perversion of Marx’s theories when educators use them as a call to action in their fight against the use of technology in education because it is exactly this resistance that has exacerbated the unemployment and poverty that Marx sees as inevitable in a capitalist society. In the Ontario community college system only 13 percent of injured workers successfully complete their state-supported engineering programs, with the rest being cut off their Workers Compensation payments and left to fend for themselves. It is the poor quality in the teaching-centred environment that is causing this poverty.

The advent of low-cost VCRs that came out in the early eighties should have revolutionized education, making it better and more affordable for everyone. Is the fact that change didn’t happen a testament to the truth in Ivan Illich’s writings?

Or perhaps there’s also a Marxian self-fulfilling prophesy at work here.

1. http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/CQ.html/HHH.082.S98.Barrett.html
Ontario community college “instructors” are now called “professors” because in the early nineties they demanded the title change during a province-wide strike. Ostensibly the purpose of this change was to gain increases in their power, income, and status. Does this kind of behaviour give more credence to Illich’s distrust of professionals?

2. http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/deschool/intro.html

Cathy Thompson is an education activist and Athabasca University life-long learner who lives in Ontario with her husband and their dog.

Educators and doctors and social workers today – as did priests and lawyers formerly – gain legal power to create the need that, by law, they alone will be allowed to serve. They turn the modern state into a holding corporation of enterprises that facilitate the operation of their self- certified competencies.
Ivan Illich, “Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies.” In Toward a History of Needs
From 1978

Two very opposite ideas about the value of professionals in our society, the 19th century communist version sees professionals as deserving of our great respect and the 1978 Illich version fears the professionals’ power over us.

Ralph V. Barrett and Diane E. Meaghan, both professors at Seneca (community) College in Toronto (1) used the Marx and Engels’ quote in a paper they delivered at a communism conference in Cuba. As postsecondary teachers they place themselves among those professionals deserving of our reverence, and in their paper they, as does York University professor David Noble, portray postsecondary administrations as evil “bourgeoisie” representatives whose goal is to “proletarianize” teachers as they bow to government funding cuts to colleges and universities. This “proletarianization” takes place as postsecondary administrations attempt to transform their colleges and universities from the so-called teaching-centered model to the learning-centered model. The learning-centered model changes the role of the postsecondary teacher from that of “sage on the stage” to one of “guide on the side.” Technologies both old and new are to be used in this transformation, technologies that are being sold by the capitalist enterprises.

Social philosopher Ivan Illich’s distrust of professionals is also premised in his “deschooling” essays (2). Using education as an example, he argues that educators and their systems have hijacked learning by insisting that learning on one’s own is unreliable, and that it can only take place within a “school” under the watchful eyes of lecturing teachers and system caretakers. Illich also argues that the expense and ineffectiveness of these systems is unsustainable, and is harmful to the world’s social and economic well being.

It is a perversion of Marx’s theories when educators use them as a call to action in their fight against the use of technology in education because it is exactly this resistance that has exacerbated the unemployment and poverty that Marx sees as inevitable in a capitalist society. In the Ontario community college system only 13 percent of injured workers successfully complete their state-supported engineering programs, with the rest being cut off their Workers Compensation payments and left to fend for themselves. It is the poor quality in the teaching-centered environment that is causing this poverty. The advent of low-cost VCRs that came out in the early eighties should have revolutionized education, making it better and more affordable for everyone. Is the fact that change didn’t happen a testament to the truth in Ivan Illich’s writings? Or perhaps there’s also a Marxian self-fulfilling prophesy at work here.

(1). http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/CQ.html/HHH.082.S98.Barrett.html
Ontario community college “instructors” are now called “professors” because in the early nineties they demanded the title change during a province-wide strike. Ostensibly the purpose of this change was to gain increases in their power, income, and status. Does this kind of behaviour give more credence to Illich’s distrust of professionals?
(2). http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/deschool/intro.html

Cathy Thompson is an education activist and Athabasca University life-long learner who lives in Ontario with her husband and their dog.

The report, “Doing Comparatively Well: Why the Public Loves Higher Education and Criticizes K-12” by John Immerwahr came out in 1999, and examines and analyzes public attitudes towards the two systems. It finds that the general public strongly supports higher education even though the K-12 system is thought of as having serious quality problems, and that these “sharp differences in attitudes towards the two education levels have important implications for public policy.” Surveys in the report show that the general public knows a great deal more about the K-12 system than they do about the postsecondary system in areas such as how they are funded and what goes on inside them, and analyses suggests that this is a reason why criticisms of K-12 tend to stick, and criticisms of postsecondary bounce off. Another reason is that attendance in public K-12 is easily and freely accessible whereas access to postsecondary is more difficult. One has to be good enough or rich enough to get in and this increases the reverence that the public has for postsecondary. Because of this reverence any quality problems in postsecondary education are generally blamed on the high-schools for doing an inadequate job of preparing students for college work.

Are these American perceptions the same here in Canada? Here in Ontario, perhaps these similar public attitudes have had an enormous effect on public policy. Great amounts of political effort have gone into trying to reform the K-12,13 system and it may be argued that the last provincial election was won because of these efforts and the controversy they produced. However accountability actions towards the postsecondary system have been weak and were made basically only to appease the provincial auditor. An Ontario socialist group called “People for Education” fights for funding for public education and relentlessly criticizes the conservative government for the high student failure and drop out rates its new curriculum has produced in the high-schools. However when it comes to the postsecondary system “People for Education” criticizes the conservative government only for not funding enough new spaces for the double cohort of students that will soon be graduating together because of the deletion of grade 13. They mention nothing about the high student failure and drop out rates that have existed in the colleges and universities for years. Their only concern with postsecondary is access.

Immerwahr’s 1999 report finds however that business leaders criticize both K-12 and postsecondary systems equally, and the report ends off by suggesting that general public attitudes may eventually come to criticize quality in higher education as well. Last summer, an inquest into the death of a teenager at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto put partial blame on nurses training at the University of Toronto. In the year 2000 university rankings issue, Maclean’s ranked U of T as number one in the Medical Doctoral category. It’s latest issue back in November 2001 ranked U of T again at number one. Obviously perceptions aren’t changing yet.

Read more:
http://www.highereducation.org/news/news_102099.shtml
“New curriculum proving too tough” The Toronto Star, Jan 26, 2002. (“Universities could refuse 20,000 new students” The Toronto Star, Jan 30, 2002

Cathy Thompson is an education activist and Athabasca University lifelong learner who lives in Ontario with her husband and their dog.

The position paper from the CPA and the CSPA also gives examples of how the press has reported improvements in a schools performance from year to year, and given credit to improvements in teaching methods when the reasons for improvements could have also been other factors such as smaller class sizes, fewer ESL students, and changing scoring procedures for the tests. Their paper also tells of how Michigan real estate agents use school rankings as selling features for homes, and how American school teachers and administrators have positively fudged the results of the tests to gain good publicity and deflect punishment by governments. (Perhaps this positive cheating doesn’t happen here in Ontario because the Toronto Star and the teachers’ unions are titillated by low test results. They state that low scores are proof that the conservative government’s new curriculum has failed students).

Moving into accountability in postsecondary education, many of the provinces have copied from the Americans a nifty little number crunching model called “Key Performance Indicators” that goes hand in hand with “Performance Funding.” Institutions and governments devise the performance indicators that institutions will be assessed on, and then the institutions receive funding bonuses based on how well they score. In Ontario there are five performance indicators for colleges, and two performance indicators for universities. The colleges are assessed on graduate employment, graduate satisfaction, student satisfaction, student attrition, and employer satisfaction. The universities are assessed on graduate employment and student attrition. The reason there are more indicators for colleges is that the colleges are Ontario crown corporations, therefore the government has more power to make demands on them whereas the universities are more autonomous and more able to resist government intervention. Some of the problems with this model are that the colleges have selectively used the results in their massive advertising campaigns, reporting only the results that make them look good and leaving out the results that make them look bad such as student attrition rates. Also, both the colleges’ and universities’ “graduate employment rates” include those graduates who are working in “McJobs.” Students have also reported instances of fudging of the graduate employment numbers by college departments, and universities are reporting student attrition rates that don’t start until second year.

Maclean’s magazine does a yearly ranking of Canadian universities that intelligent readers label as “goofy journalism.” Perhaps people buy this issue for entertainment purposes – to catch up on the controversies that are going on in postsecondary education – or to see if someone is saying something bad about their choice of university. Are governments’ education accountability efforts going the same way as Maclean’s?

Thames Valley University in the U.K is one such university that has tried to transform into a “New Learning Environment (NLE).” As reported by Britain’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education the principles of Thames Valley’s NLE are to:
– focus on creating and sustaining confident and capable independent learners;
– develop resource based learning as a substitute for, rather than an addition to, traditional teaching and learning strategies;
– use assessment as a primary teaching method, and as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of our teaching;
– reorganise patterns of teaching to maximise small group interaction where learning takes place most effectively;
– provide for multiple media, rather than simply multi-media development, recognising that interactions between staff and students are crucial resources to support students’ learning;
– require the development of “learning to learn” as a key strand at all levels of study;
– rearrange administrative and operational services to support students’ learning.’

All of the above sound like something educational institutions should have been doing all along but apparently they haven’t, and when Thames Valley tried to change things there was a lot of anger and confusion amongst the employees who did not want to change. The media picked up on the controversy when it was reported that student testing was being compromised. The Quality Assurance Agency was called in to investigate and gave Thames Valley a bad review which is posted on QAA’s web site, for public perusal. Thames Valley’s organizational culture would not allow change.

Even in Canada and the U.S, attempts to create “New Learning Environments” have wreaked havoc in organizational cultures. Terry O’Banion is the founder of California’s “League for Innovation in the Community College.” His book, “A Learning College for the 21st Century” thoroughly explains how the organizational culture in the community college system fights against a learning-centered environment. Terry is considered to be the grandfather of the community college system and he has been trying for more than forty years to get the colleges to put student learning and achievement first. He hasn’t had much luck.

The Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology Ontario has a publication on their web site called “Learning-Centered Education in Ontario Colleges.” One of the quotes in their paper states that the challenge of trying to change a college from one that is teaching-centered to one that is learning-centered is the same kind of challenge that was faced by past astronomers who tried to insist to the church that the sun was at the centre of the solar system rather than the earth, the analogy being that students are the sun, and teachers are the earth.

Nova Scotia’s Acadia University has suffered enormous disruption to their learning environment as their administration has tried to force resource-based learning upon the faculty via IBM laptop computers.

York University professor David Noble adds fuel to the fire in the fight against resource-based learning by bringing politics into the argument. He now sees university managements as evil capitalists looking to destroy publicly subsidized higher education by turning it into a for-profit enterprise. When MIT announced that they were putting their faculty lecture notes on the Internet for free, the Canadian Association of University Teachers hailed MIT for its gesture of putting education before profit.

And where does Athabasca University fit into all of this? They are an anomaly, a publicly supported, resource- based learning university that has always striven to take down the barriers for anyone to get high quality postsecondary education services. No traditional college or university will ever be able to accomplish this. Over the next decade AU should take over all education in Canada and should get some sort of humanitarian award when they do.

Read more:
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/revreps/specrev/tvu/Context.htm
http://www.acaato.on.ca/new/swd/learningcentred.htm
http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl/

Last month, before the Ontario legislature recessed for the winter, Bill 157 “The Centre for Excellence in Lifelong Learning Act” was introduced with little fanfare. The bill, if passed, will transfer responsibility for the Independent Learning Centre from the Ministry of Education to the Ontario Educational Communications Authority aka TV Ontario. It is expected that the current expertise of the ILC combined with that of TV Ontario will make for superior distance learning experiences for all residents of Ontario.

Currently ILC restricts its basically free education services to those above the age of consent; that is, to those 16 years of age and up. All others must enroll through a district school board who along with private schools must pay $173 for each full credit course. But interestingly a section in the new bill states that TV Ontario “may not charge fees to students resident in Ontario” unless permission is given by the Ministers of Education. Does this mean that private citizens who want to set up learning centres for students to come and work on their ILC courses will be able to charge the $3,500 tax credit as a fee for services while students get free access to qualified teachers and courses at the ILC? The ILC won’t say if this is what’s planned, commenting only that the details will be worked out when the legislature returns in the spring. But if so, this would mean that Ontario’s public school system will no longer have a monopoly on providing free education to Ontario’s students.

In order to protect students, all schools or learning centres that will qualify for the tax credit must be staffed by people who have had a criminal background check, and who provide their qualifications for the parents perusal. The $3,500 limit will make it possible for low-cost learning centres to provide a free education for Ontario students. Ontario students need to complete 30 full courses to graduate, so if one adds the cost of courses for one year plus the $3,500, the total amount comes to just under $5,000. The current costs for educating Ontario students is approximately $7,000 per year, so after the costs for course development are covered there would be substantial savings for taxpayers. But the most important feature of this scheme could be that the use of learning-centred delivery methods will eradicate the current high failure rates in math and science that Ontario students are now suffering with. There could be higher learning and achievement for all.

So if Bill 157 does in fact roll out to allow free ILC distance education to all Ontario students, we will ultimately find out that the Ontario conservative government truly does care about the compassionate education of all Ontarians, rich or poor, which is something that Ontario’s opposition MPP’s try desperately to convince us of otherwise. The whole thing could be brilliant, and as long as the education Luddites can be kept at bay (no easy task), Ontario could have an education climate where high-level learning might actually take place, a true revolution indeed.