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.