Graduating into the New Economy

Yesterday my daughter graduated from junior high school. There were the usual presentations and the usual boring speeches from grown–ups. The customary shtick—you are our future—you are our hope—utterly forgettable. And then the Honourable Kathleen Wynn, MPP spoke. She is our local MPP, but Honourable because she is also Ontario’s Minister of Education. My daughter is pictured at right shaking her hand when she received her diploma. Ms. Wynn started off by delivering the same drivel as everyone else, but then—unexpectedly—I heard it—barely noticed by any of the 200 graduating students or their parents. Ms. Wynn (who has a wonderful name for a politician) revealed to us the meaning of life—or at least a comprehensive account of why we were there. As she addressed these awkwardly over-dressed fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, she set before them with crystalline clarity the purpose of education. In the midst of talk about being our future and our hope, she uttered two simple words: “new economy.” According to this government representative, my daughter is being tooled to serve the new economy and to help make Ontario more competitive in the global marketplace.

Ever since former Conservative Premiere Mike Harris eviscerated the province’s education system as part of his “Common Sense Revolution,” we’ve been hearing a lot about accountability in education. The current Liberals haven’t done much to change any of that. It seems the cultural tides have created a pressure that has washed through all political parties and has filled the heads of the voting public with muddy waters. We have come to equate accountability with fiscal accountability and so funding has been slashed or has been off–loaded to other levels of government and the private fund-raising efforts of local communities. Accountability has also been equated with quality control—trying to measure student and teacher performance through standardized testing and uniform evaluation benchmarks—as if we were funding factories instead of schools. But notice what happens. Funding disparities have crept into the system so that those communities with more private resources are better equipped to prep their students to write the standardized tests. So it isn’t surprising to find a marked correlation between average household income and test performance. Welcome to the new economy! (The only spot of hope here is that standard tests don’t measure anything except a child’s ability to cope with the pointless anxiety of writing standardized tests.)

I had always believed that education has little to do with enhancing a child’s earning power. That isn’t to say that education is incompatible with earning power. But isn’t education about developing whole people? I thought education was about nurturing people who are soulful, who have a keen sense of conscience, who have a passionate thirst to learn more. In a very real and a very measurable sense, an education system whose primary goal is to crank out units of labour is a system which impoverishes us.

It doesn’t bode well for our fourteen-year-old “future” and “hope” that she is expected to accept such unexamined thoughts from adults who are presented to her as models. It would appear that our current leaders are pushing previous Conservative initiatives to their logical conclusion—from education-as-function to education-as-indoctrination. The phrase “new economy” leaves me scratching my head and wondering how this differs from the efforts of other propagandists—say Chairman Mao, for example, who also introduced a kind of education revolution which was likewise motivated by economic ideology.

If you think this last claim is extreme, you might reconsider in light of what followed the graduation ceremony. With diplomas in hand, the students filed from the George Weston Recital Hall in party dresses and new suits, nails freshly manicured, hair done that morning at the salon, strutting in a first pair of stilettos, making their way for dinner and dance at the local golf and country club. And perhaps prompted by all they have learned of celebrity culture on America’s Next Top Model, they piled into limousines that were lined up waiting for them in front of the hall. Assuming (conservatively) that taxpayers and families spent an average of $500 per student, our little junior high shindig represents a cash infusion of $100,000 into the “new economy.” Clearly, these students have earned their diplomas and have demonstrated their newly acquired knowledge by being dutiful consumers.

My hat’s off to the education system. Bravo!