THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION or WHAT EVERY BRITISH COLUMBIAN NEEDS TO KNOW
British Columbia’s Ministry of Education has developed a new Education Plan. Their stated aim is to improve the provincial education system in order to better prepare students to be successful in the twenty-first century. They tell us that, while the education system is strong, changes are necessary to make the system more personalized and dynamic. They assert that they’ve developed a new strategy compatible with the world we live in, one that will provide the children of British Columbia with the experience and skills they will need for tomorrow.
The trouble with the system we have – and any sort of prescriptive industrial model of education, like that still dominating the system from kindergarten to university – is that it demands a predictable future and concrete ends to direct its homogeneous students toward. Yet, for quite some time now it hasn’t been possible to pretend that such comforting predictability and shallow likeness exist within the system. And surely no one who thinks the shifting melange of technological, social, and ecological realities currently at play can best be met by a system of education whose policies and practises were conceived at a time when the radio and telegraph were at the cutting edge. As is clear to many throughout the system, and beyond, the education the public needs is fundamentally different to the one available at present. And further still, many agree that no fine-tuning or refurbishment of this relic will allow it to rise to our twenty-first century occasion. And yet this is just what the Ministry of Education has attempted to do.
With their new plan they’ve sought to merely renovate the old opaque rigidity that makes up the zoo that is education. (That place in which the world, in all its complex inter-connectivity, is extracted, disintegrated, and extruded into delirious over-simplifications.) They wish to replace all of the old curricular and pedagogical brick walls with new chain-link fencing: something more open, transparent, and flexible – in the hopes that this will somehow change the very nature of this institution.
The Ministry boldly claims to have made truly gargantuan changes, and in doing so initiated something no less than a modern education revolution. But if we look further than their slogans and press releases it seems obvious that all of the structures, systems, policies, and people (those hardwired disconnections, contradictions, prescriptions, and hierarchies) are exactly where they were last week, last year, and last decade – and right where they promise to be far into the future.
As far as I can tell, all they’ve done is make a fundamentally flawed and outdated system more vague and even harder to navigate. The old system, still at work, is ridiculous and impossible to follow. (Just try hitting hundreds of absurd “prescribed learning outcomes” while pretending that all of your students have same abilities and goals, as though you’re programming robots.) But at least the old walls and frames, narrow and prescriptive as they were, were clearly defined. With the new set-up, students, teachers, and parents are told they are less constricted and better enabled to share in the co-creation of the education we all want and need; but is there any doubt that it matters whether or not the system is actually so improved?
Sadly, as with all curricula before it, we can be sure that this revision’s best-before date will have come and gone before it’s even fully implemented. And, no doubt, in short order someone will be back to work ordering new lighting and a lick of new paint for what remains a strictly mandated, teacher-oriented zoo.
From my perspective the main problems here are the assumptions being made by those creating and administering the system. Just read their words and it’s plain to see how confused they are. For instance, the former Minister of Education himself, George Abbott, wrote that he envisions “an education system that gives all children the best opportunities to be successful in whatever career they pursue.” Mr Abbott and his Ministry have a clear notion of success, one tied to something like what George and his peers imagine a career to be. But does this teacherly teleology reflect reality?
I don’t know what century our educational engineers are living in but it’s clearly not the 21st. At the least they should be in conversation with the Labour Minister, or even just turn on the CBC or pick up a newspaper or magazine. There they might learn that “careers” as they would recognize them have not been the trend for decades now and are not where employment appears headed in the future. Mr Abbott and the rest of the gang might also discover that, while his generation had on average but one or two careers over their lifetime, most thirty-year-old’s today have likely taken many different jobs in several different fields already and the majority are expected to change jobs and industries every few years going forward. (I’m just at the beginning of this trend and have worked a dozen different full-time jobs in food service, retail, child care, digital arts, communication, and natural resources.) These architects of our school system might also learn that the majority of people graduating from high school and university and heading out into the workforce today are not even typically landing what is conventionally thought of as a “job”. Instead, most young people are taking on contracts or “projects”, sometimes dozens of them annually, as their primary means of survival. Of course these projects, these employment stints, are typically short term, poorly paid work nuggets – absent of the salary, security, benefits, pension, and even bricks-and-mortar workplace to which Mr Abbott (and much of his generation) know, are comfortable with, and may feel entitled to. This is what it means to be a “net native” living in the “creative economy” in a province that has no noticeable employment strategy aside from property development and real estate flipping. (And it doesn’t need to be said that these lucrative industries are predominantly open only to the same elites who run the rest of the show; the same folks who appear intent on failing to take reality into account when deciding how to prepare our children for the future.)
But, as you may know, the situation is far worse than that. Young people in B.C. don’t leave school to compete with other youth for fleeting work. No. We’ve created a situation where young people are often competing for jobs with folks who have thirty or forty year experience. This now happens everywhere from the fast food industry to government. You’ll note that even within education it’s not uncommon to find retired teachers, people who formally left the system, sometimes as much as ten or fifteen years ago, returning to take on-call substitute positions away from new teachers. (I know some of these people.) And, to begin with, there are few of these relatively low pay, unreliable jobs. Further, let us not forget that this position, a substitute or “TOC”, was not even considered a “real job” to previous generations – but is one for which the aspiring teachers of today (people with a minimum of two university degrees) will ferociously compete and then hang on to for a decade before opportunities for advancement arise. (And I know some of these folks too.)
Added to this, British Columbians, young and old, no longer compete with other British Columbians for jobs. As we’re all aware, they compete with people from across Canada, North America, and the world for work. This is the situation we find ourselves in at present; and our education system should have been, but wasn’t, anticipating and planning for it decades ago. Given this reality, everyone should be asking if today, as a society, we’re actually planning for the future or whether we’re merely attempting, and still failing, to meet the needs of yesterday. Just looking at my own reality I’d say we’re about thirty years behind, and still not even acknowledging the present.
Through the B.C. Education Plan, the Ministry of Education tells us their whole curricular re-imagination endeavour is based on a single principle. They say that the goal of our education system is to ensure that “every learner will realize their full potential and contribute to the well-being of our province.” (This sounds to me like two very different and disconnected principles; but what do I know, I don’t have a PhD in education.)
The first idea, realizing one’s full potential, implies the purpose of school, learning, and perhaps life, is to achieve a certain goal. (Whether that be high school graduation or a PhD, starting a small business or becoming Premier of the province…) Problem! This is a rather shallow and narrow view of life and of learning. What if I don’t accept this premise? Or what if I’m convinced that my full potential is as a poet, a ballerina, or a shaman, or something the Ministry hasn’t yet seen or even imagined? (For instance, how many software and web developers were our schools cultivating twenty-five years ago, with their lack of computers, staggeringly limited computer time, and inexperienced and discouraging staff? None.) In that case, school as it is – with its very particular emphases, habits, trials, means, and ends – has very little to offer me (or, at best, wastes a great deal of my precious time.) The stated premise also denies that life and learning are ever-evolving processes with no fixed goal, no peak to reach or finish line to cross. As such, the system can be seen to treat five-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds alike as partially articulated pseudo-humans, not yet fully living or worthy. And the Ministry’s vision of school, even in its proposed reincarnation, appears as a kind of waiting room, a sort of purgatory from which these embryonic humans will one day emerge, fully fledged, to enter the working world. But is living and learning not very clearly a wholly messy process of change, rather than a steady climb up some imaginary ladder to the prized golden rung, or ultimate truth, at the top? Their new plan drives home one narrow, government-approved worldview that will not be shared by those attending its schools, or even be in the cards for many when they exit. Is it not painfully obvious then that, rather than being a sound starting place, this foundational principle is not only deeply flawed but even pernicious? I think so. (...all this and we haven’t even gotten to the second part yet!)
The second idea, of contributing to the well-being of our province, is so entirely vague and mysterious as to be nothing more than a collection of words. (To keep this short we’ll just ignore the aforementioned employment realities that ensure this will never happen. Moving on.) Not only do I have no idea what the Ministry really means by this statement, but they also demand, by default, that this diaphanous non-factor be a foundational goal of all those within the system. (Aren’t “flexible” and “personal” stated aims? Does this sound flexible and personal to anyone?) Certainly it’s a rare and remote school district in which all, or even most, students are either originally from B.C. or willing and able to stay after graduation. I can say with certainty that only a tiny fraction of my friends and acquaintances from high school and university have remained where they were born or educated. So this wouldn’t appear to me to be historically accurate, nevermind a present reality, or, therefore, a sound prediction for the future. So what are they talking about?
For me these contradictions, and my own experience of school, suggest education is not at all about “providing young people with the tools they need”. How could it be? Regardless of what appears in provincial documents, in practise the central concerns of schools seem to be safety, obedience, testing, and grades. Even the B.C. Ministry of Education’s new vision remains more about providing low-cost babysitting (a valuable and totally legitimate public service) and a rather scandalous form of socialization (predominantly misinformation and misdirection.)
In the end, our system of education causes children and young adults – if they want to come away with anything like an education – to develop skills on their own and uncover for themselves critical information and resources. So rather than attempting to constrain or prevent this kind of personal learning (which their past and present policies and practises very clearly do) why don’t they actively support it? (As is their stated aim!) But, moreover, why is the foundational principle of the whole education system not simply JOY? No, seriously, why?
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