Media Clipping — Saturday February 23, 2008, The Chronicale Herald

More education, less knowledge: a problem in the schools

By Ralph Surette

In Nova Scotia as in Canada, there's never been more, nor more expensive, education. And yet, there's no indication that levels of knowledge are increasing. In fact, "basic literacy is stagnant and there is evidence of low knowledge levels in areas like politics, health and the environment."

The quotation is from a big report, three years in the making, by GPI Atlantic, that was released this week but didn't get much ink or air time - perhaps a function of the complexity of the issue, and our confusion about it.

More education but less knowledge is a problem. Can it be turned around?

The report's starting point is the question: What is the purpose of education?

Since we're in the middle of a "decade of education" as proclaimed by the United Nations, here's the UN's definition, in part: "The goal of education is to make people wiser, more knowledgeable, better informed, ethical, responsible, critical and capable of continuing to learn."

Its finest part is to advance the common good. In modern terms, this means mainly to advance economic and environmental sustainability in a world plunging fast into unsustainability.

This is more or less the classical definition, going back to the Greek philosophers. Alas, in recent times the drift has been the other way: narrower, and more linked to commercialism, acquisitiveness and fealty to the corporate economy - in GPI's language, not something that advances "genuine progress," but rather "progress" as defined by a wasteful consumption.

The report ticks off a number of trends in this regard. Ever-declining public funding for education has led schools to fundraise for books, supplies and academic programs, which favour schools in well-off neighbourhoods. There are more user fees for services once considered free, and a resort to commercial deals with beverage companies and the like by hard-up school boards.

When funding comes from the corporate sector, "a number of potential conflicts may arise, as corporate funding often comes with conditions intended to benefit the funder, but which may or may not benefit the students and the quest for genuine knowledge."

Private schools, meanwhile, are on the rise, an indicator of a drift towards "two-tier" education.

In the university sector, funding cutbacks have led to higher tuition fees, more student debt (Nova Scotia leads the pack, with average debt in 2005 at $27,000), students working more hours at part-time jobs while studying, more fees, and so on. Meanwhile, university research is increasingly funded by corporations and meant for commercial application. Research of more general, or local, value is increasingly likely to get the short end.

GPI's main frustration in drawing up the report was a lack of data on educational outcomes. "Current measurements of educational achievement remain narrowly focused on superficial indicators like high school completion rates and university graduation rates," said Linda Pannozzo, one of the authors of the report, with Ronald Colman. Michael Corbett, a professor of education at Acadia University, added in a supporting document that groups like the right-wing Atlantic Institute of Market Studies and the Fraser Institute have "colonized the field with problematic school ranking schemes that essentially treat education as just another form of production."

GPI's main recommendation is that a Canadian Knowledge Survey administered by Statistics Canada be instituted, in line with initiatives in the U.S. and Europe. It's looking for measurements on "multiple literacies." That is, not just language skills and math, but other things: an understanding of civics, science, ecology, health, nutrition, arts, culture, statistics, indigenous knowledge and the media - this last one aimed at knowing how good the student is at separating fact from advertising and propaganda. Since education is mainly about children, the struggles surrounding it are always especially deep: It's all about shaping the future. It tends to be immensely complicated because it reflects all the struggles over values of the society at large, including, at present, the confrontation of neo-conservative economics with its insistence on tax cuts, private schools, and corporate rule versus public education and the notion of the common good, the competition for kids' attention by a debased popular culture, and so on. Corbett says he's skeptical about whether governments are willing to move beyond "simplistic numbers and simplistic thinking" about education. This report, however, at least raises the issue and hopefully will start something.

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