59. Teachers strikes and neoliberalism

Unpublished
22 October 1997

Re: Ontario’s teachers are heading for disaster if they strike — Oct 21. Mr. Simpson’s certainties about government control over the education system are transparently selective. Any claim that contemporary government is finally “responsible for the [educational] system” resides within a contradictory neo-liberal politic that opposes “intrusions of the State.”
Fights over professional self-interest (remember the Kent Commission) do not begin and end with the teaching profession. Teachers, health professionals, lawyers, scientists, politicians, brokers, bankers, academics, and most of all journalists have been trained as experts to “run” their own professions often against the competing needs and desires of owners/employers, consumers, and citizens. Suggesting, as Mr. Simpson does, that elected governments of any persuasion are a cut-and-dried reflection of citizen support while unions are mere bodies of self-interest does nothing to enhance anyone’s education about the interrelationships between various deployments of organisational power.
As a rude object lesson, the cold realities of strikes and the need for civil disobediences can enhance as well as disrupt a student’s education. My first public testimony — before a municipal council — occurred as a teenager on a successful student strike committee formed to support legitimate teacher grievances of incompetent administration.
The news media as an educational tool while somewhat able to identify the ideologies of right and left consistently appears unable to usefully distinguish the ethos of liberalism from the technologies of neo-liberal ideologies.The public sphere cannot be trashed one day and made hallow the next without consequences. Confining debates on education to school curricula, “improved performance,” and public will is somewhat hypocritical if at the same time political commentators choose to welcome the mix of authoritarian and populist policy privatizations without considering the resulting ‘mentalities of politics’ on the learning patterns of adult populations