The Paradox of Democracy

During my days as a student activist studying philosophy in Alberta one wag described me as "a moderate socialist and a radical democrat."

That description is probably still apt 20 years later. The bulk of my work in online learning and media is dedicated toward the idea that people should be able to manage their own lives and their own futures.

But the phrase 'radical democrat' was and still is the source of some ambiguity. By 'democrat' I do not mean, of course, affiliation with the Democratic party in the United States. Rather, it means 'supporter of democracy', whatever that is.

Modern democracies consist of two parts:

• a mechanism enabling the majority to plan and carry out a form of self-governance for a region or nation as a whole, and
• a mechanism defining and ensuring the protection of basic rights and privileges accorded to all members of society.

Most people not surprisingly focus on the first part of democracy. Some even deride the second under the heading of 'judicial activism', as though democracy should only be defined by the former.

But I have never believed that a simple counting of votes is sufficient for the governance of a region or a nation, not the least because of the likelihood of what Mill calls the 'tyranny of the majority',  but also because the majority is simply unable to govern without these basic rights and privileges.

In modern democracies, one way we determine the will of the majority is by means of the vote (it may surprise people to know that this is not the only way to determine the will of the majority; a reading of Rousseau on 'the general will' for example reveals a more organic alternative process; others, by contrast, cite the 'invisible hand' of the marketplace).

The premise behind the exercise of the vote is that it reflects the opinions of an informed citizenry. What constitutes 'informed' has varied over the years. Voting was once limited to landowners, a privilege still enshrined in bodies such as the British House of Lords and the Canadian Senate. It was also at different times limited to free persons, to men, and today, to adults over a certain age. Robert Heinlein has suggested it be limited to those who serve in the military.

The need for this is found in a two-part argument formed by Thomas Jefferson:

• "Compare again the ferocious depredations of their insurgents, with the order, the moderation and the almost self-extinguishment of ours. And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people."

• "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."

It is a reflection at once of both Hobbes and Locke, the idea that peace in the land is ensured by a government that serves the will of the people, and that it is through this desire for peace that people will participate in, and support the mechanisms of, that government.

But this, in turn, depends on the people actually desiring something worth desiring. Here is Heinlein again:

"What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’"

Two dilemmas occur. The first is created when a person's self-interest is contrary to the interest of the interest of society as a whole. The classic instance of this is criminal behaviour, but in a democracy, many forms of self-interest are legal, even encouraged, even though they act against the interest of the whole.

The second is created when a person is mistaken about what lies in his own best interests. History is replete with examples of people acting, en masse, in a manner that harms their own well-being and security. And individual cases of self-harm or self-defeating behaviour exist in all societies. As Mill would argue, no person is best served by bread and circuses, but often, this is what they want.

In my own discussion of autonomy, I describe four major areas in which a person can enjoy more or less self-governance:

• the capacity to know - this includes being in a position to have relevant experiences, the capacity to reflect on those experiences, and to do so independently of incentives or coercions

• the capacity to act - this includes flexibility and mobility, the absence of legal constraints, barriers and locks, and the resources and entitlements necessary to make action possible 

• the range of behaviour - this is described by media of expression, association and transmission of ideas, background noise, tolerance and quality of choices

• the capacity to have an effect - described by the audience for an idea or its efficacy, as well as the nature and extent of improvements possible

In a simple democracy government by the votes of the majority, we can observe ways in which individuals, as well as the majority, are limited in their capacity to know, decide and act.

In a full and complete democracy, individuals would have the widest degree of autonomy possible, in a manner consistent with the autonomy of other members of society, in order to define and pursue their own best interests, and as necessary the best interests of society.

But it is clear that the protection and enhancement of this autonomy is not enabled by the simple process of voting alone (indeed, if even at all). For we find ourselves in a paradox: we need to vote to ensure the greatest degree of autonomy for ourselves, but we need the greatest autonomy for ourselves in order to show us how to vote.

We can see in any election (including the present American election taking place today) ways in which the autonomy of the voters is subverted, and hence, their ability to act in the best interests of either themselves or society:

• the information they receive is controlled and manipulated, they are unable to reason effectively on that information, and they are subject to rewards of government spending and coercion through loss of employment

• individual mobility is limited, both internationally, by means of immigration restrictions, and nationally, by means of limited access to social services and health care; a person's first interest, in most democracies today, is employment and personal welfare

• the right to associate and demonstrate is increasingly limited by police powers, while one's individual voice is being managed via copyright and trade restrictions, and limited access to the press and popular media

• the desires expressed by individual votes, and the mass of votes, are being subverted by influences placed on elected officials

In other words, it is not simply that people vote for bread and circuses, it is that, often, bread and circuses is the best they can get, because of the circumstances they find themselves in, and their inability to demand, and get, more.

This is why - and how - I am a radical democrat. My commitment to democracy extends well beyond support for the mechanisms of democratic decision-making, but additionally, to mechanisms and measures supporting the greatest degree of autonomy and self-governance possible.

In this (ironically and perhaps to some rather surprisingly) I am affiliated with the most conservative and libertarian voices in society today.

Where I differ is that I do not define 'intrusion' in our lives narrowly as 'government intrusion', first, and second, I do not define 'autonomy' simply in terms of my own individual autonomy, but in a manner that promotes the autonomy of all persons equally.

For if one of us is not free, none of us is free. 

In this, therefore, my support for democracy hinges on two elements that are very similar to Jefferson's two major points.

• The need to meet the basic conditions of autonomy for all of us, including a robust definition of rights that includes both the means and capacity to act and make decisions freely, and

• The need to enable for each person the capacity to become critically literate, that is, to be able to reason cogently and arrive reliably at those measures and conclusions most reflective of his or her self interest.

The former requires a charter of rights and freedoms that goes well beyond the 'bills of rights' that would be granted to people already in possession of the means to act upon them. 'Freedom of the press' is meaningless if one cannot own a press; 'freedom of speech' matters not at all if there is no means to be heard.

In practice, I support something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And in particular, I aver that no person can be free if he or she lacks sustenance and nourishment, housing, clothing, education, a sense of belonging, and a sense of meaning or purpose. If a person, or people, live in poverty, none of us is free. As Foucault might say, the rich are as bound by the trepiditions of the poor as are the poor. Or as Chandler might say, when people are poor, you always have to watch your back.

We cannot be free if we are in want; we cannot form the conditions for self-government from the condition of poverty.

With regard to the second, I have discussed elsewhere the needs of critical awareness and reflection under the headings of various types of literacy. And I have described, in much more general terms, what people need to learn. In both cases, the objective is to develop a capacity to perceive accurately, to reason with clarity, and to act with foresight.

Ultimately, my understanding of democracy is one in which the emphasis on decisions taken by majority vote decreases and finally wanes to almost nothingness.

The need for a vote, after all, represents and reflects an incapacity on the part of the electorate.

In the first instance, the vote reflects an incapacity to govern at all. The vote is, in the first instance, not an opting between ideas, but rather, a selection of representatives who will do our governing for us. It reflects a time and an era in which the process of governance required more travel and more time than any of us could afford.

This is a time that has arguably already passed. Modern communications technology makes most travel unnecessary. And today's legislators have had to spend so much time learning how to campaign, raise money, and earn our vote, that they are barely more capable of representing our own interests, even in complex matters, than we are ourselves.

And in the second instance, it reflects an incapacity to resolve through more gentle means the tensions and conflicts that flare in modern society. The vote represents a form of conflict, one in which the ballot has replaced the bullet, to be sure, but one in which existing market or legal mechanisms do not enable people to govern themselves directly.

And, in a final paradox, the tensions and conflicts being addressed in the ballot box today revolve around the question of whether there should be democracy at all. They revolve around the persistence of poverty and resistance to the efforts to alleviate it. They revolve around the persistence of ignorance and resistance to the efforts to educate. We are not now debating the question of what kind of society we would like to have, we are debating the question of whether we want to have a society at all.

Democracy, predictably, is unable to resolve the paradox of its own existence. In an existential incompleteness theorem, it is unable to determine whether democracy is, after all, the best form of government. And perhaps most damaging, it is unable to ensure its own existence. Democracy tolerates, at best, and encourages, at worst, the prevalence of poverty and the subversion of reason that give society a reason to exist.

For my own part, the resolution of the paradox lies in the explicit rejection of the proposition that some people are more important, or more valuable, than others. Or, more positively, an explicit endorsement of Kant's maxim that very rational being has intrinsic and not merely instrumental value, that to treat a person as a means to some end is to deny their essential humanity.

Some people arrive at this maxim from religious reasons. "Not even one sparrow dies and falls on the ground without God noticing it." For me, the import of Kant's maxim lies in the nature of society itself. A society that subjects its members to arbitrary and discriminatory treatment cannot sustain. Such a society exists in a state of perpetual war with itself, a draining of wealth and resources that ultimately leaves nothing but death and stagnation.

So today people vote, and exercise what limited social autonomy they have in their grasp. But in their vote, they should see the need for a wider democracy, one in which the vote is no longer necessary, but rather one based on a mechanism of exchanges of mutual support and benefit, a society defined not by cartels and cabals and conflict, but where sustenance and prosperity are ensured through cooperation, through exchanges between equals to their mutual benefit.

In other words, the reason we have a democracy at all is that at some level we believe every human being has the same basic worth. We understand that this sense of a basic equality is necessary for us to have a society at all, and that having a society is our best and only hope of having and sort of existence worth having.

That's why I'm a moderate socialist and a radical democrat. I believe this last is not negotiable. I believe that the basic equality of individuals in our society is all that protects us from the abyss, that the chains that bind us will, unless unshackled, be the weight that drags us down into oblivion.

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Predators and Producers: Whither Flat World

In what was probably an unintentional release of the information, Flat World Publishing made the world aware this weekend that it is ceasing distribution of digital textbooks without charge.

Readers of Campus Marketplace were the first members of the public to know, but "The company is making direct calls to many of its bookstore partners." Flat World CEO Jeff Shelstad told the publication that “while free access goes away, our mission to be fair and affordable remains as strong as ever."

A lot of people had banked on Flat World providing free access to textbooks, as it had promised to do.  "The only reason I gave Flatworld a chance was because it seemed like a great opportunity to try a text with no risk to the students," said one commenter on the Chronicle article. "I made the mistake of adopting before they changed their model with no notice to any of its customers."

To understand Flat World's change of philosophy, it is important to understand the company's business model. It is neatly summed up in an Inside Higher Ed article:

"Like traditional publishers, it commissioned and paid authors to produce high-quality textbooks, and to market those textbooks to professors to assign in their courses."

The idea here was that the free digital versions would lead colleges and universities to order print versions of the same works, and it would be via the print versions that the publisher made its money. What happened instead was that the world moved to digital more quickly than anticipated.

Inside Higher Ed again: "the shift in gears by Flat World Knowledge suggests that, for one company at least, providing free and open textbooks is not a viable business plan. While company officials hoped that they’d be able to persuade many of the consumers of the basic, free versions of its textbooks to pay for printed copies or versions enhanced with study aids and other add-ons, 'we don’t convert [from free to paid] as much as we used to,' said Shelstad, the Flat World co-founder."

Flat Earth represented the 'have your cake and eat it' school of publishing. It represented the idea that business models would not need to adjust to the digital reality, that you could take a traditional concept - like academic publishing - and simply add free digital content on top, as marketing and promotion perhaps.

It's the same model being embraced by the companies that are offering MOOCs, and it won't be long, as a commenter on the IHE article states, before they are offering closed open online courses. "Once we figure out the right word for 'much closer to free than we are now,' then we should let the folks at Coursera and EdX know. I think they'll probably need it in a few years, when MOOCs turn into MOCs, though at something less than the current cost of tuition."

There are ways to do free. Indeed, free learning resources will probably carry the day when the smoke clears. But they won't sustain traditional business models. Alex Osterwalder has a nice presentation on SlideShare that makes this point. Consider the alternative business models that can sustain free content:

- content is distributed for free, but once it reaches a certain threshold of popularity, it becomes commercial. This is similar to the NY Times model, which allows causal readers free viewing to a certain point.

- content is distributed for free within the context of an all-you-can-eat subscription model. Netflix does this, offering access to movies and television shows online for about $8 per month (in Canada), less than a third of the cost of one Flat World textbook.

- context is distributed for free, which stimulates demand for platforms and communications channels leveraging the content. This is what WordPress and Moodle have done, leveraging free software into hosting and consulting businesses.

So why couldn't Flat World have adopted one of these alternative business models?Because it focused on a way to sell the content it developed, rather than to leverage that content to motivate consumers to pay for products they actually would buy.

In Osterwalde's examples, consumers are paying not for the content directly but instead for free and online access to that content. It's the same thing they are paying for when they purchase computers or mobile phones and when they purchase internet accounts.

Subscriptions and services represent an intuitive addition to that business model; per-title fees for texts do not. But providing subscriptions and services require access to a lot of content, not a few specially-commissioned titles. And you have to devote yourself to building a platform rather than to simply focus on producing titles.

By structuring themselves as a traditional publisher, Flat World was not able to transition into a digital business model. This puts them on a path that now pits them as direct competition for traditional publishers, not an alternative approach. And while Flat World's Shelstad may claim to be able to compete on the basis of price, the company is now at best niche and at worst roadkill for the economies of scale.

That's one thing. Another thing is the licensing argument.

To begin with, I know Flat World published its work under the Creative Commons non-commercial license. At the same time, however, Flat World proponents such as David Wiley - not to mention other academic publishers in a similar context - have been arguing that authors need to publish their work under the "more open" CC-by license, which does not prohibit commercial use.

The logic of using CC-non-commercial is evident, and Wiley explained it during our debate in British Columbia: "Text book development costs a lot of money and they want to make those textbooks and they want to share, they're willing to share them with the world for free but they don't want to get undercut in the commercial market so they use this non‐commercial clause because as bad as it is, it's the best thing we have available." (p. 52)

Interestingly, this is very similar to my own logic in using CC-non-commercial in these pages. I don't want some commercial publish like Flat World to come along and take my content, enclose it, and start charging for access to it. I don't want the commercial pay-content industry to leverage its superior marketing and distribution capabilities to become the de facto vendor of what I had originally intended to be free and open content. So I use the NC license to protect myself.

Ironically, Wiley's argument against the NC clause was precisely that NC makes it impossible for publishers to do this. As he described it, "I want to print this stuff out, I want to do this service for people, I, if I'm going to spend all my time doing that and I'm not going to be growing my garden or doing whatever else, I'd like to at least be able to eat off of that activity, and your non‐commercial clause is morally reprehensible because it means that I can't make a living trying to help people get access to this material. That's the morality argument around non‐commercial."

This may seem to be a contradiction, but it's not. Here's what publishers such as Flat Earth want: they want access to your content for free, or for as low a cost as they can manage, and they want to be able to sell it for as much as possible. So it's good for them if authors make their content freely available, while at the same time they restrict the possibility of commercial reuse of the same content (ideally by eliminating the CC-share-alike clause).

This is what I've always argued commercial publishers want to do. I have always argued that theirs is a model based on enclosure - that they would take free and open content and make access impossible unless you paid them money. And that's what Flat World did here - it dangled its open content out there to lure people in, and then slammed a paywall on it, midway through the academic year, trapping people who had thus been enticed.

I think there are many ways Flat World and its proponents could have created a viable business based on free content.

First of all, I think it's time that the community recognizes that 'free content' means content you can download, remix, repurpose, share - but not sell. That the 'free as in libre' sense of free is meaningless without 'free as in gratis', because without access to the content you have no freedoms at all.

So I support Flat World's use of CC-NC, just as I support MIT OpenCourseWare's use of the NC license, and the rest of them - and that why, indeed, I am inclined to view suspiciously initiatives that are asking people to donate content under a CC-by license. They are just waiting for their change to pull a Flat World - to convert from a free-access to a paid-access model.

After all, who wouldn't pay $10 a year to use Wikipedia? Right?

Second, I think that Flat World could have found its sustainability niche if it had structured its offer around the idea of providing services for users of online textbooks. Services such as hosting, streaming, maybe even printing. Services such as authoring and editing and proofing. There is much more money to be made helping people create free content than there is in charging people for content.

They could have learned, for example, from Simon Fraser University's Public Knowledge Project. This is an initiative that has been around since 1998, has employed some 40 graduate and undergraduate students over the years, and has just launched its Open Monograph Press. As PKP's John Willinksy says, "We have worked hard to create a virtual publishing-house-in-a-box, which, in the hands of publishers and scholars, will give life to a new generation of learned books."

In general, let me say this: there are two types of commercial enterprise, two types of business, and they are: predation and production.

The predation model thrives on scarcity and shortage. It seeks barriers in production, or creates its own, in order to stimulate greater demand and higher prices. It thrives on hardship and want, and fails in the face of abundance and prosperity.

The production model thrives on abundance and plenty. It removes barriers in production, or enables new production, in order to stimulate widespread availability and lower prices. It thrives on prosperity and generosity, and attacks hardship and want.

Production model companies make things possible, while predation model companies make things impossible. A production model company enables sharing; a predation model company prevents it.

The predation model depends on legal mechanisms to force compliance - it depends, for example, on court-awarded monopolies, copyright and trade restrictions, prohibitions against production, and similar mechanisms. While predation model proprietors champion the principles of the free market, they rely on artificial scarcities to stay in business.

Today's predation-model proprietorships include journal and textbook publishers, who rely on cheap or free academic labour paid for by public grants and/or universities, and required textbook purchases in college and university educations.

But we've seen the model in the past, from the original corporate charters granted by monarchs to grant enterprises monopolies over trade and production of certain goods, from the ownership of land and agricultural production in the 1600 and 1700s, to the energy and transport charters of the 1800s and 1900s, to the communications, media and entertainment giants of the 1900s and 2000s. And with proprietary seed stocks and other biological goods being produced in the 2000s we are seeing an enclosure of biology and life itself under commercial ownership, creating, once again, scarcities where none existed.

The production model focuses on helping people produce rather than forcing them out of the market. At each stage of its history, the production model has had to break the predatory monopoly that preceded it.

The opening of the new world ended the proprietorship of feudal lords and fiefs, as a person need no longer depend on a landowner to create crops, but could now emigrate and own his or her own land. And as millions did, the serfs in one land after another were gradually freed, and predatory land-ownership became productive agriculture. And starvation, once common in those lands, was effectively ended.

Where once only charter corporations could undertake business and commerce, the rise of such professionals as accountants, lawyers and clerical staff enabled families and small businesses to flourish. The financial and business services industry was, in the first instance, part of the production model.

In a similar manner, the rise of the automobile and the creation of the road network ended the transportation cartels created by the railroads. For many years (and even today) the automobile has symbolized freedom - and this is not merely a metaphoric freedom, but one for the most part genuine, as people could now travel where they wished without tolls or fares.

Motorized transport, and motors in general, stimulated an entire productive sector - people could transport themselves, procure their own goods, mow their own lawns, till their own fields, lift things, move things, make things - and an entire productive economy developed around these innovations, one so large it dwarfed what existed before it.

Today we are witnessing the conversion of the intellectual properties from a predation to a production model. We are entering an era in which most of us can sing, act, write, draw and paint, compose, author, program and design. These skills, once the preserve of an elite, these products, once carefully hoarded (Disney still talks of the 'Disney Vault' as though it were a good thing) are becoming common and plentiful.

Flat World is and was based on the predation model, even when it was giving content away for free. It was based on this model because it sought to be the proprietor and locus of content production. That's what made it possible for it to so easily add a paywall. If it were based on the production model, the idea of a paywall would seem absurd.

To me, the NC clause means that my content is the output of the economic process, not the input. It is something produced by the productive economy, not something consumed by the predatory economy. It is something that is meant to be shared, not sold. It is something that is intended to be abundant, not scarce. It's value is calculated according to what it contributes, not by what it takes.

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Learning in the Digital Age: The Reality and the Myth

Let me tell you story of the great bear. It's a story from First Nations People who lived near where I was born in Canada, the Iroquois people. It's a story from long ago.

They didn't have very much. They had a small community around a campfire. They lived on deer and rabbit.

Time passed and a great bear came to plague their campground. Every day when they woke up, they could see the tracks of the bear around their campsite. The bear was eating all the game, eating all the deer, eating all the rabbits. The people began to starve.

They sent hunters out to shoot the bear, but when they shot bows and arrows at the bear, the arrows just bounced off. The bear would kill the warriors. One or two would straggle back and say, "The bear killed us." They were getting desperate and they didn't know what to do.

Finally, three warriors on the same night had the same dream. They said, "I dreamed that I killed the great bear. I dreamed that we went together and we shot the bear. The bear bled and the bear died."

The chief decided that it's a spirit dream; it must be true. He sent the three warriors, even though they were his best three warriors.

They went out and they shot the bear. They were able to draw blood. They chased the bear. The bear was bleeding. They continued to chase around and around, but they never caught the bear.

To this day, when you look up in the fall sky, you can see the stars, three hunters chasing the bear. You know that they're chasing the bear because the leaves all turn red, which is the blood of the bear that they shot.

It's through the creation of myths that we talk to each other. Our myths are not just explanations of where the stars come from or why the leaves turn red. They're the expressions of the full range of human emotion, from human reason to irony, to anger, to argument, to explanation.

We speak in myth because reality is ineffable. It cannot be expressed in words. All language is, as in the first instance, based in myth, based in some idealization, some abstraction.

We forget this. We think today as though what we say expresses reality in some way. It's as though our words were fully and literally true, but this is seldom the case. Even the words themselves are metaphors, capturing reality through myth.

You might think, how can this be? When you look at language itself, you can see this. There's a French word, croc. I'm picking French because it's not English and it's not Estonian. It's neutral. You can think of your own language and see if this is true.

We have the French word croc, which means tooth or fang, something crooked, something hooked. We have the idea of the crocodile, an animal with fangs. We have in French the idea of crochet, and to crochet is to create a rug using hooks. We have the idea of entre crochet in French, between the brackets, between the hooks. You have crochet a bouton, or button hooks, the things you use. Or, in French, a crochet du gauche, a right hook.

You see this over and over, in French and in other languages, how the single root morphs and twists. The single concept creates the image that underlies all of our concepts into the future.

We comprehend the future in terms of what we understand today. This is the basis of the origin of these myths. This is really important to understand.

When we start talking about what cannot be known we lose our place or we experience only confusion. We are lost in a swirl of chaos. It's chaos that, in fact, characterizes all reality.

We project our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, our features onto the chaos. This is how we understand the chaos. We look at the chaos and we see ourselves. In seeing ourselves in the chaos, we comprehend the chaos, but it's a myth. A lot of the time these patterns, these projections, are primal and basic like bears, like tragedy, like fangs and hooks.

At the same time, as we try to comprehend the future, we also make the future. We strive to make tomorrow safe and comfortable as it was for us in the past, or at least a mythical past ‑‑ a hearth, a home, a story, a family, a community. Another myth.

Sisyphus, you may know, sought to cheat death and he succeeded.

But he was caught by the gods and punished by being sentenced to push the boulder up the hill forever.

When he gets the boulder to the top of the hill, of course, the boulder rolls down the hill. He goes down the hill after it, and has to push the boulder up, and so on for the rest of time.

"The Myth of Sisyphus," it's very famous, very well known.

When we worry about the future, when we worry about the Internet, when we worry about e‑learning it's not because we don't know what to expect, it's not the unknown. It's because when we project into the future, we project a future like "The Myth of Sisyphus." We project a future that has been taken away from us by some nameless form, e‑learning, and replaced with pointless labour at the service of the gods.

In a future that's constantly changing, a future that we can never comprehend, a future where our degrees mean nothing a year or two years after we got them. That's a future we saw described just yesterday. It appears to be a future where we have no hope like Sisyphus.

In such a scenario, e‑learning does not appear to be a solution at all. Rather, it seems to be a surrender, a ceding of our authority, our independence and our autonomy.

One thinks of Adam Curtis' videography "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." If you're not familiar with it, I certainly recommend you look it up and set aside several hours.

What Curtis is saying is the Internet age brings us into an age where we lose our independence and autonomy and become parts in this large machine, that our contribution to knowledge is beyond our control, that there is no room for the individual, the thinker, the creator, the idealist. The only future is the one that's created as society as a whole that is, as Curtis says, all watched over by these machines.

Some would have a say it's a future that we have to accept. Camus would say, "The struggle itself is enough to fill man's heart." One must imagine Sisyphus as happy.

These days we say, "Well, at least Sisyphus has a job." We forget. We forget that Sisyphus achieved his objective. He set out to defy death, and in the end that's what he got, but it was at the cost of eternal labour. It's this cost that makes us wary.

When people point to things and say, "It's just a myth, you're wrong," it's almost like they're asking us to surrender to this inevitability like Sisyphus. What we hope and dream has no meaning or, worse, will be realized and shown not to be gold, but to be worthless dross.

It's funny how most myths seem to finish this way. The hunter forever chasing the golden bear, Sisyphus forever pushing the boulder up the hill.

For all that, we never stop creating these myths. We never stop trying to understand the world, trying to comprehend the world by drawing pictures, telling stories and imagining what it could be.

Steve Wheeler tells us the idea of the digital natives or the net generation is a myth. Of course it's a myth. It's just a story that Don Tapscott tells and you should not believe that what Don Tapscott tells is true. It's a myth. We shouldn't think of it as true.

It's also a way of understanding the world and that's the value we need to draw from it. It's a way of saying that our children are different from us. They have different experiences, they have different ways of seeing the world, they are different people.

Simply saying, "This is a myth," washes all of that under the bridge, reassures us that our view of the world is on solid ground. Why worry about change? It's all just illusion, it's all just a myth. You may have dreams, but the reality is it's all just a myth.

We are warned by the story of Adam and Eve; we are warned by the story of Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire from the gods, to be aware of the dangers of too much knowledge. As Plutarch, so we are told, says, "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."

Again, we can look at these myths as not-real representations of the story of creation or the story of the discovery of fire. Or we can look at these myths as cautions, not against education in general, but against a certain approach to education.

We can see these myths as telling us, with some clarity, that knowledge is not something simply to be consumed, like an apple, that knowledge is not something that can be stolen from the gods like fire. I thought Christian Port yesterday expressed this really well. I think we were all interested to hear his presentation.

"Imagine," he said, "we built a robot." I love the myth making in the middle of a talk.

"Imagine," he said, "we built a robot and sent it to a planet where there's something we need like some ore. We programmed the robot, the more you mine the better you feel." Remember that?

The robot learns, over time, to know itself. It comes to realize that there's a button that makes it feel better, so instead of learning how to mine the ore, it learns how to press the button.

Port asks, "What is it that motivates a human being to develop, to move on?" He says, "It's in the central nervous system where we get dopamine. We press the dopamine button and the outcome becomes a culture of cheating." It's like artificial sweetener. It's like caffeine. I love caffeine. It's like drugs, it's like green, it's like Facebook friends, it's like e‑learning.

The concern that e‑learning is this thing that our myths warn us about. It's a shortcut. It's the pressing of the button. It's the activation of the dopamine, but it's not really the learning.

What is this feeling? It gives us a confused feeling. The myth gives us two elements. It's an expression of what we want, but it's a warning about getting what we want too easily.

Steve Wheeler talking about myths, I counted seven in all. I probably could have kept going. You analyze his talk; all of his myths really are cautions against the easy score.

Consider what he says about learning styles. They're a lot of nonsense. You'll read that. There's all kinds of studies that say learning styles are nonsense.

He says, "There is one true thing. There are as many learning styles as there are people. The problem," he says quite accurately, "with learning styles is they try to pigeon-hole students into categories. They try to define students by the activities you impose on them based on what you believe as teachers."

If we think about learning styles as the magic shortcut to more effective learning, we are deluding ourselves. Even if it is true that people learn differently, and it is true that people learn differently, we don't achieve magical results simply by catering to that.

A learning style isn't a shortcut to memory because learning isn't about remembering at all. It's a myth, but it's useful. It's a myth that tells us, that warns us, that not all of our students are the same. They're not going to react the same, and most importantly, they're not like us.

There's a deeper lesson here that Wheeler touched on when he noted that learning styles motif had been visited over and over by people like Mumford and COLT. We could add Gregorc, Myers‑Briggs. We can also add that the stage‑based learning models, Piaget, Bloom, method‑based approach in Gagne, or I saw this morning the SECI model from Nonaka and Takeuchi ‑‑ I'm never good at pronouncing names ‑‑ described by Carayannis.

All of these things where learning is described by slicing and dicing, categorizing, drawing into stages, outlining a process. It's the same model in each case where we're taking something very complex and trying to find little bits in it. We're going to try to study these little bits, these little segments, these little categories and that will be the shortcut to understanding the difficult process of learning.

It's modeling. That's fine if we understand that modeling is myth making. In general, the approach of trying to pigeonhole students, pigeonhole stages of learning or whatever leads to methodology. It leads to, on the one hand, a struggle to understand the world, albeit without science, and on the other hand, an attempt to realize our objectives more simply, more easily, an attempt to create a shortcut.

It's nonsense to say that there are no categories. There are categories. The world is filled with categories. What it's nonsense to say is that these categories are fundamental to learning, that they express the fundamental nature of perception. It's nonsense to say this categorization will, by itself, magically lead to some new understanding as though our mythical categorizations somehow expose the nature of reality.

We do not make things simpler by multiplying entities. We do not make things clearer by breaking them down into parts, though we are tempted to do so.

Today's candidate for breaking things into parts and making them simpler, so‑called, is competencies, as though we can understand the really difficult nature of mathematics by understanding 10 subsets of mathematics or whatever. In my mind, searching for competencies is taking one really difficult problem and breaking it down into 10 really difficult problems.

Another myth. I was up this morning preparing this presentation, watching the news in English. You may have seen this if you were listening in English.

You may have actually seen this commercial from DuPont and this is a quote. "The need for science‑based solutions is more pressing, as is the collaboration to find them. Coming together is how we will better protect the Earth and the billions on it."

So says DuPont. So says, in her own way, Alison Littlejohn. She tells us, "People first connect, then they consume and use the knowledge, then they create new knowledge, an artefact, a conversation, a trace, etc."

She gave us the use case of Sally, the new chemist, who has to create a new substrate for drilling a new type of rock. I don't know what that means because I don't know much about drilling. She needs to create a new tech. I'm drawing that from "Star Trek."

She says that you draw from a whole range of different resources. You also draw from knowledge of different range of people and, at any point, you may be working as an individual, group, network, collective, etc. You connect, create, contribute, or you join with others with similar goals. This turns out to be central to the presentation.

"What are the binding forces," she asks, "that draw people or resources together?" Via social constructivism, people communicate via knowledge objects. People communicate working in networks, etc.

I'm sitting there. I'm asking myself, how do I understand this? I can't understand it literally. She's talking about binding forces that draw us together as though we must succumb to being joined together by some external force like what, gravity?

The myth somewhere through the talk has become the reality. She says, "We need something, an object, that brings people together, but what is this object? In turning, we use a goal as that object." I loved this. I really did.

There's in English two words, objective and objective, and object and object. You can have an object, which is a thing, or you can have an object, which is a goal. You have the same word with two different meanings and it's interesting to see how the two different meanings slide together here.

We have very traditional outcomes of this, various social objects such as work or learning activities, reports, patient health case report, common problems, learning goals, things that would be familiar to us from 20 years ago. The myth making has served its purpose and brought us back to the comfortable and familiar.

There's another myth you may be familiar with. It's the story of King Midas.

King Midas was a very greedy king, as you know, and was granted a wish based on a most thoughtless fantasy that everything he touches turns into gold.

Of course, he starts turning things into gold.

Everything seems really good until his daughter comes for a goodnight kiss. He gives her a little kiss and his daughter turns to gold.

As the web page where I got this from, "Freezes solid like an Oscar statue." I love the way they use metaphor in order to describe a myth.

Midas pleads to the gods for nullification. He's able to wash away his gift and lives a virtuous life thereafter.

We can read the myth very superficially. You don't always want what you wish for, or some things are worth more than gold.

I draw a slightly deeper lesson, or at least to me it's deeper. I'm going to say it's deeper because it's me. We often hear about gold of one sort or another described as a prescription for everybody.

I was thinking of Stephen Harris's school and these terms that he described it just before this talk. Imagine if everybody had Stephen Harris's school. Would that even be possible? Would it make sense or would it bankrupt the education system? Can you imagine the furniture companies giving every school furniture? Who would they sell to?

It's not just that. In the North American context, there's this idea that everybody should learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or the so‑called STEM courses, but if everybody learns science and technology, nobody's an artist.

It's not that there's no art in the world after that, there's no conception of art. There's no way to represent art because we've lost the words. It does not scale, cannot scale.

The principle of the categorical imperative tells us when somebody prescribes something as a solution, to imagine everybody in the world adopting that solution and then to ask whether it makes sense.

Everything turning to gold does not make sense. Everything turning into that one special school does not make sense. Everything turning into science, technology, engineering and mathematics does not make sense.

Sameness is a myth. Sameness is the shortcut. We think, we are tempted to think, if everything could be the same, it would be so much easier. It's inevitable, as we learn from Prometheus, that in our efforts to make everything the same, we destroy everything that we value and we come to discover that sameness is meaningless without that value.

It's classic myth formation. The approaching presence of some evil or danger, globalization, the end of energy, I don't know, too many penguins. The only way to respond to that danger is to become part of the whole, to work as a team, to subsume our personal interests.

Why, I would ask, should we suppose that sameness or subsumption to the whole will solve the problem? Why is the push to collaboration, shared objectives, shared goals, somehow the answer to whatever it is that's coming on us?

There was a comment. Somebody made a comment in the session just before this one. There are too many convening theories, incommensurable vocabularies, and we could solve this if we had one vocabulary and one theory. That would fix that.

I remember the RSS standards wars of the late `80s, early `90s. RSS was a syndication format and there were too many different flavours of RSS.

Somebody said, "Let's create a new standard and there will be just one standard covering them all. We'll call it Atom." Then after that we had RSS and Atom, two different standards.

Then somebody said, "Let's create one standard that will bridge the gap between RSS and Atom." Then we had three standards, and so it goes.

The attempt to standardize creates multiplicity. Myths of conformity, as though conformity makes better.

In 1793 they came up with the idea of interchangeable parts. Eli Whitney first put this into practice in the manufacture of muskets. Saying this really worked, it created more guns. We had the idea that in the long run, if we have sameness of production, all the changes that need to be managed by management.

Here's something from Duncan Kennedy. "Legal education is training for hierarchy. Because students believe what they are told explicitly and implicitly about the world they are entering, they behave in ways that fulfill the prophecies the system makes about them and the world. This is the link‑back that completes the system. Students do more than accept the way things are and ideology does more than damp opposition. Students act affirmatively within the channels cut for them, cutting them deeper, giving the whole patina of consent, and weaving complicity into everyone's life story.

It's Sisyphus all over again. Sameness simply brings us back to doing the same thing over and over again at, if you will, the behest of the gods. If we lose our difference we lose our meaning.

George Orwell put it well. "It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete soaring up terrace after terrace 300 meters into the air. From where Winston stood, it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering the three slogans of the party. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

Sameness breaks down the distinctions we need even to have a goal, or an ambition or a dream.

An Indian legend, again.

I'm sure you're all familiar with this legend, the six men of Hindustan who went to see the elephant. The problem was, these men were blind and so they could not see the elephant.

Each man touched the elephant.

One man touched the side of the elephant and said, "It's huge like a wall."

Another man touched the tusk of the elephant and said, "It's sharp like a spear."

Another one touched the ear of the elephant and he said, "It's flat and floppy like a leaf."

Another one touched the trunk of the elephant and he said, "It's like a snake."

The myth ends with these men fighting amongst each other, each of them sure because they had the experience for themselves of what the elephant was like.

Of course, as the myth tells us, none of them were wrong, but none of them were right.

It's interesting where Janssen is talking about in omnia, talking about it being lifelong learning, serendipity, but also entrepreneurship, e‑learning, m‑learning, etc., helping people meet their goals. She points to, I think quite correctly, adding value by combining competencies.

She said, "In Nokia, they hired only engineers and that's where their problem started." What they tried to do instead was to bring together people who were young, people who were old, people who were students, people who were professionals. I think that was a good idea.

The idea here was that people would do their learning in context, so it would have real meaning for them. They would have opportunities to succeed and to fail, where the intent was to bring out the expertise in everyone, the different types of expertise.

The other side of her story was that these teams were to be entrepreneurial. They were to create entities that would compete in a marketplace. We have also in this picture this myth of the marketplace, this myth of the commercial approach solving the problems that the management approach cannot solve. It's the invisible hand of the marketplace, the myth created by Adam Smith. Surely, we don't think that this is real.

I ran in my newsletter just the other day a report showing that study after study has looked for evidence that the marketplace moves forward toward some advantage, some stable position, some progress, but there is no built‑in advantage to the invisible hand of the marketplace. The invisible hand of the marketplace is a myth. There is no guiding hand. There's just chaos.

Here's a model for understanding this chaos. It's just a myth, but it's a good myth. It will help us see through some of these other myths. It's called the TIMN theory, tribes, institutions, markets and networks. It describes the evolution of organization over the years. It may well be familiar to many of you.

It also describes forms of learning. When you think of tribes and apprenticeships in the same light, institutions representing the model of professors, scholars and scholarship. Markets representing the model of arguments, debate, the clashes of ideas, classes, categories and theories, etc., and networks as communications. I put in my notes here creativity.

The first two models are built on a kind of sameness, the sameness of genetics, the sameness of family. The last two are based on types of diversity. One type of diversity results in Atomism. The other type of diversity results in networks.

Putting somebody into entrepreneurship programs is putting them into competitive markets. It's preparing them for, I would say, the world of the 1990s, the world before the Internet, the world before we began communicating with each other in these networks.

It's interesting. Steve Wheeler talking about the flipped classroom, talking about the real flip, the flip toward what he called bear pit pedagogy, having them fight it out, debate it, arguing from both sides.

I listen to that and I think of the competitive market approach. Having students argue and debate is like having students try to create companies, try to compete against each other and, again, preparing for the market model of the 1990s.

What I want to say about myths is the same thing that I want to say about learning. It's that the content of the story is, for all practical purposes, irrelevant. That doesn't mean that there's no content. It just means that the content is the thing that moves the learning forward.

What matters in learning is not what is said, but how it is said. As McLuhan would say, the meaning is, in fact, in the message or, maybe to paraphrase him a bit, the meaning is in the mode of the message.

The TIMN model, again, different ways of teaching. The tribe model, story by the campfire. The institution model, a lecture by a university professor. The markets model, a shouting debate. The network model, a conversation.

People like Weinberger and others tried to say this in the "Cluetrain Manifesto," markets are conversations. What he should have said, in my mind, is that our markets are becoming networks. Competition is becoming conversation.

Networks aren't a shortcut, either. Networks aren't the magic solution any other than markets are the magic solution, any more than professors are the magic solution. Networks have to avoid two forms of what might be called network death.

On the one hand, collapsing into sameness. That might be called the collaborative principle where every entity in the network becomes the same and, consequently, all dialogue, all meaning, ceases.

On the other hand, the network has to avoid disintegration into atoms. That might be called the competitive principlewhere the network falls apart. Both the social and the individual are forms of network death. What we want is that happy middle ground where the network is dynamic and capable of reacting, adapting and adjusting to the future.

I've tried to describe in my own work methodological principles that allow networks to do this. Of course, these are myths as well, but they're practical myths. As long as we don't think of them as describing reality, we can use them the way we can use other myths. The principles are autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity.

It's interesting when we look at the myths, when we look at the myths that I've talked about so far in this talk, that in many cases, arguably all of the cases, the myths are warning us against abandoning diversity, against abandoning openness. They warn us against trying to make everything the same. They warn us against trying to determine the objectives, the goals, the values of people.

In my own work with a number of my colleagues, people like George Siemens, David Cormier, Rita Kop and others, we've created a type of online learning called the MOOC, or massive open online course. What a MOOC is, is a recognition. It is first of all a recognition that there are no shortcuts, that we are not going to try to design e‑learning as simply a faster way of cramming content into people's heads.

That would be failing to heed the lessons from the past, the lessons that go all the way back to Prometheus, Sisyphus and the rest. A MOOC in the parlance of this talk is about creating a future, not succumbing to it. Kristjan Korjus talked about the open organization of the students at Tartu. This is the same principle, only applied to a single course.

Success in the course is what you determine it to be. Participation in the course is what you want it to be. There is no content in the course. There are topics. We talk about different things. Each week we may bring in a guest or we may talk about some concept or idea, but it's a lot like the artist that was described, I forget which talk it was. I think it was Stephen Harris's.

The artist, instead of teaching his students how to paint, went to the class and painted and led his class all the way through the process from painting all the way to hanging it in the gallery. Yeah, it was Steve Harris.

The content is like that. It's what the instructor does, but it's not something that the student has to consume and memorize. There is no content or, conversely, there's too much content. The student needs to navigate or learn to navigate through this by connecting with themselves, by connecting with other people.

The idea here isn't to teach content, but to start as a starting point for our thinking. You might ask, what's the purpose, what's the objective if there is no content? There is no purpose. There is no objective. More accurately, each person decides what their own purpose is. The idea here is to promote diversity and promote autonomy.

There is a process that we talk about and recommend. It's only talked about and recommended, it's not required, of aggregation, remix, re‑purpose, feed forward. Very similar to what Alison's proposal talked about, but without filtering, without creating, without evaluation.

I was going to say I’m more interested in people creating, but that would be incorrect. I’m more interested in people conversing with each other, using objects to express their hopes, their fears, their ideas, their dreams, creating their own myths.

Not pedagogy, there is a way of talking about the skills that would be required to flourish in such an environment. I sometimes talk about them under the rubric of critical literacies.

They range all the way from the skills involved in arguing, as Steve talked about, to skills involved in recognizing patterns, motifs, principles, organizations. Also, the pragmatics, the use of symbols and images, the context, the placement, and the frame in our world view and understanding change, dynamics, evolution, and prediction in this environment.

These are skills you don't get in front of a classroom, say, "OK, we'll start with skill number one, part A." These are skills you acquire only in an environment where you see them and you acquire them by doing them, by practicing in them, by conversing, using the language in which these skills demonstrate success.

I'll finish off with one more myth.

It's a story by Arthur C. Clark called "The Nine Billion Names of God."

There were some monks in the Himalayas. They'd been working for the last 300 years and they developed a new language. They're laboriously writing down, one by one, each of the nine billion names of God.

It's calculated it will take them another 13,000 years to finish.

When some Westerners arrive at their monastery and they talk about computers, the monks think and the Westerners think this could be a really good shortcut.

We could get the computers to write out all the names of God for us. That's what they do. They set up computers.

The Westerners are very careful because what's going to happen after you write out the nine billion names of God? Well, nothing.

The Westerners set up the computer to print out the names of all the nine billion names of God, but to finish printing only after they've left so the monks won't be mad at them.

The story ends with the Westerners are climbing down the hill and the computer finishes churning out all the nine billion names of God.

They're walking down the mountain. They look up and, one by one, very simply, the stars are all going out without any fuss.

I was thinking about Arthur Harkins' talk, cyborgs and preparing for the Information Age, preparing for the 1970s, and thinking about preparing for an age when computers take over. That's the future I was asked in the previous session, what's the future you most fear? It's the future where the nine billion humans are each, one by one, replaced by a computer.

It's conceivable. We can think about it, but you know that there's a new myth here as well.

The myth is that, one by one, each human is replaced by a machine, nine billion of them. After all this time, the machines are able to have perfect conversation with each other, no ambiguity, no misunderstanding, an ideal language, complete comprehension. They discover with all the humans gone there's nothing left to talk about.

We can imagine a future filled with machines. We can't imagine a future without meaning. We have to continually hope for the impossible, not the possible, because if our ambitions were actually achieved, it would be a disaster.

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Improving Canadian Postsecondary Education

We can read about 'five ideas to reform post-secondary education in Canada in a University Affairs article by columnist Léo Charbonneau. The strategies (proposed by a Globe and Mail reporter in a now-paywalled colum) are old canards, and I'll debunk them one at a time.

1. A National Strategy

Every time the subject of education reform in Canada comes up someone calls for a national strategy. Thus we are told "Canada 'is unique in its failure to develop a national approach to universities and colleges.'"

As Charbonneau says, "It’s not going to happen, period." Education in Canada is a provincial responsibility; the federal government has no interest in intervening (nor should it), and the best the the Council of Ministers of Education Canada could come up with was the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), a $64 million bonfire made of money.

More to the point, though, the presumption that a national strategy would make things better needs to be deflated. Look at our national environmental protection strategy - is it somehow better because it's federal? I would be inclined to say it isn't. How about national trade strategy - are we doing better because it's federal? Arguably not.

Things don't get better just because there's a national strategy. They get more centralized, and that means, when they go wrong, they go wrong all over the place, and there's no way to demonstrate a better alternative.

2. Making Teaching Central

This is another one of those things that comes up every time someone raises the subject of post-secondary education reform in Canada. It's hard to resist.

But I have a radical alternative suggestion: make students central. Make learning central. Or even more to the point, make access (by everyone!) to learning central.

As Charbonneau says, "good teaching requires resources, particularly human resources. This means hiring more full-time, tenure-track faculty. Who’s going to pay for that?" The answer, we know, is all of us, through our taxes, and students, through their tuitions.

Again more to the point, though, why is it that the professors are central to the system? Yes, I know, they're the ones who provide the teaching, but (speaking very frankly now) they're employees. We wouldn't even be hiring them unless we wanted some sort of result. It's the result that's the important thing, not the process.

The slogan 'make teaching central' is based on the presumption that the only way to effectively and efficiently provide a post-secondary education to the mass of Canadians is to offer (good old traditional) teaching. But we know (from experience) that this means rationing post-secondary education to those who are good enough or (more often) those who can afford it.

I say, make learning central. Explore alternatives. I have no issue at all with the money we spend on post-secondary education; I'd go to the wall to defend it. But make that money count. Find ways to help Canadians educate themselves, and throw down the barriers to learning.

3. International Expansion

The call to 'expand internationally' rarely has any educational intent; it is usually intended as a way to raise money for our cash-starved system by enticing people (well, rich people) from China and India to pay premium tuition fees.

When I was president of the Graduate Students' Association at the University of Alberta one of my greater privileges was handing out cheques of $435 each to international students, their share of the tuition-fee lawsuit we won against the university. These cheques were more than an international student working as a graduate assistant earned in a month.

Some of these students made real sacrifices in order to study in Canada. Others, though, were the beneficiaries of corrupt governments or simply their nations' respective one-percenters.

Canada's legacy shouldn't to leverage its educational attainment by squeezing poor nations for everything they can afford. Our legacy should be one or generosity, not parsimony.

That's why, when a former president of the NRC came through our offices, I declared my mission to be to extend free learning to every person in the world (to his credit, the president didn't flinch, though the Director-General accompanying him just about had a heart attack).

The idea of opening campuses abroad is a non-starter, especially in a world that is shifting away from campuses. These maybe worked back in the days when the American Universities were being established. Today they're just the educational version of McDonalds, fast-food-learning that the local poor cannot afford.

I do, however, support Charbonneau's suggestion of "a Canadian version of the Erasmus student exchange program that would entice students to do a term abroad or even elsewhere in Canada." I've always thought this was one thing Australia did really well, sending its students and staff around the world to gain experiences and ideas (I've seen less of it recently).

Of course, we had such a program, at least inside Canada. It was called Katimavik. The federal government ended funding for it last year.

4. Accountability Benchmarks

The old accounting maxim is, of course, "what is measured can be managed," or some such thing. The idea is that you don't know whether your policies are having any effect unless you measure outcomes. That's an idea that sounds fantastic in theory. In practice, it often fails.

Here's why: measurement is, at best, only the first step in a feedback loop. For measurement to mean anything at all, it needs to progress through some mechanism (aka 'management', though if you skip management and go directly to staff, then it becomes 'formative' assessment - same theory, though) that reforms behaviour in such a way as to influence the outcome in the desired direction.

This raises two questions: first, are you measuring the right thing? And second, does the feedback mechanism produce the right result? In many cases, the answer to both questions is 'no'. The reason is that most measurement systems, when implemented, are based on short term measures, such as grade scores. But education is a long term phenomenon.

A lesson taught at the age of three results in a behaviour at the age of 23. You can't effectively measure the behaviour 20 years later, so you test whether the lesson was learned at age three. Which it may well have been - even if it was the wrong lesson. An intolerance or a prejudice taught at a young age is an undesirable outcome, but testing mechanisms have no way to detect for and correct this.

Our demographic and economic data today are in effect measuring the effectiveness of the education system of the 1970s and 1980s. These data show (to me, at least) that while we excelled in the teaching of the arts and sciences, we were weak in literacy and severely lacking in ethics and policy. These failings (not test scores) should be fed back into our understanding of the school system.

But, of course, as Charbonneau points out, while our national government should "adequately fund a robust education division at Statistics Canada," we've seen instead "recent cutbacks at the federal agency." We've seen funding for other research, such as by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, curtailed. Much cheaper to advocate standardized tests - it's quick cheap data. Useless, maybe, but the portions are huge.

5. Canadian Online Platforms

I have long argued for a JISC-style mechanism in Canada that offers access to services, innovation, research and support. This includes, but is not limited to, online platforms. These calls have met with pretty much zero traction (at least we have innovative provincial agencies, such as B.C. Campus, in some regions).

But even with this recommendation, we have to be careful. The last thing we need is, say, a nationally-mandated learning management system (it's bad enough that there are some provincially-mandated LMSs). Putting that much purchasing power into the hands of a single agency is a recipe for corruption at worst and golf-course-ware (*) at best.

But there are many things we could support nationally and/or provincially here in Canada. Open up our library and museum collections. Open up a place were teachers and students can upload (and find, and use) learning resources. I've worked on various projects like this over the years - for example, eduSource - but they all founder at the rock of commercialization.

We should have set up a system such that any teacher or student could set up an email list if they wanted, open a discussion group if they wanted, could host an online course if they wanted, set up a blog or wiki if they wanted, etc. Setting up and maintaining these basic services could (and would) be the basic platform for much more robust development and experimentation in online learning.

But - again - there is a big difference between mandating this for use, and making this available for use. But that is the difference between a national 'strategy' and a national 'infrastructure'.

And Finally

My take is that there isn't a whole lot wrong with education in Canada - after all, our high school graduates are demonstrably among the best educated in the world, our post-secondary system teems with creativity and inspiration, and our society as a whole has developed into a peaceful, kind, tolerant and prosperous home for all of us. Pretty good metrics, if you ask me.

The only major problem is that there isn't enough of it - too many people still miss out. People in rural regions are not able to access the diverse range of programs and services available in the cities. First Nations people miss out on even more (and have poor ('national standard') housing, economy and health care to deal with as well). At the post-secondary education the investment is large and getting larger, both in terms of time and money - too much effort is spent sustaining the system, while not enough attention is paid to the needs of students and (especially) potential students.

And it's too expensive. Again, I do not begrudge the funding, but I do not agree that costs in education (and especially tuitions) should continue to rise so much more quickly than the inflation rate. We need to find ways to ease the cost pressures - but not by limiting access to the most eligible and not by privatizing core components of the education system (when we think about where privatizing book and journal publication got us, one would think that current excesses in academic publishing are a knock-down argument against privatizing any other part of the system).

I do not believe in the wisdom or efficacy of trying to reform the system, especially when that reform comes from the top. I think we (developers, educators, policy-makers) need to work around the edges, supporting and developing creative and innovative programs. Some of these programs should support free and open access to learners in Canada and around the world. Others should support other agendas - it is folly to think that my vision of education is the only vision that should be acted upon.

And let me clear about this, too - I loved university. Compared to the misery that was high school, it was academic paradise. I want to preserve what was insanely great about the experience - I want to preserve the madness and creativity and late-night sessions and arguments, I want to preserve the exposure to new ideas and cultures, the time to read great books (and these days, to watch great movies and videos), to be influence and challenged by music and art and culture and sports. Turning this whole experience into one in which the economic imperative prevails cheapens and destroys it: I want learning to be about developing into the most skilled and interesting person you can be.

University may not be for everyone but something like it should be for everyone. I know, there are many people out there who have far better things to do than to study - but learning is about far more than studying. People in their late teens and 20s who are not at university should have alternatives,  things like (and I'm just thinking out loud here) rock camps, machineries (places where people assemble to work on - and create - machines), bakery and culinary schools (as at the colleges), and so much more. 


(*) 'Golf Course Ware' is educational technology that is marketed to executives, usually at highbrow events on the golf course, rather than to teachers and learners who actually have to use the resource.

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