BY: MATIAS DE DOVITIIS
Flashback to early 2020 and the Ford government was staring down the gun barrel of teacher strikes all over Ontario. Unrest with parents was tangible and his public support in polls was sinking. At issue were class sizes and the quality of education. Then the COVID-19 pandemic started, and those issues were put aside as students were sent home after the March break. A long, grinding year of on-and-off homeschooling started. Now, once again, education is creating controversy and parents and teachers are re-organizing. At issue is the privatization of the education system.
We spend less today on every student in today’s dollars in Ontario than we did 10 years ago. McGuinty, Wynne and now Ford, have reduced the education budget over time even while talking-up the creation of the workforce of the next century. None of their promises for better education ever materialized. Instead, schools saw ever shrinking budgets.
Hybrid learning is the latest buzzword and is more of the same for-profit ideological spin on education. It is an attempt to commodify learning, to package and market it. It is being sold as innovative. It refers to classes where there are students simultaneously online and in class, with the same teacher instructing kids physically present and online. It has the same failings. TVO is being asked to produce online content and “commercialize” the enterprise (Source: PressProgress). Online learning will be made mandatory by the Ministry of Education (Source: CBC). This is all part of an attempt to reduce costs in education, by reducing the number of teachers in the system. The more students learn online, the cheaper it is to give them a graduation certificate. After all, the Ford government sees education as a yearly budget line, not as the foundational element of a democratic society.
Hybrid learning, online learning and other new Ford government ideas are backdoor attempts at privatizing public education. The attempt is to make the cuts without making it obvious because the public is not generally in support of gutting the public education system with good reason. The needs of private for-profit education companies are diametrically opposed to the needs of students, but potentially there are hundreds of millions of dollars involved. One needs to look at Highway 407 or the yet again delayed construction of the LRT on Eglinton to see the effects in Ontario of giving large public contracts to private companies.
Public education is foundational to democracy. A quality public education system can over time lower social inequality, reduce crime and pay for itself, because it improves the quality of life and generates revenue for the government in the process. The evidence of a wealthy, equitable society is not that they have expensive private schools, even the poorest countries have very high-quality private schools, but instead, it is that the well-off send their children to public schools. Let us remember that public education is the contract between the current society and future generations to better society. It is the legacy we adults leave to the next generation that will outfit them to build the country when we are gone. What we do with this legacy is to be decided over the next few months.