Cargo Education
by John FitzGerald
March 21, 2007
In earlier articles (namely this one and this one) I have argued that Canada is characterized by governmental institutions which on examination turn out to be in large part primitive imitations of the real thing. These institutions are fundamentally cargo cults, social institutions founded on mistakenly taking an effect for a cause. Just as Melanesian cargo cults thought building a facsimile of an airport would cause cargo to arrive, Canadians have thought that setting up institutions with the same names as other countries’ would make Canada a nation, too. And so, for example, we set up a health care system and forget to train enough doctors and nurses for it. The original cargo cultists believed that building airports would cause cargo to arrive, while we believe that building hospitals causes staffing to take care of itself.
Another obvious set of Canadian cargo institutions consists of its several public school systems. They obviously aren’t real schools for the simple reason that they don’t teach anyone anything. For example, in 2002 Ipsos Reid conducted a poll of Canadians to assess their knowledge of their country and found that:
- only half the Canadians they polled could name the first prime minister of Canada (Sir John A. Macdonald, for the love of Pete).
- only a fifth could name the first French-speaking prime minister (Sir Wilfrid Laurier, pour l’amour de Pierre).
Sure, the samples in these polls cannot be considered representative of the population as a whole, but they were at least representative of that substantial proportion of the population which takes part in polls. And sure, those few items of information don’t exactly provide an accurate assessment of people’s total knowledge about their country. They are, however, what the schools are supposed to be teaching Canadians, so manifestly they’re not even teaching these basic facts about Canada.
And as we noted in the first article, Canadian governments talk a lot about how important postsecondary education is to the future of the country, but then turn around and put more obstacles in the way of people trying to obtain some. They seem to believe that building universities and colleges will automatically make money appear in students’ pockets so they can pay the tuition.
In large part Canadian public school systems are built in slavish imitation of foreign systems. Every foreign educational fad shows up in Canada sooner or later – usually later, after it’s worn out its welcome in other countries.
For example, Ontario established the Educational Quality and Accountability Office to implement a program of what is known in the educational evaluation trade as performance assessment – that is, evaluation by assessing students’ actual performance (conducting an experiment, say) rather than by asking questions about what students know (about conducting experiments, say). At the time, performance assessment programs were being abandoned around the world because they had turned out to be less effective than traditional standardized testing, but in Ontario the cargo cultists at the ministry of education and training decided that since other countries used performance assessment Ontario would have to use it, too, if it wanted to have a real educational system. Performance assessment soon got dropped, after which the EQAO started re-inventing traditional types of assessment.
I worked for many years in public and separate school boards in Ontario, by the way, as a member of non-teaching staff. One thing that struck me forcefully when I started working in these boards was how few administrators and teachers knew anything about the vast literature about learning or about the vast literature about evaluation of learning. One would think that an institution interested in getting pupils and students to learn would want to learn something about how to make them learn, and about how to assess what they have (and have not) learnt. Not if the institution consists of Canadian educators, apparently.
Without any real interest in pedagogy, Canadian public schools instead pin their hopes on technology. For decades they were fascinated by audio-visual education. In 1964, for example, University of Toronto opened Scarborough College (now the University of Toronto Scarborough) as a groundbreaking vanguard institution of audio-visual education (a fact now suspiciously omitted from the U of T website).
The groundbreaking vanguard innovation at Scarborough College was to build a quite attractive but nevertheless traditional college building and then fill it with television screens. Each large lecture room featured a huge one at the front, which doubled as a movie screen, while smaller rooms, including seminar rooms, had television sets suspended from the ceiling. From the time I arrived there in the fall of 1970 to take up a teaching assistantship to the time I left in the spring of 1971, I never saw anything played or broadcast on any of these screens. The only television I saw used was one in the common area on which students watched the Stanley Cup.
Of course, to get the benefits of extensive investment in audio-visual media you have to have something to play on them. University of Toronto clearly expected the professors to create audio-visual material out of thin air. If the university wanted to be in the vanguard, what it needed to do was put money into an extensive program to develop audio-visual material of demonstrated effectiveness. Instead they set up the televisions and assumed the programs would come.
In the 1980s, of course, Ontario got carried away with the educational uses of computers. It decided to build its own, for example, one which would be compatible with both PCs and Macs. News of this initiative spread quickly around the computer world, both within Canada and without, and – both within Canada and without – the computer world quickly turned thumbs down on the idea. But Ontario plunged ahead, and came up with the Icon computer. Unfortunately, instead of being compatible with both PCs and Macs it was initially compatible with neither, and the ministry insisted that schools run their Icons on networks, which seriously slowed their response time when used interactively,
Eventually it became possible to run DOS programs on Icons and, as night follows day, the Icon swiftly became superfluous and soon after disappeared. The cargo cultists who had promoted it, though, probably also got promoted.
Then came the internet. Schools had to be hooked up to the internet, though the educational potential of that vast reservoir of pornography, advertising, and hacker attacks is not immediately apparent. The automobile is also technology which has transformed society, but we don’t insist that classes be conducted on moving buses. Yes, the internet is a valuable source of information, but then wouldn’t it be more appropriate for the teacher to use it than for the students? Sure, the internet can be used to teach students how to evaluate potential information, but so can a newspaper, and more effectively.
If we are to improve the public schools, the answers are pretty simple. Make teachers study the literature on the experimental investigation of learning. Train them in basic psychometrics. Use commercial tests to evaluate students’ learning rather than tests created for politicians. Do anything other than sitting around waiting for the cargo to show up.
Cargo Education © John FitzGerald, 2007
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