The Future of Work: the purpose of public education

The idea of online echo-chambers where you only ever see ideas that imitate your own bias has been a recent topic of concern.  Since battling my way through a philosophy degree at the University of Guelph, I've made it a point of trying on difficult ideas even if my first reflex is to disagree with them.  I was once again testing myself like this at ICTC's Future of Work Summit this week.

One of the main themes that kept popping up in this summit was people from private for-profit sectors suggesting that we completely rejig the public education system to serve up graduates who integrate with their employment needs more effectively. Ontario's new government has a similarly reductive view of public education's role.  I teach computer technology and have always encouraged my students to discover and cultivate pathways that will lead them to a meaningful and financially successful careers, it's one of my go-tos, but this subsuming of public education entirely into the myopic needs of private business pushed me further down that path than I care to tread.

I usually tweet my responses to ideas that come up in conferences in order to document them.  It helps me remember what happened when I'm reflecting on them later.  My initial response to a number of for-profit businesses asking that the entire public education system get rejigged for their benefit was to try and point out the difference between what public education does and what they think it does.  Contrary to popular belief, our sole function isn't to crank out employees whose only function is to make profit.

There was a strange tension, for me at least, between the aboriginal opening prayer song and talk of inclusion with the profit driven interest that kept bubbling up in various presentations.  Perry McLeod-Shabogesic's thoughts on the wisdom of honouring everyone's contribution and his careful wording around being a helper regardless of profit or personal benefit felt sharply at odds with the keynote by Cheryl Cran, whose lean, aggressive management strategies produce small but exceedingly efficient profit driven teams.  Part of me likes that vicious efficiency.  Drop the dead weight and maximize your effectiveness.  I continue to participate in competition because of that drive, but I can't let it motivate my teaching as a whole because my function is to serve the whole.  I couldn't help but think, "all business speaks from a place of privilege but has no idea that it does."  The idea of profit only exists as an option when fundamental needs are met.  For many of the people in the world (and it's the majority) who are still battling with fundamental needs, profit is a privilege they can't afford.

In a public classroom I teach students who will never earn profit for someone else in their lives.  Some will choose to work in the public sector helping society as a whole in healthcare, education or support services.  Others will want to push back against the profit driven economy that is putting the fate of humanity in jeopardy.  Others still may want to focus on meaningful work that is ignored by the private sector, like raising children or volunteerism, and some of them simply aren't capable of working in the exclusivity of a for-profit workplace.  I think Perry would think laterally and find ways to value all of those contributions.  That indigenous philosophy based around the health of the community over the wealth of an individual is very helpful for a teacher considering their clientele.  In the privileged world of business, all those people in my classroom don't exist.  Business focused speakers would want to ensure you never hired any of that sizable chunk of the population in the first place.

The changing Canadian job market: between public sector and NGO employees, a sizable chunk of Canada's working population doesn't operate in for-profit business.  There is much more to society than business need.

If a sizable portion of Canada's population doesn't work in for-profit business, rejigging public education to serve that single sector demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how society works.  From a social justice point of view, you could argue that public education should focus on producing engaged and socially aware citizens.  From an aboriginal point of view, we should be speaking to people from a place of community.  From a special needs point of view, we should be working toward greater compassion and understanding of everyone's contribution.  An environmental point of view might also be a driver in public education.  Environmentalism is increasingly diametrically opposed to globalized business and an ever-expanding economy in a world that is fraying under the weight of this unsustainable philosophy.  Public education needs to address all of these perspectives of human society.

During the 2008 market collapse, one of those periodic moments in history when profit driven people lose their minds and fictionalize the world we all live in to such a degree that it becomes obviously unsustainable and collapses in on itself, I saw an online comment that said, "you don't feed profit driven business steak, you let it feed off society's waste, like the cockroach that it is."  That's a harsh thing to say but people were pretty mad in 2008, though most seem to have forgotten all about it now, though we're still paying for it.

The idea of inclusivity was a recurring theme at the summit.  One example given was was how remote communities don't have digital connectivity yet and this was held up as an example of a lack of equity.  It is indeed a lack of equity, but you can bet that no profit driven business is going to provide that infrastructure.  The infrastructure we build in society, especially the stuff to address remote communities where profit isn't going to motivate action, is always done with public money.  Roads are built not by the corporations that ruin them with transport trucks, but by governments supported by taxpayers.  ICT infrastructure is no different.  Corporations make their profits on the backs of infrastructure built with public funds.  In this way, there is no real private company - they all rest on the back of publicly funded infrastructure.  This is neither good nor bad, it's just the way it is.  Business is too fragile to make profit without support.  That fragility is foundation of all business privilege.  That many business people wave their profit driven focus around with pride is always baffling to me.  There isn't a single billionaire who hasn't made their wealth on the back of publicly funded infrastructure.  To make that fragility the primary focus of public education is absurd.

This isn't to say that private, profit-driven business does not have a function in our society, but it isn't the heart and it certainly shouldn't be the brain.  At best, profit driven business is an appendage, like the arms or legs.  Important, no doubt, but it can as often injure the body politic as it does help.  Healthy, supported private business is important, but it isn't the beall and endall of human society, and tailoring public education to cater to it is myopic and self serving.

***

Over this past weekend in Toronto I've had a strange breadth of experience.  On the Saturday night we went to the Tiff Lightbox to see Apollo 11, incredibly restored and rendered footage of the Apollo 11 Moon mission...

I was born two months before that happened and spent my early years in love with the US space program.  I was in tears watching this film.  I consider it a pinnacle of human achievement that points to a possible, sustainable future.  My love of technology was fostered by NASA's work around Apollo.  I fear we've lost anything like the vision and drive needed to get back to this summit.  Watching the film, I couldn't help but remind myself that this wasn't a public or private enterprise, but a brilliant combination of what we are capable of when we combine our various talents and work together.

The next afternoon I was at Sting's The Last Ship, a heart wrenching and de-humanizing tale of conservative globalization in 1970s England.  I have family from Tyneside where this takes place and it rocked me - my parents emigrated from England because of Thatcherism and it nearly killed us.  As a pro-union story valuing humanity over the economic forces that diminish us, it amazed me that it was playing in the capital of Fordnation.  That the theatre was full of one percenters who daily throw people on the heap for their own profit was a disconnect, but that's Toronto for you.  As we stepped over homeless people laying on the sidewalks on our way back to the hotel I wondered how Torontonians can keep it all straight.  Perhaps seeing Sting is all that matters and the story doesn't, but it should.

The next day I was sitting in this summit on the future of work where well dressed business experts talked about how we should rejig the public education system to better serve their profit margin.  The Last Ship part of me was struggling with a rising anger, but there is more to this than just dismissing the needs of business.  There are a number of situations where what we do in public education aligns with business need.  A literate, numerate and digitally fluent population helps everyone regardless of the sector of society they participate in.  The digital divide we contribute to by graduating students with little or no digital fluency is hurting much more than business's bottom line.  From the point of view of digital fluency, business and the rest of society are in alignment.

If you're digitally illiterate in the Twenty-First Century you're in real trouble whether you're working in the public sector, the private sector or at an NGO.  It even hurts you if you're not working at all.  Canada as a whole would benefit from a more digitally fluent society.  ICTC may have aimed this summit at the needs of private enterprise, but addressing that new, digital literacy goes well beyond the myopic needs of the profit chasers.

ICTC's drive for a digital skills continuum jives with my expanded view of public education as much more than human resources for business.  Our country and our planet would benefit from more digitally effective citizens.

How to make changes to Canada's complex ecosystem of educational organizations was also a concern at the summit.  Canada was repeatedly criticized as the only leading OECD country without a federal ministry of education or a centralized idea of education, yet Canada performs astonishingly well in the world.  Could it be that our mosaic of often competing education systems protects us from the gross simplification forced on other countries by their profit driven businesses?  A centralized system would be much easier to manipulate and denigrate.

At the end of three days in Toronto I'm stretched between being excited about the ideas of agility and efficiency advocated in the Future of Work Summit and worried by the dehumanizing effects that globalization and business efficiency force on everyone.  In a more perfect world I'd hope we could chase efficiency for everyone, but it wouldn't be through profit, that only works for the fragile narcissists chasing profit.


NOTES:
Canadian statistics on employment by sector:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190308/dq190308a-eng.htm
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2018043-eng.htm

Canada's non-profit and charity sectors:
https://www.canadiancharitylaw.ca/blog/key_statistics_on_canadas_charity_and_non_profit_sector
"The Canadian registered charity sector alone (not even including non-profits that are not charities) is bigger than the following industries (as a percentage of GDP):

Real estate and rental and leasing (13.04%), Manufacturing (10.36%), Mining, quarrying and oil or gas extraction (8.14%), Finance and insurance (7.1%), Public administration (6.33%), Wholesale trade (5.66%), Retail trade (5.41%), Transportation and warehousing (4.44%), Utilities (2.27%), Accommodation and food services (2.17%) and Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (1.65%)"
http://www.imaginecanada.ca/blog/getting-know-canadas-nonprofit-sector-why-we-need-better-data

http://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2019/populism-rises-look-fallen-wages/
Downward pressure on wages - we have more and more people and less need for them...

Management Expertise

WIRED: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/can-denver-become-like-silicon-valley/

This is a WIRED story about tech software startups in the Denver area.  In it a man who has an idea about buying insurance online has become a 'TECH CEO' even though he has no idea of what it is he is actually building.  With no background in technology hardware or software development, this guy is trying to launch a tech-startup with an idea and little else.

The quotes below are from the article.  The bolding is mine...

ROSS DIEDRICH HAD gone pale and raw-boned. The CEO of a year-old startup in Denver, he’d stay at his office until the middle of the night, go home and sleep for about five hours, then chug a spinach smoothie and start again. He was just 27 years old, but he felt wrung out.

He still didn’t have even a basic version of the software that he could demo—an “MVP” in coder parlance, for minimum viable product. Chris was still holding down his full-time job; he didn’t want to quit until Covered had some funding in hand. The lead development engineer that Ross had brought on, a big, quiet nerd named Jonathan Baughn, was juggling a bunch of projects and wasn’t as available as Ross had expected. But Ross didn’t want to put too much pressure on Baughn. As a contractor, he was within his rights to work for others. A junior software engineer Baughn had brought to the project, Reyna DeLogé, tried to manage on her own, but they kept blowing past their self-imposed deadlines.

He navigated to the demo site, typed in his password, and tapped on the mousepad. Then he tapped again. Nothing happened. The demo was broken. “What the heck is going on here?” he murmured.

I'd feel wrung out too if I was building something that I had no idea of how it works and kept blowing through deadlines.  Demoing it and having it fail to launch and then having no idea why would be exhausting.

I would posit that you need at least a passing acquaintance with the technology you're pedalling before you try to claim ownership over it.  An automotive executive who has no idea what is under the hood would be a poor manager.  A head chef who doesn't know how to cook would be a poor manager.  A general who has never stepped foot on a battlefield would be a poor general.  A principal who was a disaster in the classroom would be a poor principal.

The film Steve Jobs does a good job of examining the contradiction of a manager who has no engineering skill:

Where Jobs diverges from the disaster described in the WIRED article above is that he surrounds himself with the most knowledgeable engineers - an orchestra of expertise, and then focuses on having them produce their best possible work.  An argument could be made for a manager like this, but not at the expense of engineering, never at the expense of engineering.

Your ideal manager must have some technical background if they are to work with skilled labour.  In the clip above Woz tells Jobs that he can't do anything, which isn't really true; they met and bonded over their shared knowledge of electronics.  Jobs may not have been able to engineer the devices he helped create, but he was very aware of the technology and how it worked.  With that knowledge he was able to gather experts because he could appreciate their expertise.

A manager who is only an expert in management is best when not managing people who perform skilled work, whether that be engineering or teaching or any other complex, skills based process.  Matt Crawford does a great job of examining this in The World Beyond Your Head.  In the book Crawford distinguishes between the skilled labourer who modifies or 'jigs' their environment to better perform their profession and the unskilled script follower who does what they're told in a prefabricated production line.  Being free to manipulate the physical environment in order to perform your expertise is a foundation stone of professionalism in Crawford's mind.  A lot of the downward pressure you see on worker valuation in education and employment in general is because of the Taylorism of workplaces into script following routines.  Making the end goal of education a result in a standardized test plays to this thinking perfectly.  In those prefabricated and abstracted workplaces skill isn't a requirement, obedience is.

An effective manager of skilled labour acknowledges and cultivates expertise in their people.  You can't do that without having some kind of handle on that skillset.  Being oblivious to how reality works and managing complex, skilled labourers who work in that demanding environment like they are a production line is the single greatest point of failure in management, unless your goal is to chase out skilled labour and turn your organization into a mechanical process where the people in it are little more that scripted robots.  There are financial arguments for that, but they aren't very humane.  We might not perform as many repetitive job tasks in the future, but if we remove human expertise from the workplace it will damage us as a species, and any financial gain from it would be short lived.

Related Readings:

Shopclass as Soulcraft: IT Idiocy, Management Speak & Skills Abstraction
Taylorism in Edtech
Implications of a Situated Intelligence in Education
A Thin and Fragile Pretense
How We've Situated Ourselves