Angry in the Great White North

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff
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Michael Ignatieff, now officially the permanent leader of the Liberal Party (having won the role in a gruelling race against no one at all), wants Canada to be a learning society. 

Sounds interesting.  It also sounds familiar.

You might think Michael Ignatieff ripped the idea for a learning society off of Ken Dryden, who campaigned on this in the 2006 Liberal Party leadership campaign (you know, the one with more than one contender):

As a social development minister under Paul Martin, Dryden set up a national daycare program. He says his mission is to build a "learning society" based on a national early learning and child-care system and he wants to strengthen post-secondary education.

"Big in spirit, big in possibility, big in ambition, big in the world - a big Canada. That's how we will win the next election," he has been quoted as saying.

 

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty
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You might also think Michael Ignatieff is channelling Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty:

[This government] will continue to work with parents and educators to improve student achievement, ensure more and more of our young people graduate from high school, and make it possible for more of them to keep learning beyond high school in a university, college or apprenticeship program.

Your government will strive to ensure still more of our children meet the provincial standard in reading, writing and math, so that we are assuming our shared responsibility to equip them to succeed in the hyper-competitive global economy of the 21st century, and to measure their progress.

If our children are to succeed in the knowledge economy, ours must be a learning society.

And so your government will work to phase in full-day learning for four- and five- year-olds.

Traditionally, for Liberal Party politicians, the notion of a "learning society" is just a philosophical justification for government-run daycare.

It is a shallow interpretation of what a "learning society" is supposed to be.  The real learning society is focused at the other end, with the continuous education of adults after high school and university.  Michael Ignatieff bucks the Liberal Party tradition by actually getting this, as he alludes to in his acceptance speech:

A strategy for recovery must be a strategy for learning.

Investing in Canadians to create the jobs of tomorrow.

Government cannot predict where the economic opportunities of the future will emerge.

But government can prepare our people to seize those opportunities when they arise.

We must create a society where learning is a way of life and learning is life-long.

At its heart, the idea of a "learning society" is a corporate one.  The key benefactors of the products of the so-called learning society is big business.  Indeed, Donald Schon, one of the key thinkers behind the idea of the learning society, points out that the first learning societies were corporations themselves:

Donald Schon makes the case that many companies no longer have a stable base in the technologies of particular products or the systems build around them. A firm is:

...an internal learning system in which the system's interactions. must now become a matter of directed transformation of the whole system. These directed transformations are in part the justification for the business systems firm. But they oblige it to internalise processes of information flow and sequential innovation which have traditionally been left to the 'market' and to the chain reactions within and across industry lines - reactions in which each firm had only to worry about its own response as one component. The business firm, representing the whole functional system, must now learn to effect the transformation and diffusion of the system as a whole. (Schon 1973: 75)

In other words, the continuous learning that takes place inside many large companies is directed by the need to be at the bleeding edge of technological change so as not to fall behind the competition.

The justification for the learning society is instability, as Schon explains:

The loss of the stable state means that our society and all of its institutions are in continuous processes of transformation. We cannot expect new stable states that will endure for our own lifetimes.

We must learn to understand, guide, influence and manage these transformations. We must make the capacity for undertaking them integral to ourselves and to our institutions.

We must, in other words, become adept at learning. We must become able not only to transform our institutions, in response to changing situations and requirements; we must invent and develop institutions which are 'learning systems', that is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuing transformation.

Schon recognized that the technological base for corporations was in a constant state of change, and so drew an analogy to society at large.  And for people like Schon, there is a fundamental pessimism with regards to the ability of people to deal with change and instability without the active support of an interventionist government.

So who has time to spend a lifetime learning?  Robert Hutchins points out that the time is takes to educate is made available because of labour-saving high technology:

'The two essential facts are. the increasing proportion of free time and the rapidity of change. The latter requires continuous education; the former makes it possible.'  He looked to ancient Athens for a model. There:

education was not a segregated activity, conducted for certain hours, in certain places, at a certain time of life. It was the aim of the society. The city educated the man. The Athenian was educated by culture, by paideia. (Hutchins 1970: 133)

Slavery made this possible - releasing citizens to participate in the life of the city. Hutchins' argument was that 'machines can do for modern man what slavery did for the fortunate few in Athens'.

At this point, I need to point out the obvious.  Labour-saving technology is what creates all that greenhouse gas stuff.  We use energy at a prodigious rate to run machines to do the work we would otherwise have to do ourselves.  As a result, we all enjoy free time in amounts that people even a century ago would find truly unbelievable.  The free time that allows us to learn, however, has come at a steep environmental cost. We could return to that greener past (if it ever really existed) but only by swapping time for labour.  A "green society" would be inconsistent with a "learning society" (unless there is a wholesale shift to nuclear energy to power all that labour-saving technology -- but then most Greens hate nuclear energy as much as they hate carbon-based energy).

So what are we supposed to be learning with all this free time?  Michael Ignatieff has already explained it.  Whatever it takes to keep us competitive.  Lifelong learning is not about some sort of post-scarcity utopia in which we can all pursue artistic pursuits because they amuse us or enrich us.  It is about feeding the ravenous corporate machine with workers with the right skill set, presumably to replace those with the wrong skill set (who then would educate themselves with whatever the next skill set is so as to replace their replacements in due time).

You learn what The Man tells you to learn.

Today, of course, companies do this in-house, recognizing that their employees need to have their skills upgraded, and then upgrading them, as a cost of doing business.  Michael Ignatieff seems to think this is better handled by the government and funded with taxes.

Typically Liberal, eh?  Solve a non-existent problem by raising taxes and creating a bureaucracy for it.  Because we all know how efficient the government is at doing things.

Lifelong learning funded through taxes?  Sounds like the sort of thing that leads to structural deficit, doesn't it?

In any case, some think the so-called "learning society" is just a myth:

[The] development of the notion of the learning society can be approached as a modern day myth. It builds on earlier myths of productivity and change (such as those explored by Donald Schon) and of lifelong learning and the learning organization, and operates largely in the interests of capital, the state and professional interests. 

[T]he function of the learning society myth is to provide a convenient and palatable rationale and packaging for the current and future policies of different power groups within society.... Nothing approaching a learning society currently exists, and there is no real practical prospect of one coming into existence in the foreseeable future.

Yet this myth has power. [It] is a product of, and also embodies, earlier myths which link education, productivity and change. (Hughes and Tight 1998: 188)

So the "learning society" is just a cover for client-politics of the sort the Liberal Party likes to practise, or so the argument goes.  Indeed, when "learning society" is used by Liberals to justify nationalized daycare, it is often pointed out that the only winners in such a program are unionized daycare providers who are no longer in competition having been made into de facto government employees, and who are now forever grateful to the Liberal Party for having made daycare essentially mandatory.  The experience in Quebec with their provincial daycare program is rising costs, higher taxes, and nothing that approaches universality for parents in search of actual daycare services.

I'd say the warning about a learning society of the sort Michael Ignatieff envisions being nothing more than a cover for delivering favours to special interest groups is a fair one.

It'll be interesting to get some details about what Michael Ignatieff thinks a learning society is and whose interests such a society is serving.  I might be wrong about a learning society being essentially a corporatist society run with the explicit help of government through taxes.  But I doubt it.

For me, the only real question is whether anyone is going to recognize it for what it really is.

Maybe there's nothing much to it: On the other hand, Michael Ignatieff's "learning society" might be nothing more than just more money for existing education programs:

Meanwhile, [Michael Ignatieff] characterized his national platform, which is to be ready for June, as a "knowledge" platform that would provide programs to support his vision for Canada in 2017, its 150th anniversary.

He emphasized that it would fully cost out programs and target illiteracy, early childhood learning, and investments in post-secondary and aboriginal education.

That's his "learning society"?  Illiteracy programs in a country where the literacy rate is 99%?  That's pathetic.  I thought he had something really interesting in mind.