You do not have to look very deep to see the effects of government restructuring at all levels of Ontario’s education system. In just a few years at York University, for instance, a garden of buildings to house applied technology programs and business administration has grown, fertilized by both private and public funding. And as the corporate presence also grows, the administration treats the students as consumers. Tuition increases every year, more deeply entrenching the student as a consumer of their “quality” education.

It is also not uncommon to find students downtown walking the streets selling chocolate bars trying to finance some aspect of their educational experience. Newspaper headlines are filled with stories about the erosion of the public education system, a continued funding crisis faced by school boards, the cutting of “non-essential” educational programs and labour strife. Teachers have harnessed their labour power, sometimes withdrawing it, to challenge government education policy. Seeking to limit this opposition, the Conservative government now wants to eliminate teachers’ ability to take labour action through strikes or work-to-rule campaigns.

In Retolling the Mind Factory: Education in a Lean State, University of Windsor sociology professor Alan Sears examines the forces underlying the changes to the education system and the implications of restructuring. He contextualizes the changes in education, explaining them not as an isolated product of right-wing ideologues in power, but rather as part of the very processes and dynamics of capitalism itself. Specifically, he examines the “lean state” and “lean production” – shorthand for the changes wrought by the neo-liberal political and economic agenda – and how the education system satisfies the requirements of each.

Neoliberalism and Schools

The lean state fosters a workforce for lean production. There is a need for a disciplined, flexible workforce which has few alternatives to the market for survival. The lean state redefines citizenship such that people have lower expectations about what social provisions are on offer. Lean production is also characterized by flexibility: employment is contract-based, part-time and non-unionized. Sears argues that the liberal-humanist education of the past is now replaced with a “post-liberal education system...charged less with making citizens and more with training consumers and preparing workers for the ‘real world’ of stiff competition for places in an increasingly polarized workforce offering fewer secure jobs and a more ‘contingent’ future.” It does this by limiting students’ sense of entitlement, emphasizing standards and preparing students to see themselves fundamentally as consumers and entrepreneurs.

Schools, Sears also argues, are a site of discipline. Through education, students learn to self-regulate in order to be productive for both the state and for capital. Schooling is an important mechanism by which students learn to subordinate themselves, to be dutiful citizens in relation to the state, productive for capital and responsible consumers. In the classroom, the teacher represents the supposed neutrality of the state where everyone is assessed equally in terms of their intelligence, performance and potential.

Increasing standards is one mechanism by which the Ontario government is restructuring the education system. In so doing, Sears says, the government is creating “new opportunities to fail.” He raises the important point that in emphasizing testing and evaluation, education restructuring seems to be about identifying those who have skills and those who do not, rather than actually ensuring students acquire the skills. A clear example of this is the fact that adult literacy programs are being cut while the measurement of literacy skills in schools is being increased.

LIBERAL EDUCATION

In addition to providing an analysis of current restructuring in Ontario, Sears provides an invaluable examination of liberal education. Liberal education is founded on a cultural project of citizen formation combined with elements of skills training. It lays unique claims to a universal standpoint while producing differentiation, severing mind from body, dismissing knowledge acquired from lived experience and fostering competitive individualism. Sears highlights the racialized aspects of liberal education which present European ways of knowing and understanding the world as the only way to understand the world. Liberal education, he writes, renders “people of colour invisible by the taken-for-granted white perspective on the world that casts Europeans alone as the makers of history.” He suggests that current restructuring rolls back what limited gains there were in the name of multiculturalism made in liberal education.

Sears also examines the gendered dynamics of the lean state and production and the role education plays in perpetuating this inequality. School is a site of gender reproduction with one clear example of this being the gendered division of labour within the teaching workforce itself. Through teaching practices and interrelations between children, gender codes are often affirmed and reproduced. In addition to this, Sears argues that the school atmosphere is often highly hostile and punitive towards lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people even though this hostility is not necessarily taught in the formal curriculum.

Sears argues that education is indeed contradictory in that it both reproduces inequality and provides a site for resistance. The education system has provided an important site for achieving some level of equality or challenging marginalization. Oppressed social groups have fought for increased accessibility and greater inclusion. Most recently, teachers, students and staff of schools and universities have provided the greatest challenges to the government’s education restructuring. Through labour action such as strikes, teachers and staff have placed significant obstacles to the government’s restructuring efforts. Sears makes the point that while challenging the post-liberal restructuring of education is valuable, and while it is important to achieve whatever gains toward greater inclusion and equality are possible, it is essential to recognize that the education system and the society in which it is located is deeply unequal and exclusionary and that there are significant limits with what can be done within the current system.