Implications for 21st century Canadian public education policy making
In pursuing the collation of commission reports of the 20th century, a secondary focus emerged, the ability to examine the fundamentals required to redefine education in the Canadian constitution, to centralize and secure Canadian and essential public values concerning public education. Here is a project imagining the possibility of substantial change, change equivalent to that achieved following Quebec's 1961-66 Parent Report. It's a project that provides the knowledge required to offer choices to interested Canadians in terms of education possibilities for the 21st century. Currently public education policy is ideological and religious with its historical roots in Canada set by the two founding nations -- all this needs to be reviewed for Canadians in the 21st century. The data for the research provides the foundations needed to affect significant change in the bureaucratic organization of public education in Canada -- we can't make any changes without the fundamental Canadian public education policy history. The history has been fragmented in terms of standardized production of linear historical trajectories out of each province. The Canadian Territories’ policies are obscured by the terms of education in the constitution, where it is written that territorial education is under the control of the federal government. Through collating this layer of history and assessing the commission reports in chronological relationship, possibilities for understanding open up. Such a project creates an intellectual conceptual framework from which we may consider change. The policy documents or commission reports were available at canadianeducationalpolicystudies.ca possibly permitting that national policy can be discussed, debated, and analyzed freely outside the universities which in their policy studies departments appear to operate according to limits set to public education control in the constitution. In terms of change in public education policy, I would argue that the problem is not political as many people would think, but rather intellectual. It is the intellectual elite at the public education policy departments who are products of public education policy designed in the 60s and 70s and who are limited in their capacity to consider alternatives outside the public education provincial paradigm.
The provincial limit (fn1) at the level of graduate studies at the Canadian university should not be an intellectual limit just because control over education is decentralized in the constitution. Analysts have not had the information at their fingertips, it is dispersed among many diverse commission reports and documents, and these have been organized by province. Certainly with the information and comparative emerging here, education policy studies departments should not be intellectually limited. What is needed is a paradigm shift from public education policy analysis that remains predominantly provincial and exclusive at the PhD level in education policy studies departments. This shift is possible through comparative because with the comparative, the national public education policy picture emerges, and with a thorough comparative we will no longer be limited to a provincial paradigm.
Canadian public education policy history provides the knowledge Canadians need in order to design a national policy on public education for the 21st century. It also puts into place a historical overview of the public education policy of 20th century without confusing it with the 19th -- this is a 20th century overview much needed at this time in Canadian history. The linear provincial trajectories emerging from the 19th century, is accounted for and is now, with exception of educational policy analysts who study the details, redundant. (fn2) The purpose of this project is also to provide the history and the supporting arguments towards what would be the major objective of a National Commission on Canadian Public Education, the definition of public education at a national level, with what it protects Canadians to in the 21st century clearly indicated. This would mark a historical turn in Canadian public education, redefining public education in the Canadian Constitution, and thereby prompting research in universities that should be relevant to current Canadian needs and conditions in the three domains of English, French and First Nations/Inuit/Metis public education. It would prompt new standards concerning knowledge requirements where no graduate of public educational policy studies would be awarded credentials indicating expertise without having taken a survey course in 20th century Canadian public education policy.
The problem is national and must be dealt with at this level. There is a national level in public education; it is accessed through comparative. With the mystification lifted and some identified fundamental features of Canadian public education policy in place, there should be the possibility for academic consideration for reasonable upgrade and change in Canadian public education policy, moving forward not as a consequence of "pop-critique" but with actual fundamentals in place that provide the foundations needed to do it. The comparative is available through access to a layer that is lost to the public and has become in each province an area exclusive to academics only, most certainly in respect of the historical royal commission reports that are not electronic -- royal commission reports set policy agendas in public education, make recommendations for changes to the School Acts, construct a 'vision' for the future, and most importantly review the public education policy history.
Basically the historical public education commission reports are a hidden layer in understanding public education policy for Canadians. We may have access to the skeletal design of public education in Canada without much hindrance (see the introductory document on my website home-page, section 8 an overview by Dorothy MacKeracher), but the historical development of public education policy is hidden in commission reports even as they were produced by public government on behalf of all Canadians living in their various provinces and territories. Accordingly even though commission reports are exclusive property of the government, I have rendered them public again, in order to access the history we must have in order to make changes in federal as well as provincial public education legislation in Canada for the 21st century.
fn1. Many Public Education PhDs often do not exceed board level horizons in their treatment.
fn2. Ronald Manzer is in this tradition. Bob Gidney's 'From Hope to Harris' is another example.
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