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The Canadian public education commission reports -- a hidden layer
The content of commission reports is ideological and political. Thus the Canadian commission reports are a rich source of Canadian culture and data and they tell us a great deal about historical underpinnings to our public education system. These documents also review public education policy history thus filling a cultural lacuna that exists as a consequence of ignorance and lack of access to the documents. The problem of lack of access to a comprehensive range of the documents has hampered comparative capacity and sorting. In some respects commission reports are also considered "sacred" in terms of analysis because they are products of public government and liberal democracy. In Canada, it is considered that the opinion of the public is thus democratically and originally represented and therefore and thus the commission reports need not be open to analysis or interpretation. This introduces the issue of theory and foundations to analysis. A problem has emerged however with lack of access to a complete overview of historical documents. Further, challenges to liberalism following recession in the 1980s threatened the democratic production of public education commission reports. It also created a new community of professors interested in critical critique of such reports in provincial public education policy departments. As a consequence of lack of access to historical public education policy documents is due to their limited publication because they are commission reports, therefore, a feature of democracy is stunted for overviews such as is attempted here. Therefore, the comparative that Canadians need is not accessible.
There is resistance in Canada concerning the comparative I am advancing, there is a preference for mystification, because it is the case that decentralization quite likely creates many more academics and jobs than centralization. This orientation increases the tendency to mystify the foundations to public education in Canada. Mystification broadens possibilities in terms of ‘academic’ production at the various provincial universities. This mystification isn't necessarily a deliberate attempt to obfuscate. The problem is lack of access, the lack of a one-stop reference, access to the complete set of Canadian commission reports and other important governmental inquiries into public education. There is also resistance due to ignorance and this can be countered through "education," pursuing research in this area of paucity and providing a treatment or overview of Canadian public policy education through access. I entered into a PhD program in to attain public education policy knowledge and expertise. What I learned and discovered is that the "hidden" layer, the historical commission reports, needs to be opened and made available. Analysis of the historical progress of public education development in Canada must be constructed. This is what research should be about. It should challenge status quo and lock-step thinking. It should consider perspectives discounted due to 'framing', should challenge narrow perspectives, look at a problem from a different viewpoints, macro as well as micro. Certainly the "big picture" analysis on public education policy in Canada is rarely tackled with actual data that represents historical shifts and perspectives over time. This project creates Canadian 20th century public education policy as an object of study. This has never been done before because access to a comparative data source was obscured through ignorance and political disinclination to permit such a comparative. But also, the time is right now for such an endeavour. The 20th century is behind us and is available to an overview.
There is no impending loss of provincial autonomy in education control merely because a national picture is constructed through comparative education policy. On the other hand, the autonomy that the Canadian Territories have had since 1975 in their public education systems is not represented in analytical literature because the Constitution of Canada still states that the control of education in the Canadian Territories is under the control of the federal government. This encourages discrimination in national analysis in the academic community. It encourages the continuation of ignorance. It encourages the systemic racism that exists in public education policy departments and covertly designates these predominantly First Nations/Inuit/Metis systems as secondary in importance in public education policy analysis. It marks the Territories as "different" where First Nations/Inuit/Metis issues in education run deep as a consequence of exclusion, the residential schools and integration policies. In "big picture" treatments, however, exclusion poses a problem since a treatment including only Canadian provinces facilitates the secondary status attributed without any question given to considering the Canadian Territories’ identity.
Most education policy academics do not think beyond the provincial framework. To think beyond the provincial is to propose a significant paradigm shift in provincial public education policy departments. The possibility of thinking as a Canadian public education policy analyst seems unattainable and additionally change is uncomfortable. This is not to say that we have no Canadian experts who analyse Canadian public education policy, but much of it is achieved through analysis of statistics collected by the federal government. Historical and political analyses are limited. A national scholarly requirement orienting towards the national would render a good deal of what is considered currently primary research to secondary and tertiary positions. Big fish in a little provincial sea would become little fish in the big sea of national public education policy analysis. The problem is not necessarily intellectual (although education policy studies departments, in my experience, contain a good many PhDs awarded solely for professional reasons) because public education policy departments historically were built out of the growth in public education and the requirement to respond to policy recommendations, and it was necessary to put blinkers on. This is the default position in any case, because a national version of Canadian public education policy is impossible to conceptualize. But also, public education policy academics often behave politically and unconsciously and sometimes overtly discourage thinking beyond the provincial framework. There are few resources with which to reach outside such historical limitations. Often there is no working expertise on policy in any other province than the province academics do their graduate studies in. Often there are comparatives but the comparatives are constructed between a Canadian province and an international example. One top Albertan professor/administrator/advisor in public education policy knitted his beetle brows together when I presented him with a banker box containing a collection of Canadian public education commission reports, and replied in an Irish colonial accent that what I was interested in pursuing was “not in [his] area of interest.” There is no reference point for any Canadian overview. A review of Manzer’s 1994 book “Public Schools and Political Ideas: Canadian Educational Policy in Historical Perspective” leaves one feeling confused. There may be an effort to conceptualize Canadian public education policy, but it is hampered by the hidden layer, lack of access and lack of knowledge about the constituting texts constructing the history, and the apparent limitations of constitutionally imposed centralized decentralization. We are not, however, limited by the constitution in theory.
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