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Where Are Our 'Guardians of Public Interest'?

That's what my mother and all teachers actually are.

Jo-Anne Dillabough 16 Oct 2005TheTyee.ca

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My mother, Margaret Dillabough (born in 1921 and now 84), was a schoolteacher for more than a quarter of a century, from 1960 to 1986. Throughout these years, she was an active member of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation, working diligently to support the union activities of her colleagues and peers in the Federation. Both as an educator and as a woman, she looked forward and not back.

She did not define herself by traditional expectations. She did not place domesticity or the care of her own children above public service and the care of all children. Nor did she believe that women of her generation ought to be pressured to remain confined to the domestic sphere, with sole responsibility for child rearing. In her mind, the cultivation of vital political space, and the values and virtues of public life should be taught to all, for the benefit of all.

But there was a personal price to be paid. She had to live with the guilt that all women of her time suffered because of their desire to work and to contribute to public life. The truth of the matter is that teaching provided her with employment, a livelihood, and a life outside family responsibilities. But her work as a teacher had a greater significance that went well beyond personal fulfillment. It also allowed her, together with many others like her, to shake up prevailing thinking about the private sphere, and about what it meant to be a female worker in modern Canada.

Margaret's profession earned her security and a well-earned salary at a time when working as a civil servant was not yet common for women with children (up until 1950 many women teachers confronted marriage restrictions). But more importantly, it offered her the chance to use her extraordinary skills in support of young people in need of encouragement of all kinds. She worked countless hours at evenings and weekends, marking papers, planning lessons, calling parents, visiting families, attending extra-curricular events, coaching teams and just generally being there. She traveled to BCTF meetings whenever possible and was loved by all those who crossed her path.

Public 'servants'?

The example of her career has inspired my own personal commitment to the study of education and to the democratization, as far as that is possible, of the state. Her working life as a teacher is an emblem of the importance of public service and a reminder of the need for such service to be valued both by the public and by the governments who are responsible to it. At a time when governments no longer seem to care much about public welfare, it is more important than ever to remind ourselves of the great and ongoing contribution that teachers have made as "servants" of the public. This notion of service exposes the many difficult contradictions teachers face - on one hand, they must act in the name of the public and on the other hand, they are often treated quite literally as "servants" (rather than legitimate state members) to a larger political agenda that often fails to recognize their experiences as workers.

Over the last two decades worldwide - not just in Canada - governments have cut funds to schools and school districts that ultimately maintain the integrity of the education system. These cuts are made in numerous ways: dropping music programs, losing special ed teachers, and reducing the funding needed to keep a school in reasonable shape for its students.

In Toronto, where I conducted much of my own work on urban inner city schooling, there were holes in roofs, floods, crumbling walls, and much needed repairs waiting to be completed. Teachers were cut, equity programs were marginalized, schools got bigger, librarian assistants were lost and professional days were reduced. Class sizes rose and continue to rise inexorably. Support staff were made redundant. Teachers were asked to do more and more extra-curricular work on behalf of schools because so many of the specialized staff had been taken from District budgets. Teachers in schools with scarce resources were sometimes teaching ESL (these programs were themselves substantially cut) with little or virtually no ESL training. Students' test scores were used as a benchmark for the success of the school regardless of its resource needs. Such cuts led to school closures in districts where funding had become so poor that parents could never raise enough money to repair the damage.

Price of 'fat' trimming

Who suffers the consequences of all these structural shifts in education funding? The teachers, the students, the parents. And ultimately our province and our country pay a very high price for the increasingly narrow education our cash-strapped schools can offer their students. Education, as a human right, is meant to be the site where the cultivation of creativity and ideas are central. It should also stand at the heart of a vision of justice that adds up to more than a series of cuts, tests and a lost and diminished sense of purpose on the part of teachers and students alike.

In delivering such far-reaching education cuts and passing bills that undermine teachers' human rights in our "democratic" state, the liberal governments, and this Liberal government in particular, undermines the ground upon which a publicly cultivated democracy should stand.

Now, as an academic who has critically examined the various meanings associated with concepts such as "freedom" and "democracy", I well understand their limits and their elusive and illusory nature. But the duty to recognise the hard won post-war battles for popular education, and the need to honour those who spend their lives delivering education to the nation's rising generations has never been more clear.

Teachers as metaphor

Teachers do not simply educate our young people, day in, day out. They also stand as a much larger historical metaphor for the cultivation of public welfare. They work in the name of an ethically oriented public, and in the name of a historically informed political mission of inclusion. They do so under increasingly difficult conditions, which have been imposed on them by a government that has judged that chasing global strategies of retrenchment (trimming the so called "fat" off education) is the best way to demonstrate political legitimacy.

Sadly, in doing so, government cuts lead to increasing social divisions within schools and across communities, rising competition among parents to improve the education of their children, and diminished resources and support for schools in low income neighbourhoods. What is the future of education for young people in these neighbourhoods? And how do we hang on to brilliant and exceptionally hard working teachers who labor in the service of the public?

Bill 12 and the Liberal government's inability to recognize very real and entirely legitimate teacher concerns over rising class sizes are just two examples of the failure of the state to defend the educational legacy which thousands of school teachers, past and present, have struggled to build up. My mother and countless other teachers of this province (and other provinces across Canada) have fought hard-won battles for political respect. Teachers are one of society's most important resources yet they are now among the most undervalued members of the civil service.

We ought to be ashamed of ourselves for letting this happen to our teachers. We ought to provide them with the resources they need to carry out one of the most important public tasks at hand - educating the public. I can think of no other group more worthy of our respect at a time like this. Wake up Canada. Wake up British Columbia. There will be no public "freedom" and no future for Canada's young people without public respect for those who have dedicated their professional lives to a great service that liberal governments now seek to undermine.

Guardians of public interest

In returning to the place where I began, I have been moved to write this letter because of the dedication to the public that I witnessed throughout my mother's working life. What kind of public fails to appreciate the national investment entrusted to the work of our teachers? What kind of public tolerates the kinds of suffering they now endure? It is a failure of the state, not of the teachers. This is nowhere better expressed than in the words of the influential and respected French academic, Pierre Bourdieu, who died a few years ago. Writing of the growing disillusion felt by our public servants, by "social workers, family counsellors, youth leaders, rank and file magistrates, and also, increasingly, secondary and primary teachers", Bourdieu went on to point to where the blame lay: "One of the main reasons for all these people's despair is that that the state has withdrawn, or is withdrawing, from ...sectors of social life for which it was previously responsible ...What is described as a crisis of politics...is really, in reality, despair at the failure of the state to act as the guardian of public interest."

Where today, here and now, are our guardians of public interest? Without them, without their defense of those public servants, like teachers, who labor in the service of the greater good, there can be no public welfare, and there can be no justice either. We might do well to heed the words of another of the twentieth century's great thinkers, Hannah Arendt, when she observed that: "Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act senselessly [my addition] than to think".

Dr. Jo-Anne Dillabough is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at UBC.  [Tyee]

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