Chapter 2: Organizing the Data -- Final observations to Chapter 2

Final observations to Chapter 2

     There is a Canadian set of documents reporting on post-secondary education, and I have yet to identify this set and consider it against the agenda of my project. Overall, the goal is to theorise public education policy and do this using evidence available in policy documents of the 20th century. The earlier documents are generally commission reports which provide recommendations for post-secondary education. Later 20th century documents, particularly those after 1994, are policy treatments specific to post-secondary education and can be rather voluminous in their content. At this time of the project I do not know what the post-secondary policy field for the 20th century looks like and it may be that this research project is limited only to commissions and reports that included post-secondary with elementary and secondary school treatments. Certainly, however, the curriculum of the elementary and secondary schools produces consumers for universities, as well as potential students who will pay tuition. The elementary and secondary schools also hire the products of universities, the trained teachers with their expertise not just in a subject area but also in method, the Faculties of Education, then, integral to flow of the system and to the future stability of the university. The focus of the project is still not insignificant merely as a consequence of limitations at this time in the main to elementary and secondary education.

     After 1975 the production of legislative and departmental reports more than quadrupled. The situation appears to hold steady as a consequence not only of requirements to tweak policy in areas not covered in large-scale commission reports, but also as a consequence of the internet. Now policy documents can be made public immediately, and all supporting information including submissions and briefs can also be accessed online. Where the commissioner used to request experts to do the research and provide the information so that "he" could draw his conclusions and report them and make recommendations, a body of experts now produces discrete policy reports containing a number of chapters and this covers in greater depth, in general but not necessarily, areas that were once subsections in royal commission reports. 

    In some provinces such as British Columbia royal commission reports are still the main approach to adapting to change and making plans for the future, but in some provinces the production of many reports specializing in one area of focus seems to be the trend. A question raised by the research is how such a shift in public education policy production affects representative public government and public education. I would say at this early stage in the project, that it could be the case, that large provincial commission reports in education policy are not as legitimate as they used to be, and that the trend to generate many smaller reports that are focused, is holding as a legitimate product in liberal democracies. With this type of production considered, then, the shift to a national response to public education policy through a national commission periodically (perhaps every ten to twenty years), would facilitate change at a macro level balancing modern micro-level policy. This I believe is required at this time in history. We need a national focus suitable to facilitate appropriate change in the 21st century. 

    My objection to the generation of many specific policy reports in public education without a national policy would be that so many policy reports obscure the ideology which appears to be less and less humanistic and more and more instrumental at this time in history. The quantity of policy reports does not bring them forward to the Canadian public for discussion. A problem arises, however, with the fragmentation of issues and the possibility of constructing an overall picture. The newspapers consign these smaller reports to the second page and may not cover them at all. With this such status quo is not available to be questioned, and as such the bureaucracy is not changing and responding at the national level.