While the Council of Canadians’ Maude Barlow has been off attacking the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, her Class Warfare co-author Heather-jane Robertson has attempted to defend us from the same threat on the home front. Her latest book, No More Teachers, No More Books: The Commercialization of Canada’s Schools will be snapped by Leftists, Luddites, concerned parents, and educators all over this country. If they don’t live in Ontario, they may feel short-changed.

Experts produce mountains of paper on how to improve education, while students are left to share textbooks. Conveniently, the latest fad solution does not include textbooks, just a massive investment in technology. We cut back on teachers, take corporate handouts with strings attached, even send our children into the streets selling chocolates door-to-door, just to put computers in the classroom. We are told it’s the only way to prepare students for the 21st century.

Education.com is a con, says Robertson, bait laced with sedative. There is no evidence that computers are equal to books as learning tools for children, unless the subject is computers, and they can’t hold a candle to the super computers both kids and teachers bring to school. If we implement computers across the curriculum, the medium will change the message. Students will become consumers instead of citizens. Robertson may be right about that. We already have the mind-numbing “Me” curriculum, so “Me, Inc.” isn’t such a leap. This relentless focus on self is particularly hard on disadvantaged children, who may not appreciate coming to school only to be reminded of the wretched lives they lead at home. The Left may blame the Right for this madness, and the Right may blame the Left, but the truth is it comes from all points on the political spectrum, straight from the heart of the “Me” generation.

Given the seriousness of the subject, it’s a pity Robertson can’t rise above the politics of confrontation. She blames the Right for everything she doesn’t like, from provincial testing to poor spelling, and grammar. School councils are dismissed as corporate pawns, as if school boards were more trustworthy. The research is extensive – if you include newspaper clippings – yet sloppy, and highly selective. Was Robertson too busy taking potshots at Ontario’s Conservative government to see the big picture?

Another seminal book in the field, Systems of Survival, offers a broader perspective by explaining why you can’t run a government like a business, or vice versa. With examples drawn from ancient history to the present day, Jacobs makes a compelling argument that when we attempt to combine the ethics of governance with the ethics of commerce, social systems collapse.

In Jacobs’ terms, the guardian syndrome applies in the classroom, and the merchant syndrome applies in the marketplace. This puts parents, teachers, and politicians on one side of the fence, with business and labour on the other. Teachers can be trade unionists at the bargaining table and guardians in the classroom, but any attempt to straddle the fence can have drastic consequences.