It was only few days ago that Timothy Shire, publisher of Ensign, emphasized education as the opportunity to prepare individuals to think critically, creatively and inspire life long learning; and therefore he objected strongly to the current educational philosophy to focus on the demand of commerce and provide widespread testing programs to maintain standards in reading, mathematics and grammar.

We go to school and we bring in the classroom what we were born with along with our own experiences. And we learn as we relate with our teachers, with our classmates, and as we reflect on our overall experiences. Therefore, learning is fundamentally a natural process and work is in this respect a natural extension of our educational learning. However we have a big problem in Canada as our free marketeers have infiltrated every corner of our society, including education and now health. Our provincial premiers met in Vancouver yesterday and they discussed the predicament of Health Care in Canada. Ralph Klein presented his plan for the renewal of health care in Alberta and in defending privatization he equated the concept of enriching health care as the doctors enrich themselves. Klein stated

"that's why they go to school for many, many years, so their earning power can increase... I mean, how do doctors buy their big houses?"

How can we go on with Klein's mind set I really don't know.

Another big problem of our time is the concept of country productivity as a measure of our well being. Productivity is generally defined by our neoclassical leadership as average GDP per worker per hour. Now you, readers, just tell me what kind of significance this definition has as it makes reference to an average, as it make reference to the biased measure of GDP, as it doesn't make reference to full employment. Our neoclassical leadership have gone so far as to describe economic growth and productivity growth since the Middle Ages.

Anyhow, there is no doubt that Canada has lagged behind many developed countries in its economic and productivity growth in the last some 30 years. Economist Fred McMahon is the last pundit to have identified the fall of the Canadian dollar versus the American dollar as correlated to our low economic productivity.

It is my understanding that our Canadian economy is not much different from the American one, in the sense that we use similar technologies, services and manufacturing processes. Therefore, at the micro level, our relative problem of economic growth is not one of productivity. And as a consequence, the average productivity number is not a good explanation of our being economically behind the United States. I have a more direct explanation for our being behind the United States. I have recently talked of our decadent democracy due to our corporatist society, that is a society where our individual rights have been suffocated for the selfish interest of competing groups, that is governmental agencies, businesses, professional bodies, charities, other non-profit organizations.

The economic philosophy of the Free Market of making money with money is the same in the United States as in Canada, however it is my understanding that the United States is more of a corporate economy than Canada, and this explains the fact that Canada has lagged economically behind the United States, and the fact that Canada has not experienced a wider gap between the rich and the poor as the United States.

Our economic and social predicament is therefore not to be focused on productivity, but rather to the continual erosion of our democracy because of the effects of corporatism due to both our corporate businesses and the management of our non profit organizations.

References:

Pertinent articles in Ensign

Doctors stung by Alta Premier Klein's 'only for profit' comments, Judy Monchuk, January 24, 2002, Canadian Press http://www.canada.com/regina/story.asp?id={82EDBBCD-E037-415A-93D6-D1B00212544C}

The Argentina of the north, Fred McMahon, January 24, 2002, National Post http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020124/1224074.html