Class Warfare: The Assault on Canada's Schools

Dennis Blake is a visual arts teacher with the Halton Board of
Education.

This book presents some intelligent and provocative arguments as to the
inherent dangers of letting big business dictate necessary changes to a
school system that is under fire from all directions. The authors argue
that big business is setting up a number of straw men in attacking
current educational practice. They accuse business of escalating fears
that an increasingly expensive school system is increasingly producing
an inferior product—namely, undereducated children. They maintain that
dissatisfaction with schools is a product of media (read: big-business)
manipulation and that many complaints about schools’ inferior
practices are demonstrative myths.

Barlow and Robertson make some very good arguments, especially when
they recount the less-than-altruistic reasoning that lies behind
business interests in education. However, it should come as no surprise
that business has a business interest in schools and that business will
attack schools for what it sees as shortcomings in the school system. To
argue, as the authors do, that the perceived shortcomings in the school
system are business-generated conspiratorial myths is to avoid the very
real problems that exist in Canadian education. Education is not just
under attack from a predatory right-mindedness; it is politically
embattled in a left-wing versus right-wing understanding of what is best
for society. Children are more poorly educated because they live in a
hedonistic, anti-intellectual society and because education’s leaders
are fighting windmills. Barlow and Robertson’s rejections of the
right-wing corporate agenda, though in many respects laudable, does not
address the real problems of a school system that does no more than
reflect

the confused society in which it resides.