The Bruce Report

In 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen arrived at the South Pole, Honduras became the world’s first American-backed “banana republic”, Irving Berlin penned “Alexander’s Rag Time Band”, and Moravian academic Joseph Alois Schumpeter coined the term “economic development”.

Nearly as momentous in that year, more than a century ago, the University of Cambridge published the eleventh edition of “Encyclopaedia Britannica, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information”, on diaphanous folio, in sturdy leather embossed with gold leaf.

All 29 volumes of that remarkable work of scholarship, a gift from my father,  occupy a place of pride on my dining room bookshelf, a joy as much to behold as to peruse. Almost.

Where else, nowadays, can one find a 15,000-word article on the history of fasting, prepared by the Rev. John Sutherland Black, M.A., LL.D.?

“When entirely deprived of nutriment the human body is ordinarily capable of supporting life under ordinary circumstances for little more than a week,” the eminent cleric reports. “In the spring of 1869, this was tried on the person of a ‘fasting girl‘ in South Wales. The parents made a show of their child, decking her out like a bride on a bed, and asserting she had eaten no food for two years.”

But, as the good doctor informs us, “Some reckless enthusiasts for truth set four trustworthy hospital nurses to watch her; the Celtic obstinacy of the parents was roused, and in defence of their imposture they allowed death to take place in eight days. Their trial and conviction for manslaughter may be found in the daily periodicals of the date; but, strange to say, the experimental physiologists and nurses escaped scot-free.”

It’s hard to imagine stumbling across anything as delightfully arcane, erudite and bluntly witty on Wikipedia. But, then, the noble Britannica belongs to a more elegant age, when knowledge and reading were more important than information and scanning.

After 244 years, the 2010 edition of the esteemed trove – whose contributors  have included Thomas Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein and Leon Trotsky – will be the last available in print. Its president, Jorge Cauz, says sales of hard copies have been negligible for some time. He says the future is purely digital. He says, “We knew this was going to come.”

It’s heartening to know the lofty Britannica will not vanish from the Earth. Still, one wonders how it will change in the brutally competitive online cosmos. Will its editors tolerate the sort of lengthy musings they once embraced?

Musings, such as Robert Maynard Hutchins’ 1952 celebration of literature: “Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.”

Or will they succumb to the bits and bytes of cyberspace, where attention spans are short and original insights are mere foot soldiers in the relentless march of commodification?

In 2009, Ian Grant, managing director of Britannica UK told an interviewer:  “Wikipedia is a fun site to use and has a lot of interesting entries on there, but their approach wouldn’t work for Encyclopædia Britannica. My job is to create more awareness of our very different approaches to publishing in the public mind. They’re a chisel, we’re a drill, and you need to have the correct tool for the job.”

What, now, is Britannica’s job, and what are its tools?

Six years ago, comScore Networks Inc. ranked Wikipedia – with 43 million unique visitors in one month, alone – ninth in its list of top U.S. web sites. More recently,  media watchers have described it as the most influential platform of its kind in the world.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Christmas Evans, an early 19th century Welsh preacher: “A Nonconformist minister, regarded as one of the greatest preachers in the history of Wales.”

What’s the source?

None other than: “Chisholm, Hugh, editor (1911). Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition). Cambridge University Press.”

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

One of the foundational concepts of western philosophy is the cartesian proposition, in latin, “Cogito ergo sum”, which, when loosely translated into english, means, “I think, therefore I am.” It follows, then, that if I cease to think, I also cease to exist.

But is it possible that excessive thinking can actually hasten my demise? I thought too much, therefore I am not? (The paradox, of course, is that if I’m dead, I shouldn’t be able to formulate the question in the first place, which throws the definition of reality, itself, into the metaphysical meat-grinder. But, I digress).

If thinking may not be sufficient proof of existing, a growing number of academics and commentators are making playful hay with the notion that cogitation ain’t what it’s cracked up to be and that the traditional routes to critical analysis – notably, a higher education – may not be as useful or even beneficial as were once. . .well, thought.

Writing in the Globe and Mail recently, columnist Neil Reynolds suggests, intriguingly, “The U.S. does confirm the thesis that education is not necessarily a measure of intelligence or job performance. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, a daily electronic newspaper for academicians, California has the best-educated state legislators in the United States – and one of the worst economies. The state’s official unemployment rate (12 per cent) is the highest in the country.”

He has a point. Consider the number of Harvard and Stanford-educated post-docs who brain-waved the world into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Their expansive frontal lobes kept them sequestered in rooms, where they ran algorithms on the performance of non-existent securities without care for the broader consequences of their actions for the society they repudiated.

Consider, also, some of the truly bone-headed musings issued, in recent years, by some of the planet’s smartest people.

Former first lady and current U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the release of sensitive documents when her husband was in office: “I’m not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the President.”

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky: “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the progress of the war in Iraq: “I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it’s what I said.”

Naturally, the alternative – trusting the affairs of state and economy to a gaggle of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing flat-earthers – is no solution. But the point is we shouldn’t have to if we elect or appoint leaders who do not fall prey to the arrogance of their own knowledge.

Perhaps the real problem is not “thinking”, per se, but the type and duration of mental exercise deployed in given situations. Not long ago, a University of Chicago study found that people who sweat needlessly about their decisions invariably make more mistakes than those who go with their guts. “Whether evaluating abstract objects or actual consumer items, people who deliberated their preferences were less consistent than those who made non-deliberative judgments,” the authors concluded.

Another project, undertaken by the University College London, suggested that some people simply think too much about everything, making them prone to memory loss, depression and, by extension, suicide.

Somewhere, in the minds of men and women, there is a happy medium, where self-awareness is less cartesian than socratic, along the lines of, “I don’t really know anything, but I intend to find out.”

Refreshingly, this appears to be the intellectual territory New Brunswick Finance Minister Blaine Higgs appears to occupy as he struggles to find out what’s going on with  the province’s departmental budgets. “I’m not getting a monthly update on a financial basis,” he told reporters the other day. “I haven’t said I’m giving up on it. I don’t intend to give up on any of this.”

That’s comforting, lest thinking about the wrong things hastens our economic extinction.

It is what distinguishes a child’s mind and elevates a society’s ambitions. It both breeds and benefits from economic growth, challenging citizens to embrace and develop new, more productive and more sustainable ways of thinking, living and working. And in New Brunswick, its cause has never been more current, more urgent.

Yet, despite the trove of research reports, books, and raw data that point to its inexorably favorable influence on the progress of this and every other jurisdiction in the world, education only rarely stirs elected policy makers to do much beyond producing tepid talking points that insist, why, of course, they’re all for it.

In fact, no government that genuinely understands the central role a good education plays in maintaining the long-term health of its constituencies would ever declare blanket cuts to the budgets of public school districts, as has the Alward team, when so much fat still lards the provincial account book.

Year after year, ludicrous amounts are spent propping up failing companies. New Brunswick, we are reliably told, is broke; still, our assembly men and women somehow manage to find a few million bucks to toss at a Norwegian company that will never create a single job in this part of the world.

The province’s public bureaucracy is obscenely bloated – far bigger than the population needs or can reasonably support. Still, that doesn’t stop our august legislators from fashionably trimming, rather than radically buzzing, the civil service and all its entrenched portfolios of privilege.

Meanwhile, educators face cuts that could well compromise core K-12 programs in the fall. Universities and community colleges are bending over backwards to raise revenues the government sector once supplied. More kids are dropping out and turning off to moulder in low-paying, low-skilled jobs than at any other time since the early 1980s when a previous generation struggled with the effects of a global meltdown.

In 2008, according to Statistics Canada, 20 per cent of teenagers in this country, aged 15 to 19, were no longer pursuing a formal education: “That was higher than the average of 15 per cent across the 31 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). At the university level, the first-time bachelor’s graduation rate was 34 per cent in Canada, compared with the OECD average of 38 per cent.”

Austerity boosters are not wrong when they point out that the cost of elementary and secondary education has risen dramatically in recent years. The price tag on Canada’s public school system in 2008-2009 was $55 billion, 7.1 per cent greater than the previous year. Indeed, since 2002-2003, spending has increased by nearly 33 per cent, more than double the cumulative rate of inflation during that period.

But such observations are poor substitutes for arguments. Education simply generates more durable prosperity, per capita, than any other type of government investment. Education built Silicon Valley and the tech corridors of North Carolina. It put Waterloo and Cambridge, Ontario, on the world map. It’s what made Nortel and RIM international business titans. And it’s what keeps New Brunswick, despite itself, an enviable centre of higher education in Canada.

Premier Alward faces a tough job balancing all the competing priorities an underperforming economy and massive deficit foist on him. But taking a cookie cutter to New Brunswick’s problems is not the answer. Higher literacy and numeracy, better liberal arts and science and engineering programs, are the charted courses, the ways out of this mess, which is, let’s be honest, the result of too many years tied to the lazy status quo (something a truly educated society would have rejected).

The only brand this province urgently requires has nothing to do with its past or present circumstances. It has nothing to do with fishing or mining, the forestry or postulations about shale gas, or federal transfers and equalization.

The shape of the future will be proscribed by the minds of our children. And what they will know depends entirely on what we are now willing to learn.

Something about the dreadful disrepair of both Moncton High School and the relationship between its District Education Council and the Government of New B runswick brings to mind a classic routine by the satirists of the inimitable Monty Python.

Four well-dressed Yorkshiremen are assembled at an unspecified vacation resort, when the first blurts: “Who’d have thought thirty year ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Chateau de Chasselas, eh?”

Says the second: “I was happier then and I had nothin’. We used to live in a tiny old house with great big holes in the roof. ”

Says the third: “House! You were lucky. We used to live in one room, all 26 of us, no furniture, ‘alf the floor was missing, and we were all huddled in one corner for fear of falling.”

Says the fourth: “Eh, you were lucky. We used to have to live in the corridor!”

First: “Oh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish heap. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us. House? Huh. ”

Second: “Well, when I say ‘house’ it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin.”

Third: “We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go live in a lake.”

Fourth: “You were lucky. There were 150 of us living in a shoe box in the middle of the road.”

Third: “Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of gravel, work 20 hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky.”

First: “Aye, and you try to tell the young people of today that. . .They won’t believe you.”

Naturally, but it’s a good bet thousands of Moncton High pupils and their parents are feeling trapped in their own comedy of errors right about now, thanks to the breathtaking level of neglect and scandalous incompetence perpetrated by the very institutional bodies they trusted to provide a safe, clean, stable environment for that most cherished of Canadian entitlements: public education.

What began as an emergency shutdown of one of the city’s venerable and (let’s face it) most decrepit schools has now cascaded into a frantic and haphazard race to find room for its student body in locations scattered around the metropolitan area.

What’s especially galling is that all this was entirely preventable.

Even a decade ago, when my daughters attended Moncton High, parents and teachers routinely complained to administrators about the school’s structural and environmental problems – problems like an ancient boiler system that rendered the place either blisteringly hot or glacially cold; problems like rust, corrosion, filth, crumbling masonry and, yes, mould.

District 2 and the provincial government have had at least ten years to address these issues. Instead, they chose to play footsy with their jurisdictional responsibilities and – like Monty Python’s fictional Yorkshiremen – tell tale tales to each other about their respective miseries on budgets, politics, optics, resources and, ultimately, priorities.

It’s now hard to avoid the conclusion that the district education council system, as it is currently configured in New Brunswick, is a toothless beast leashed by the department of education to roar when necessary and purr when required. It carries all the responsibility and liability, but possesses almost no authority to effect essential and efficacious change at the local level where it putatively reigns.

And so when change becomes unavoidable (as it is, apparently, at Moncton High) it arrives by overnight courier, urgently and disruptively, forcing the so-called beneficiaries of provincial education policy – parents, teachers and their charges – to jump when commanded and somehow adapt to the lamentable “inconveniences” they suddenly face.

There is no excuse for such short-term thinking, and appalling lack of communications, among those whose only real job is to plan for the long term and keep the public informed about their intentions and decisions.

Freshly minted Education Minister Jody Carr now says he will conduct a review of the structural safety of all schools older than 30 years in New Brunswick. That’s just peachy, but he should also address the structural inadequacies of a system that supports such woe.

And he should do it before our children’s signature memory of high school becomes the day they were evicted from their hole in the ground.

My Great Aunt Anna McKeen was a teacher who spent 30 years working for the Alberta School Board. Although she stood barely five feet tall in her stockings, she was by all accounts a formidable presence, a stickler for rules and proper conduct.

Still, her students remembered her most for her devotion to their enlightenment and continuous improvement. And many kept in touch with her till the day she died mere weeks before her centennial.

If she were alive today, I wonder what she would make of the debate raging across Canada over the use of information technology in classrooms. Specifically, how would she weigh the relative merits of Shawn Graham’s determination to equip every middle and high school student in New Brunswick with laptops?

The premier, who says he has consulted teachers in the province about the scheme, insists that 61,000 computers will help children succeed – by which, I assume, he means “succeed” in the Internet-enabled, Web-dominated world of commerce.

His opponents – who are, by now, almost too numerous to count – are convinced he’s wrong. Tory Leader David Alward points out, not unreasonably, that it’s more important to invest in educators. Green Party honcho Jack MacDougall merely dismisses the Grit campaign promise as “trite”.

But I think Anna, who was both astute and pragmatic, would ask a deceptively simple question: How do computers, and their wireless, hand-held progeny, contribute to the process of generating literate, well-rounded and tolerant citizens? How do they help inculcate, in students, the habits of mind that are necessary for life-long learning? How do they, in effect, support the teacher’s noble purpose?

These are exactly the questions with which policy makers and educators are grappling elsewhere in Canada. And there are no easy answers.

A recent report in the Globe and Mail quipped, “BlackBerry etiquette is a fickle thing. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who banned the use of the devices while driving in the province and inside his own cabinet meetings, made waves Wednesday when he said he was open to a move being informally considered by the Toronto District School Board – to lift its ban on cell phones in classrooms. [His] comments suggested that what he thought was distracting for adults may be educational for students.”

In a sense, McGuinty and Graham are simply acknowledging the new facts of life. Laptops, notebooks and smart phones have become ubiquitous. Nearly everyone owns, or has access to, one or more of these marvels of mobile communications and information gathering. (Of course, if that’s the case, then why does the Province of New Brunswick need to spend increasingly scarce tax dollars further endowing the already well-equipped? Still, that’s a discussion for another time).

The point is that these devices are tools, and like all tools, they can be wielded for both good and evil intent, depending on the circumstances.

Texting while speeding down the highway is stupid and irresponsible. But what about googling the mating habits of the Great Blue Whale whilst safely seated in Biology 101? Should this be considered improper conduct? Should it be against the rules?

 What gets lost in all of this is the primacy of the teacher-pupil relationship. Arguing for or against the presence of information technology – either its unfettered use or its complete ban – in a formal educational setting is the sort of impaired logic that would have set my aunt’s jaw to trembling. For both sides, once again, demean the essential pedagogical role Mr. and Mrs. Chips play by setting their own standards, establishing their own values and, ultimately, inspiring their own charges with their individual varieties of wit and wisdom.

As a result, teaching, itself, becomes a tool – rather than a crucial function – of public policy, and everyone loses.

Kids learn in different ways and at different paces. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. Government’s best and most appropriate obligation is to provide teachers with all the resources they need – high-tech, low-tech and no-tech – to fulfill the only objective that matters in a civil, democratic society: producing new generations of engaged, knowledgeable and critical thinkers.

On word that the Province of New Brunswick will soon give us 800 million more reasons for thinking that our society is mortally wounded, we might be wise to retreat to our storm cellars and hide among the root vegetables and canned goods until Armageddon finally passes.

Does nothing work anymore? Are we doomed to watch our civic bonds dissolve, one by one? Who’s left to wage the good fight to restore hope and confidence to our beleaguered psyches? In fact, a couple of warriors come to mind, and for the second time in this space this week, I don’t mind playing Pollyanna to everyone else’s Cassandra. (Just don’t get used to it).

For some years now, Dialogue New Brunswick – a creature of the Canada-N.B. Agreement on the provision of French-language services and Canadian Heritage – has been working to promote mutual understanding, respect and appreciation between the province’s Anglophone and francophone communities.

Says the organization’s enthusiatic and talented executive director, Carole Fournier: “We’re not looking to create bilingual citizens necessarily, but we are looking to allow [people] to experience each other’s culture.

Especially little people. This year, Dialogue New Brunswick is expanding its successful “My- Friend-Mon Ami” pen-pal program, which has paired 75,000 French and English kids since its inception in 1991. The initiative involves students between the ages of six and 15, from both linguistic groups, writing letters to each other about their lives and experiences.

In September, the program is being extended under the sobriquet “Friends Meeting Friends”, which simply means that the youngsters will get the chance to sit down, face to face. “It’s important that we provide our students with [this] chance to connect,” Fournier says. “The appreciation of each other has grown over the past years, and I think we need to keep working on that with programs like this.”

Happily, Dialogue New Brunswick is not the only organization with an urgent mandate to make connections and expand educational opportunities across social and civic boundaries in a world gone sideways. Consider the work of Dr. Fiona Walton at the University of Prince Edward Island.

She and her colleagues at the university’s education department have developed a unique program for Inuit leaders – a program that enables them to obtain Master of Education in Leadership and Learning degrees in their home territory of Nunavut. A Canadian first, the inaugural convocation ceremony will take place in Iqaluit on July 1, this year.

The initiative is, in fact, a partnership of U.P.E.I., that province’s Department of Education, the Government of Nunavut, Nunavut Arctic College, and St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Says Dr. Walton: “This [degree program] allows graduates to provide leadership within the school and post-secondary systems of education, as well as in other educational settings. We need to invest in leadership development because it will take leaders to create the conditions in our schools to implement a program of change. We need to foster a whole new generation of educational leaders like our business schools create business leaders.”

I would argue that the collective “we” must also foster (somehow) a whole new generation of business leaders, if only to get us out of the mess in which we currently find ourselves. New Brunswick’s impending $800-million deficit is an enormously bitter pill to swallow, but no more so than P.E.I.’s and Nova Scotia’s looming fiscal shortfalls. (In fact, the latter’s is expected to top $1 billion this year). And the threat of rolling deficits in the Atlantic Provinces over the next decade is palpably real.

But what people like Fournier and Walton teach us is that the world changes for the better incrementally, in small ways, one step at a time. When the big picture becomes too burdensome to bear, maybe the way clear is through looking at all the little ones, all the bite-sized chunks of hope and harmony.

If nothing else, it might keep us out of the root cellar.

Let me get this straight. . .

A contingent of two from the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) sits opposite Minister of Science and Technology Gary Goodyear, his policy advisor and one other civil servant, there to receive an earful on subject of ingratitude.

“You are lying,” Goodyear reportedly thunders, evidently enraged by CAUT’s interpretation of the government’s policies on funding basic research.

“You are misleading them,” he continues, referring to the organization’s regular communiqués to its members, most of whom are critical of Harpertown’s apparent disinterest in pure science and the R&D that girds it.

Indeed, according to Carolyn Abraham’s remarkable story in the Globe and Mail on Monday, “they [CAUT’s representatives] had barely begun to state their case when the minister accused them of twisting facts. When CAUT’s staff said the Conservatives have a spotty record on science and noted they abolished the office of the national science adviser, the minister’s assistant screamed at them to shut up. Then, the minister said, ‘you’ve burned all your bridges with us’, and they stormed out.”

David Robinson, CAUT’s associate executive director was the source of Abraham’s “fly-on-the-wall” account, as he was. . .well, one of the flies on the wall last Wednesday. In 15 years on the job, he declared, he’d “never had a meeting like that.”

On this, at least, Mr. Goodyear agreed. “I, too, have never had a meeting like that,” he said. “It was a unique experience and one I don’t care to repeat.”

So, again, let me get this straight. . .

A duly elected representative of the federal government chooses to deal with constituents, who nurse complaints about the function of his office, by telling them to pound sand. In fact, though these electors shill for no political party or promote any particular ideology, they’re greeted like Taliban in the city they, and other taxpayers, finance year after year after year.

Hmmm. Sounds like business as usual for an archly partisan crew that knows all too well which finger to raise, parallel to the sky, whenever it is questioned.

Seriously, though, Mr. Goodyear. . .scientists? I’m curious. Why would you pick a fight with people who might cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Multiple Sclerosis or, in your case, foot-in-mouth disease? More to the point, why would you make a spectacle of yourself when people like me adore pointing out the volume, texture and durability of the clothes the emperor doesn’t actually wear when he greets his adoring crowds?

Ah, well. Never mind. You’re excused. It’s not as if your portfolio in the Harper government is worth much. After all, over the past 18 months, your boss has eliminated more than $300 million in funding for pure research. He’s transferred millions more from the federal research councils into industrial development programs that are so poorly staffed, so pathetically served by a generation of innumerate, illiterate devotees of their own facebooks, that the chance of you, or anyone else, breaking clear, seems unlikely.

But if you do – if you ever break clear – you might consider that hard science, as boring as it appears to you, is the blood that courses through the veins of applied science. The theoretical becomes pragmatic only when patents get issued; and patents don’t get issued without government funding for those who occupy the top of the intellectual food chain: The lab rats motivated by nothing more than the desire to discover.

Last week’s stem cell breakthrough – in which Canadian researchers finally cracked the problem of transforming common skin cells into the stuff of life – is a case in point. This project required years of hardy investigation with no promise, no immediate application. It needed millions of dollars of taxpayer support, which it received right up to its happy conclusion. Now, it’s clear, someone’s likely to make a pile of money licensing this technology all over the world.

But, under the current federal climate, it may be the last time anyone does.

So, really, Mr. Goodyear, let me get this straight. . .

You mistrust scientists because they mistrust you and your government’s ignoble track record on research funding. You believe that anyone who questions the Harper government’s commitment to research and development deserves to be dismissed, abused and shouted down.

What, I wonder, is a better definition of ingratitude?

There is nothing like a first-class economic crisis to bring out the college of smart guys, extolling the virtues of hard work, big ideas and sober, second thought.

So it was in Moncton a couple of weeks ago when luminaries from Atlantic Canada’s business, education and public sectors gathered to ponder the fate of the region in a world gone mad.

Of course, a day of brain-busting confabulation isn’t much time to sort out the affairs of a part of Canada that’s been, too often over the past 50 years, its own worst enemy. Still, the dutifully assembled gave it their best shot.

Does Atlantic Canada possess the resources and political commitment to remake itself in the image of its fondest aspiration? Or does the average bloke really care?

Do universities hold the key to long-term development? Or are they fatally burdened by the silos that keep them apart from the muck and moil of daily life?

Is out-migration, particularly among young people, a dart to the heart of the region’s future prosperity. Or is it an opportunity to recalibrate our “brand worthiness” through a small-is-beautiful campaign that targets a knowledge-loving, technology-driven international marketplace?

You know, the easy stuff.

But, though there were few answers, one point rang like a bell, at least in my own modestly equipped mind: If the region has any chance of outpacing the current crisis, of building a new foundation for economic success, it must pay more than mere lip service to the urgent need for affordable, accessible higher education.

Today, legions of university and college kids graduate clutching a sheepskin in one hand and a massive I.O.U. in the other. Over the past decade, student debt (which now averages a whopping $15,000 per person, per year) has deepened – in many instances beyond the point of no return on an investment that society still insists must be made, regardless of the consequences.

In fact, the consequences are not only personal (poverty, bankruptcy, despair); they’re also broadly economic, and they cut to the core of what it means to be a truly competitive region in a world where ideas and skills move across borders, rewarding the fleet and nimble and punishing the slow and clumsy.

Naturally, the solutions are not easy. Yet, one seems painfully obvious: Eliminate, or radically reduce, tuition rates for undergraduate courses of study in Atlantic Canada.

Now, before the howling imprecations from the right side of the political divide commence, allow me to elaborate.

First, there are immediate social benefits stemming from any scheme that puts money back into the pockets of young scholars. Those with the wherewithal to study do so more quickly and efficiently than those who are forced to assume onerous, distracting levels of public and private debt. The result is that the former tends to graduate sooner, with degrees more closely linked to their interests and gifts – making them better, more job-ready employees – than the latter. To use the language of economics, tuition relief reduces the incidence of costly externalities (prolonged under-employment, joblessness, and systemic labour shortages in key industries, among others).

Second, debt-free graduates are more likely than their sallow-skinned, money-hungry counterparts to seek advanced credits; and they are more likely to seek them in fields of study which promise rewarding, lucrative, permanent work. Moreover, if that work is available in Atlantic Canada, every credible economic development think tank insists that, for the first time in a generation, new cohorts of educated young people will stay, not flee for their economic lives.

Predictably, there is the question of who pays. Just as predictably, the answer is: We do. We working men and women, who send our taxes to Ottawa to ensure, among other things, that our children obtain at least the same opportunities we’ve had, must foot the bill through the ministrations of our governments. And nationally, collectively, this will amount to billions of dollars a year. But how cheap that price is – what a true fiscal stimulus it becomes – when measured against the cost of doing nothing.

If this global tumult teaches us anything, it is that short-term thinking leads to long-term trauma. Invest, now, in the next generation – in the next college of smart guys – and, one day, we won’t need our biggest brains pondering solutions to problems that, frankly, should never exist.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the classroom, now comes another exquisite example of our education tax dollars at work in New Brunswick. In fact, the recent flag-flap over singing the national anthem during school hours has nothing on this marvellous contretemps – something I’ll call, “When People Must Die.”

It came to light a couple of weeks ago when Jessie Lomax, the mother of a fourth-grader at Ecole Mont-Carmel in Ste. Marie-de-Kent, took a gander at an assignment her daughter brought home. It instructed the tyke to ponder the following scenario: The planet is about to explode; a rocket ship will transport three of five people to safety; decide which three leave, and which two stay; choose from among an Acadian francophone, a Chinese person, a black African, an English person, and an aboriginal person; you have ten minutes to make up your mind.

Naturally, the little girl in question was confused and upset, prompting Ms. Lomax to complain loudly and publicly about the explicit racism in the exercise, and the broader moral quandary of asking children to make life and death decisions, however hypothetical. I think (though I’m not entirely certain) she used the words, “Are these people insane?”

Unfortunately, I have no idea. But what I do know is that these sorts of “values education” quizzes were fixtures of elementary-level social studies courses back in the 1960s and early 70s. They were designed – or so their progressive authors reckoned – to deal with tough issues head on, and shine a bright light into the gloomy corners of the soul where hatred and bigotry grow. The theory was that by getting all the nasty “learned prejudices” out in the open, you could effectively reprogram a child’s mind before he or she began attending Ku Klux Klan meetings.

The problem was, simply, the approach didn’t work, and for many reasons – not the least of which was that smart asses like me would invariably rig the results with impertinent modifications. I, for example, was raised in a diverse, multi-ethnic community, so I didn’t think too often about my chums’ skin colour or religion or first language. I did, however, think quit a bit about my principal who was fond of administering the strap, and my math teacher who enjoyed verbally humiliating her less accomplished charges. Who lived and who died? Believe me, to this sixth-grader, it was a no-brainer.

On the other hand, I never did quite grasp the logic of the exercise’s premise. First, the world’s about to blow-up. Second, a rocket ship is coming to take three people away. I distinctly remember peppering my teacher with the kind of questions that turn well-meaning educators into heavy drinkers.

            “Miss, why is the world blowing up?”

            “Okay. . .it isn’t, not really.”

            “Miss, how come only three people get to go?”

            “Because, that is the assignment.”

            “Miss, can I choose myself and my two best friends?”

            “No, you have to choose from the list given.”

            “Miss, where is the rocket ship going?”

            “Into space. . .away from the planet.”

            “Miss, there’s no air in space. . .wouldn’t they die anyway?”

            “Just pretend they’re going to another planet.”

            “Miss, wouldn’t they need something like warp drive?”

            “No. . .uh, yes. . .okay, whatever.”

All of which left me more distrustful of stupid tests (a disposition I carry with me to this day) than of members of ethnic groups not my own.

Still, New Brunswick Education Minister Kelly Lamrock is right to stop the project in provincial elementary schools – as he did last week. It sends all the wrong messages, serves no useful purpose, and distracts attention and money away from the real and systemic problems that afflict our public education system: low levels of literacy and numeracy, inconsistent and antiquated learning resources, and a pathetically low level of science, history and civics pedagogy.

If we want our children to grow up to be tolerant, sensitive, accomplished citizens of the world, teach them other languages. Show them how to factor a binomial. Make sure they can pick out China, India, Israel, and Russia on a map. And give teachers the tools they need to achieve these results.

Don’t elevate a discredited relic from an earlier generation, and call it education.

The stereotypical college provost is a dull martinet preoccupied with procedural minutia designed to keep his faculty and students both anxious and bored. Fortunately, in Atlantic Canada, it’s pure fiction. And no one demonstrates this better, perhaps, than Wade MacLauchlan, the University of Prince Edward Island’s effusive, articulate president.

Not long ago, I spoke with the man about the region’s long-term development. “If we think about adding value to everything we do, we can see many emerging opportunities,” he said. “And if we have a map that focuses our efforts, so much the better. This encourages the sort of intra-sectoral cooperation that’s crucial to the advance of small economies.”

Increasingly, this is the type of horizon-busting commentary Atlantic Canada’s university chieftains prefer to retail: Big picture stuff in which academic silos crumble before the juggernaut of reason, collaboration and progress. And not a moment too soon.

Though politicians pay lip-service to our institutions of higher learning – though they agree, in principle, that nothing is more important than top-notch post-secondary education – few truly appreciate their enormous contributions to the region’s economy, or their storehouses of innovative ideas at a time when we can use all the bright notions we can get.

According to the Association of Atlantic Universities, Atlantic Canada’s 17 accredited institutes host 77,000 full-time, and 14,500 part-time, students. They employ nearly 17,000 faculty and staff, and account for another 10,000 jobs.

Each year, they generate $2 billion in Gross Domestic Product, and $4.4 billion in total economic output. They pay nearly $500 million annually in provincial and federal taxes, and spend equally as much on research and development.

Yet, apart from the worthy Atlantic Innovation Fund – a federal research and technology commercialization program delivered by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency – the public sector has, for years, ignored our universities’ growing and urgent need for support.

The most recent snub came courtesy of the federal budget a couple of weeks ago. After handing out tens-of-billions of dollars for new construction projects, tax relief, improvements to the employment insurance program, and enhanced export development, Ottawa went mute on the subject of science and technology. No new money had been earmarked for Genome Canada or the national councils (the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the National Science and Engineering Research Council).

Remarkably, under the circumstances, the region’s institutes continue to improve, continue to expand the boundaries of human imagination, and continue to contribute to the overall well-being of the society that cradles them.

U.P.E.I., for example, leverages its limited budgets to produce a stunning array of accomplishments involving pharmaceutical research, bioscience, animal science, and cooperative educational programs in virtually every field of endeavour. As a result, it is routinely recognized across Canada and abroad as one of the finest universities of its kind anywhere in the world. Indeed, the institution just completed the most ambitious, private-sector fund-raising campaign in its history, generating more than $52 million.

Similar achievements resonate throughout Atlantic Canada – at Dalhousie, Saint Mary’s, UNB, UdeM, Mount Allison, and Memorial, among others.

Arguably, it’s the very adversity they face that has produced the new breed of thoughtful, nimble, culturally engaged administrators. But it’s not an argument I would want to make, given the temper of the times.

Institutions of higher learning both attract and produce highly educated, profoundly skilled and handsomely paid professionals whose ingenuity represents industry’s best hope for long-term, sustainable economic recovery. Original, creative research is the future’s single, most important commodity. And this requires participation from all sectors of society.

Or as MacLauchlan says, “If we put our shoulders to the wheel, and work together, we can only gain.”