Appendix

Actually, I foresee the same kind of polarizations I talked about emerging in the general economy emerging here in education and learning. A move farther and farther away from universal standards and universal access in education toward a two-tiered ed. system, particularly at the post-secondary level: At the elite end, in the cultural formation of "knowledge workers," learners will get a lot of individualized tutoring attention, augmenting their cruising through Internet salons of privileged discussion and their use of high-end data-base search and analysis tools.

Then, at the other end, dumbed-down digitally delivered learning: Disney-style learning packages marketed, distributed and combined into "customized learning experiences" through the kind of computerized voice-clip mazes we currently navigate to do a lot of personal business -- including course registration - today. In fact, this consonance between the polarizations in the economy and polarizations in preparatory education has already been noted in some recent research, including a 1992 report on computer use in U.S. schools which found that the rich schools had students doing multi-media with teacher-facilitators, and the poor schools had computers replacing teachers, and confining students to computerized drill work. "Instead of becoming instruments of reform, computers are reinforcing a two-tiered system of ed. for the rich and poor," the researchers concluded.¹

In Whose Brave New World, I predicted that the global networks of the new digital economy would prompt a new wave of colonization, and that the territory targeted for colonization would be the public- sector institutions of health and ed. I sense this happening in the public-school system, and even in post- secondary education -- Acadia University being a telling example. I call it colonization because this captures the polarizing dynamic which eco-feminist Vandana Shiva highlights in the development process associated with colonization. In other words, it's both development and under-development. It's not just that the new digital media for education and learning are being developed as the latest, the with-it, media. It's that the traditional media and the people associated with them are being under-developed: becoming marginalized and left to atrophy.

With the cutbacks in public-educational funding plus centralization and other educational reforms introduced in its name, we're seeing the under-development of ed. as public service and as living culture embedded in local communities.

Turn the frame around, and these developments are also the stepping stones to a new development of education as a business. And that, I would suggest is the larger context in which the discussion of this conference is taking place.

To repeat what I said at the outset: On the one hand we have a lot of desperate people wanting to upgrade educational credentials, and needing technology-assessment tools to avoid being ripped off.

On the other, we have the increasingly digital and multi-media corporate context in which training and learning is being developed and offered these days. The question is, how do we respond as critical insiders? What do we want to guard against? And what do we as women sticking up for other women want to push for?

In other words, resistance plus, as my friend and comm. scholar Lorna Roth puts it, persistence too, in terms of the enduring principles of woman-centred learning and the culture of education.