The Market Model of Education and the Threat to Canadian Universities

Abstract

The market model of education, which is enveloping Canadian universities, endangers the advancement and dissemination of shared knowledge as a public good. By reducing all knowledge to a private good, it fails to acknowledge that education has opposing goals, motivations, methods, and standards of excellence to those of the corporate market. Statements made by leading advocates of the market model exhibit a habitual tendency to expunge all evidence that does not serve the overriding goal of maximizing private money profits. When taken together, these characteristics suggest that the market model of education has become a totalizing moment in human affairs, which Canadian faculty and students must oppose if the university as a public institution is to survive.