I strongly support the striking Ontario college teachers; short-term faculty hiring is a bad-news trend

An Oct. 22, 2017 CBC article is entitled: “Ontario college strike spotlights ‘new norm’ of precarious labour in academia: Hiring short-term contract faculty in colleges and universities is a growing and worrisome trend, critics say.”

A related bad-news trend, concerning which I’ve heard from several college and university teachers over the years, is the drive to identify students primarily as clients.

The student-as-client model easily gets carried to extremes, to the point that education becomes primarily a process of providing paper qualifications for students and little else. What kind of education is that?

Such an approach does not make sense except from the perspective of a frame of reference that is concerned solely with education as a business.

As I’ve noted at an earlier post, I’m pleased that Finland is among the countries where education is approached in adherence to a model that is more robust, than is generally evident in some other countries, and that from all indications produces A-1 results.

Among other things in Finland, teachers are accorded a high level of prestige and respect and they are well paid. The Finnish teacher-selection process is highly competitive, which makes good sense, if you want to choose the best possible candidates.