Models of authority for Ontario schools

This dissertation seeks to present a consideration of some of the ways in which models of authority have been applied to Ontario's system of public education, need still to be changed. It contends three things. First, it states that the sociocultural realities of contemporary life profoundly affect the ways in which people relate to institutions such as school systems, and in turn the way school systems are able to govern themselves and the students for which they are responsible. Second, it observes that public education in Ontario has had a long history of broadly based liberal control, which has traditionally functioned using various versions of a centre-to-periphery pattern, now much more rigidly understood in narrowly economic terms. Third, it argues that although many changes have been made to facilitate student learning at each stage of the development of Ontario's public school system, the current ideologically-limited version of the model of authority used in its governance is even less able to maintain the system's relevancy in the face of the pressure brought to bear on it by (post-modern) life. A new dialogue must be established concerning what authority means in contingent terms for schools, starting from the basic classroom relationships between teachers and students, if the system as a whole is to be changed. The dissertation presents a definition of authority that is primarily relational, yet fully functional at the level of language. Such a definition is needed to consider models of authority as they may be applied to the fluidity of contemporary reality, in which norms themselves often become cross-contextual sets of practices rather than being representative of universally-acknowledged “metanarratives”. On the way, the definition is compared and contrasted with three artificially (designated) periods of centralization in the governance of Ontario's school system. A consideration of the mandate for public education itself then follows, along with the means by which authority may be legitimated within it. The distance between present realities and those versions of centralized authority used to govern Ontario's schools at present are held up over against the definition of legitimate authority provided at the outset, in order to prove the need for change.

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