affecting Higher and Secondary education are, of course, part of a pattern of a world-wide tendency which can be traced back to the major crises in the Western capitalist world in the ear1y 1980s which, among other things, saw Thatcher and Reagan installed as the ‘leaders' of the two largest English-speaking nations in the world, the role of government (at all levels) as a socially equalizing force being questioned, and the primacy of multi-capitalist conglomerates everywhere being seen as inevitable. The consequent ‘downsizing' of businesses and governments has not, of course, been accompanied by the political leaders becoming disinterested in molding the lives of their constituents. The withdrawal of state funding from medicine, education, welfare schemes has led to more, not less interference in the internal mechanisms of the institutions responsible. The tactics of post-modern governments, in the words of Zygmunt Baumann, lie between seduction and the perfection of the panopticon as modes of controlling their publics. The extensive nature of social surveyance is manifested in Ontario by the work-camps, welfare fingerprints, and, now, the plans for computerized school records which will make even hearsay the subject of state inspection. The scope of seduction may be witnessed in after-legislation propaganda which is designed to convince the public that even the most clumsy pieces of legislation are creations of corporate genius and that any form of opposition is self-interested and lacking in "common sense."

The recent address by Premier Harris indicates the future lies not with intellectuals, with the humanities, with the social scientists but with the "11-year-olds who could show me how to redesign my web page." Thus the present generations are lost. The objective of this government is therefore to remake the intellectual culture of this province, and hence the country, so that all educationa is instrumental, vocational, guided by the great corporate figures who have now assumed control over the knowledge-factories. Unless we commit ourselves to this instrumentality we are doomed.

It stands with Edward Said in arguing that: "[The Intellectual is] someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments and corporations, and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. " In addition, needless to say, it argues that the task of intellectuals is to think and think critically.