BC’s Blueprint for Extraction Education

In 2014, British Columbia’s Liberal government released “BC’s Skills for Jobs Blueprint: Re-engineering Education and Training” (BC Government, 2014). The document outlines the government’s plan to align post-secondary education more closely with labour market needs, particularly in the oil, gas, and mining sectors; a key focus is the development of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) industry.  The blueprint boasts to create “1 million jobs by 2020” in the trades, without additional institutional financial investments. As the document puts it, “funding is not changing but programming must.” Drawing on a policy sociology approach (Ball, 2014; Ozga 2000), I argue that underlying this new initiative is an epistemic understanding of education for, through, and as extraction. In Freire’s (1970) model of banking education , the knowledge-rich teacher deposits information into the empty bank account (the student). The teacher can withdraw funds from the student in asking her to spit out exactly what was put in—a regurgitation of information which maintains the hierarchical position of the student-as-poor and teacher-as-rich. The notion of extraction education also seeks to maintain power relations but shifts the focus from ‘deposit’ to ‘withdrawal.’ At its core, is the idea of extracting as much as possible while investing as little as possible. There are three main ways the BC government endorses an extraction education: Education for extraction : The Blueprint is directed to train more British Columbians to extract more materials from the land. The government claims that 200,000 jobs will be created in LNG-related industries by 2020. Education—from high school onwards—is asked to be responsive to such development to ensure greater resource extraction. Education through extraction: An extraction economy requires extracting more from institutions. BC’s 2014 budget contains $51 million in cuts to post-secondary funding over three years, with technical institutes and colleges particularly hard hit (CNW, 2014); according to the president of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC, by 2016, “per-student operating grants to post-secondary institutions will have dropped by 20 per cent since the Liberals formed government” (Culbert & Shaw, 2014). At the same time, the government is imposing greater demands on regional universities and trades schools to meet the resource extraction boom. Education as extraction: There is the idea that an institution can deposit skills into individual students and then extract a job-ready individual. Ongoing professional development is not a focus of the Blueprint. Further, the skills needed for an extraction economy, as well as the economy itself, are treated as unchanging, easily measurable, and predictable. Extraction education reveals a neoliberal approach to education: a focus on supply (what we get out of the earth, institutions, and individuals) rather than demand (what we need to put into educational system to meet needs of the land, institutions, and individuals). In my paper, I outline four principal reasons why extraction education is problematic: environmental, financial, educational, and vocational. I also argue for greater collaboration and conversations among BC’s different educational sectors in responding to the government’s call for extraction education.