Professor Mark Slouka, cited here recently, is an awardwinning teacher and writer. He directs the writing program at the University of Chicago, where the Encyclopedia Britannica has had its headquarters for the past century. Originally published in Edinburgh, it is now another U.S. global enterprise.

The 'Britannica' surveys the whole domain of human knowledge in 32 volumes, eight more than the 24 I purchased 40 years ago. Prof. Slouka thinks that with the proliferation of technology our educational institutions have been 'dehumanised'. The 'literati' who read and experience the world directly through travel and face-toface encounters are being replaced by the 'digitati' who 'know' what buttons to push and the right films to watch.

The on-screen images include the jumbo-trons that lecture to hundreds of students, most of whom never speak personally to the professor.

Slouka, say his critics, underestimates the benefits of technology when he claims that we shall soon be unable to distinguish what is real from what has been created by film makers and propagandists. It will be unfortunate when the average university graduate has been trained mainly in the pure and natural sciences with little or no education in the humanities. It will be worse when most of what any of us thinks about has been generated either by Hollywood or by the 'mavens' of the global advertising industry.

Gertrude Stein was once asked why she valued a painting more than a string of pearls. She replied that she preferred something made by a man to something made by an oyster. Technology is the work of men and women, but education that is dominated by the use of machines or gadgets is dehumanising. For almost a century people have been of two minds about the advance of technocracy (rule by machines). Those who are adept at manipulating them simply follow orders as did those who wielded axes and shovels in another age. Is their work to be valued above that of thinkers and reformers?

When machines create pictures, write poetry, produce music and do our thinking for us, will George Orwell's "1984" have arrived, albeit belatedly? Will a microchip imbedded in each newborn monitor one's whereabouts throughout life, and will statutory surveillance devices in every room and vehicle make all activity subject to random inspection by Sûreté Centrale? Those who invent, market, install and service those machines will not wish to protect us against them. Who will speak for freedom and privacy?

Prof. Slouka says that educators are overly concerned to produce trained 'peasants' (the corporate designastion) like those now proliferating in South East Asia, who will serve their corporate masters.

The modern counterparts of Croesus, about whom Ralph Nader writes in his new novel Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, dominate governments and institutions. Ergo, they influence the kind of education they say we need. The super-rich should, according to Nader and Moore, be enlisted to help solve the social and political problems generated by capitalism.

In the first chapter of the novel Nader imagines Warren Buffet, the $46 billion man, warning his fellow plutocrats that "the world is not doing well. Artificial intelligence is on a fast track to dehumanising us. As a species we are learning more and more but are less and less able to keep up with what's happening to us as human beings". And that, says Nader, is at a time when we have more powerful tools than ever before because of "the proliferation of facilitating technologies".

The current relationship between industry and education, says Slouka, is like that between Walmart and its suppliers. Boards of education, in order to meet their payrolls, will have increasingly to please the corporate barons by what they teach. Acartoon comes to mind in which an aircraft passenger grasps the arm of a priest sitting beside him. Outside the window, lightning flashes and the interior of the plane gives evidence of severe turbulence. "Can't you do something, Father?" asks the worried passenger. The cleric replies, "Sorry, I'm in sales, not in management".

Are our educators focussed on selling what the global merchants are intent on managing? Are they forgetting that the transmission of our culture is as important as the expansion of our economy?

The Globe and Mail reported (Social Studies column, September 30) that German physicians have launched a Culture Shot programme to supplement the physical health of children. Youngsters leave a doctor's appointment with complimentary theatre and museum tickets. Dr H.J. Kahl of Dûsseldorf called it "cultural prevention" that promotes a healthier way of life.

Mark Slouka says that today's teachers are being hired to produce a generation of corporate serfs rather than free men and women who enjoy the fullness of life by drawing from the deep wells of history, literature and the arts. Would a local trustee or school principal care to comment?

In his new film, "Capitalism: a Love Story" Michael Moore says that capitalism is a system of legalised greed that flouts democracy and demeans people. "We're going to have to invent a different kind of economy based on democratic principles and with an ethical core," he says. That conclusion should surprise no one. Catholic social teaching has been saying so for years. It rejects the capitalist myth that an unregulated market produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Google "Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891)" and "John Paul II on Capitalism".

Neither our political freedom nor our cultural enrichment are automatic results of a growing economy. Quite the opposite.

Prof. Slouka quotes Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, as saying that high schools as we know them are obsolete. British author and critic David Lodge writes that it is the universities and schools that properly prepare young people for them that in an impending new Dark Age must keep civilisation alive. They should not have to justify their existence by spreadsheets.

Education and job training are both important but they are not the same thing. "Beware", said Plato, "when profit-seeking entrepreneurs (his "men of iron") rule the state". Or the schools.