The educational marketplace

The educational marketplace WILLIAM CLARKE I looked at the thought for the day in the Holiday Inn and it was - "The only way to have a friend is to be a friend." I have been asked to deal with the subject of educational publishing, and I think the phrase is, in "broad strokes," with a broad brush, or a large shovel, depending on your perspective. It is evident to those of us in publishing that we still must get our points across, because last night's speech was an example of ad hocery in one of its more unfortunately common manifestations; we still haven't a policy. We certainly haven't the programmes. Because of this we will have to deal with issues I thought had been clearly stated long, long ago. Why educational publishing as a kind of topic area within this sort of conference? The answer is relatively simple. The educational marketplace in Canada represents the only market currently open to publishers publishing Canadian works, which has inherent scope and size. This is essentially an economic problem. If one can produce a product in sufficient volume then the cost of production can be amortized over a larger volume and the economies of scale can then start to be realized. In Canada , this is the single large-scale market that we have available to us. It is, therefore, essential that those publishers operating in Canada producing materials of Canadian authorship, and in this area we can tnclude both Canadian-owned and foreign-owned companies, have access to an institutional educational market. Why is it important for all publishers, even those literary houses not concerned with the production of educational materials, in the strictest sense? It is important because those very trends in education towards diversification, towards a broad use of material, have made it possible for the books they are producing to play a role in the classroom and in the curriculum. The educational marketplace must be a very 54 important area of our concern, however successful we are in the bookstores, however successful we are in the public libraries. If we cannot make it in the educational market we are going to die. Governments that judge the health of the industry in terms of the fact that they were able to subsidize 50% more books last year than the year before, and publishers that judge the health of an industry in terms of the fact that there are more impoverished publishers now than there were a year before, are simply missing the point. The success of any government policy must be measured in only one way, or at least in one important way amongst others, and that is to the extent to which government can become less involved with publishing, the extent to which the publishing industry can become self-supporting, can grow and develop, and make its contribution on the basis of its own efforts. The educational marketplace looms exceedingly large in this area. Why is it important to the public? The public must have a concern for education . The quality of education - and this is, again, an obvious remark that everybody, or most people in educational administration seem to be missing - depends on a number of factors. Primarily, I think it depends upon the teaching profession. Unless we have access to the right numbers of highly-trained and dedicated teachers, we cannot survive educationally. But the quality of education depends upon the resources available to the teacher. To send a good teacher into a classroom environment where there are not materials adequate to the needs of students, is to tie that teacher's hands behind his, or her back. And we simply cannot pretend and it is sheer lunacy to say - as boards of education in the province and elsewhere are saying, if we get the money we have got to put it into teachers every time. This is simply not budget planning, it is irresponsibility . Revue d'etudes canadiennes In Ontario, which is a very good example, the budget for classroom material and school library materials is now merely 1% of the operating budget for the schools - 1% that is of the operating budget and...