What we are witnessing is just the latest and sharpest manifestation of the remorseless process of commercialization of our lives that creates insecurity, anxiety and sheer exhaustion because it piles all the pressure of coping on us as individuals. And that burden is just too much, even for those families who used to see themselves as quite ‘well off’. Hope is systematically being taken away. The anger and frustration is real, widespread and well founded.

The key word in the higher education debate is not so much fees but variability. It is the ability to compete on price, whether it’s at the bargain basement or luxury end of the university market that signals the ultimate victory of the economy over society; of profit over people. The flow towards university privatisation will become inexorable. However, when it comes to fees, Scotland and Wales are showing that something different is not just desirable but feasible.

Today we are all conditioned to think of education as a positional good – how do we or our children benefit disproportionately compared to others? It is a rat race in which the winners are just the fastest rats. Since the 1980s universities and schools have been steadily and remorselessly marketised and pupils and students commodified. Success, as the new common sense would have it, could only be achieved through competition, between institutions for the best scholars and students and between students themselves. The pressure becomes almost unbearable – the right nursery begets the right primary, which paves the way for the right secondary and then the right university – leading ultimately to the right, that is, best paid job. Along the way those who can’t stand the pace are weeded out and those who can are tutored, coaxed and coached by parents who are only doing their duty as they help burn out those who they love the most. Mental illness amongst our young people reaches inexorable heights.

This instrumentalism is such a narrow view of what it means to be human and to be educated. That is why the students’ struggle resonates across our country. The students themselves are showing maturity beyond their years. They know this is not just about them and they cannot win any lone concessions on fees without the wider support and consensus. And why would they want to ‘win’ if it means others lose out still further? They understand what solidarity means. That is why campaigns like UK Uncut, which links corporate tax avoidance to the rebalancing of our depleted public finances, is critical both morally and practically. If one company, Arcadia, paid its tax return in full then Higher Education could be securely funded. But they are allowed to escape their responsibility to society while the rest of pay in full. The students know that Educational Maintenance Allowance is critical for hundreds thousands of young people from low income families who now attend Further Education colleges and that cleaners on their campuses should be paid a living wage. Students don’t have to be told that we are all in it together. They know it.

The political class may choose to forget but we don’t; that it was the greed of the banks and the free market regime handed to them by our politicians that tipped the nations finances into crisis.

But the cuts in education and elsewhere cannot be successfully opposed with just a No. Progress demands a vision and then the practical steps towards a better of way of being.

We start from the belief that education cannot just be a debt trap on a learn-to-earn treadmill that we never get off as the retirement age is extended. There is so much more to life than this and we want it for all – not just for some. Education in our good society is a universal public good which all must explore to reach their fullest potential. It is centered on an inter-generational transfer of wealth, in the spirit of Edmund Burke, in which everyone matters.

We recoil at the horror of passing on a world to the next generation that is worse than the one handed to us. This has gone on long enough. What is happening is wrong and we must say so in every legal and peaceful way we can – in parliament, in the media, in the all sites of education and on the streets.

We want to help create an educational sphere where it is the value of learning that matters not its price. It is about the protection and extension of a precious public realm where we know each other not as consumers and competitors but as citizens and cooperators. The driving force of education should be creating the capacity for self-organisation. It is the democratisation of schools and universities in which staff, pupils and communities share with managers the joys and responsibility of reform. We want society to enjoy the annual harvest of enquiring, critical and free minds – not the production of hard, cold and self-interested calculating machines.