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Compass: Education is for people not profit. PLEASE SIGN!!



Up and down the country innovative campaigns have sprung up to oppose the government’s education reforms. Last night’s vote to increase fees for university students up to £9000 will turn Higher Education into a market. It reflects the wider commercialisation of our education system must be strongly opposed at every opportunity. Instead we need to see education and other public services democratise. So today we have a letter published in The Guardian aimed at uniting all groups of campaigners.

The widespread anger over higher education fees is the first step in what inevitably starts as a defensive campaign. First we fight to protect what we have. But soon, through the process of struggle, wider fissures opened up. For the sudden eruption of protests and anger on campuses and city streets has been reaching boiling point for some time. Because this isn’t just about fees, but about the final transformation of our education system from a public into a private good.

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.

Education is ultimately about how we learn to live together – not why we fall apart.

Neal Lawson Chair of Compass

Brendan Barber* General secretary of TUC

Aaron Porter President of NUS

Sally Hunt* General secretary of UCU

Christine Blower General secretary of NUT

Len McCluskey Unite general secretary designate

Tony Woodley Joint general secretary of Unite

Dave Prentis General secretary of Unison

SOAS Occupation

King’s College Occupation

Tremough Occupation

Save EMA Campaign

Caroline Lucas Green party MP for Brighton Pavilion

Jon Cruddas Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham

Councillor Sam Tarry Chair of Young Labour

Professor Richard Grayson Goldsmiths, University of London, and former Liberal Democrat candidate

Gavin Hayes General secretary, Compass

Joe Cox Campaigns organiser, Compass

Cat Smith Chair of Compass Youth

Lisa Nandy Labour MP for Wigan

Eric Illsley Labour MP for Barnsley Central

Bill Esterson Labour MP for Sefton Central

Katy Clark Labour MP for North Ayrshire and Arran

Cllr Rupert Read Green party

Cllr Willie Sullivan Labour party

Sian Berry Former Green candidate for London mayor

Adam Ramsay No Shock Doctrine for Britain

Zita Holbourne Joint chair, Black Activists Rising Against Cuts

Lee Jasper Joint chair, Black Activists Rising Against Cuts

Richard Murphy Tax Research LLP

Clifford Singer False Economy

Sunny Hundal Editor, Liberal Conspiracy:

Howard Reed Director, Landman Economics

Martin Dore General secretary, Socialist Educational Association

Anthony Barnett Founder, openDemocracy

Dr Alan Finlayson Swansea University

Jonathan Glennie Research fellow, Overseas Development Institute

Dr Jeremy Gilbert UEL

Prof Ruth Lister Loughborough University

Prof Stefano Harney QMUL

Prof Martin Parker Warwick Business School

Prof Malcolm Sawyer University of Leeds

Prof Prem Sikka University of Essex

Prof Peter Case UWE

Prof Gregor Gall University of Hertfordshire

Prof Christine Cooper University of Strathclyde

Svetlana Cicmil UWE

Fabian Frenzel UWE

Dr Steffen Boehm University of Essex

Dr Paul Warde UEA

Dr Lee Marsden UEA

Prof Howard Stevenson University of Lincoln

Prof Michael Fielding Institute of Education

Dr David Toke University of Birmingham

Yiannis Gabriel University of Bath

Prof George Irvin SOAS

Armin Beverungen UWE

Dr David Cunningham University of Westminster

Stevphen Shukaitis University of Essex

Kevin Brehony Royal Holloway

Gabrielle Ivinson Cardiff University

Dr Michael Collins UCL

Pat Devine University of Manchester

Dr Joe Street Northumbria University

Judith Suissa Institute of Education

Jonathan Perraton University of Sheffield

Jo Brewis University of Leicester

Stephen Dunne University of Leicester

Jo Grady University of Leicester

Dr Marie Lall Institute of Education

Anoop Bhogal University of Leicester

Stuart White Jesus College, Oxford

Dr Chris Grocott University of Birmingham

Mark Perryman University of Brighton

Prof David Parker University of Leeds

Prof Ken Spours Institute of Education

Chris Edwards UEA

Nicola Pratt University of Warwick

Dr David Harvie University of Leicester

Dr Priyamvada Gopal University of Cambridge

Michael Edwards UCL

Dr Ben Little Middlesex University

Hugh Willmott Cardiff Business School

Dr Gareth Stockey University of Nottingham

Prof William Outhwaite University of Newcastle

Matthew McGregor Student officer, Sheffield University 2001-02

Prof Simon Lilley University of Leicester

Katherine Corbett Middlesex University SU arts and education chair

Dr A Kemp-Welch UEA

Graham Lane Former chair of LGA education committee

Prof Robert Hampson

Prof Sally Tomlinson

David Ritter

Laurie Penny

Anne Coddington

Rebecca Hickman

Martin Yarnit

Byron Taylor

Nick Dearden

Victor Anderson

Rosemary Bechler

Dan Taubman

* Indicates that this person signed the short version of the letter that appears in today’s Guardian only

To Sign the Statement Click Here

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