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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