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by Joe Llewellyn, August 2010
The measure of any civilised society can be seen in the way it is able to nurture and prepare the next generation. A society that cannot hand over the same living standards and opportunities it has enjoyed is fundamentally flawed. In equal measure securing a prosperous future for the youth is the guarantee of a dignified retirement for the older generation. Yet the crisis of capitalism threatens all of this.
Rising unemployment and attacks on infrastructure, housing, social services and education means increased exposure and lost opportunities for the most vulnerable in society. A whole layer of young people risk being lost in a vicious circle of unemployment and temporary work, of cuts in welfare and declining living standards.
The education system in particular is by no means immune from the effects of the capitalist crisis. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century the idea of well-funded schools, colleges and universities accessible and free to all should not seem like an increasingly distant pipe-dream. Employment upon graduation, without the saddle of massive debt, should be a basic right in any decent society.
Yet in the past few years, full with its economic crises, there have been more and more attacks on an education system already in serious disrepair. Course closures and staff redundancies are being threatened in Universities worldwide.
Traditionally capitalism saw education as a means of training a new labour force. The system determined who were going to be the managers and who were to be the skilled and unskilled workers. In the past, would-be social reformers believed that educating working people was the key to general prosperity, narrowing inequality and even paving the way toward an egalitarian society. However they failed to take into account the class society that exists beyond the four walls of the class room.
A Short History of Fees
Tertiary education was made free to all in 1940 by the labour government. This was introduced because of the pressure of the labour movement and resulted in gains for working people and gave new opportunities to working class people. This reform preceded work from the Labour movement worldwide which at the time wrung a series of concessions from the hands of the ruling class, including the nationalisation of various industry and in the UK, the introduction of the NHS.
Tertiary education remained free until the late 70’s when the national government brought in a $1,500 fee for international students. This was immediately met by protests nation-wide, with students in Canterbury carrying placards which stated – “1979 - $1,500 fees. What comes next?”
They were soon to find out. Just over 40 years after introducing free education Labour abolished it all together. In 1988 they announced an 80% increase on the $80 “administration fee”. The following year, Labour’s current leader Phil Goff, toured the campuses as an education minister carrying the message that the country could no longer afford free tertiary study. This coming just six months after labour gave the rich their biggest tax cut in New Zealand history. He introduced the flat $1250 standard tertiary fee for full-time and full-year students and is responsible for introducing tertiary fees.
The incoming National Government abolished the $1250 flat tuition fee in the 1991 Budget, however allowed tertiary institutions to set their own fees without any government regulation. Most institutions introduced their own flat tuition fee, however over time they introduced differentiated fees for different subject disciplines and levels of study.
In the 1990s, fees rose by an average of 13% per year. The domestic equivalent full-time student (EFTS)-based “bums on seats” funding model was also introduced in the 1991 Budget. As the rate of funding per student decreased, tertiary institutions sort to recover funding decreases by increasing their fee levels. In 2004, economists Scott & Scott reported that funding to universities per EFTS fell by 34.76% (in 2002 prices) from $11,293 in 1980 to $7,367 in 2002. Between 1991 and 2002, EFTS funding fell by 73 percent of university total operating revenue to 42 percent.
Fees have continued to rise in recent years apart from the Labour-Alliance Government’s fee freeze for 2001, 2002 and 2003. Fee rises have been back on the cards for most students following the government introducing the Fee and Course Costs Maxima (FCCM) Policy in the 2003 Budget. Fee maxima levels were announced for 2004, 2005 and 2006, and fee maxima levels for 2007 were announced in the 2006 Budget.
Although the government claims that the fee maxima policy is about maintaining affordable tertiary education, this is far from the case when the policy has resulted in fee increases. The maxima levels announced in the 2003 Budget were all set significantly above the 2003 average fee levels, and the maxima levels for 2007 are 2.5% higher than the 2006 levels.
Under the fee maxima policy tertiary institutions are able to increase fee levels, and most have, by as much as 5% (the Annual Fee Movement Limit) towards the relevant maxima. However, some tertiary institutions have applied to the Tertiary Education Commission for exemptions to the 5% AFML and this has resulted in 10% fee increases for a number of students at a number of institutions.
The 2004 Income and Expenditure Survey revealed that 79% of students agree that fees are too high, while two thirds believe that public tertiary education should be fully funded. However, the fee maxima policy has failed to address and recognize student opposition to the current fees regime.
Total collective debt owed to the New Zealand Student Loan Scheme currently sits above $8 billion and continues to grow, with 60 percent having been borrowed to pay for fees. In 2005 alone, $608.9 million was borrowed from the loan scheme for fees so that students could enrol. More alarming is that since 2000 a whopping $3.4 billion has been borrowed from the loan scheme by students to pay for fees. This is only increasing.
Why should we stand up for free education?
There is a lot more at stake than students not wanting to pay. There is the reality that many students can’t pay and that many are choosing not to attend university because of the huge dept they will acquire. Fees directly affect who gets to go to university.
Fees, as they were pre-1940, are once again beginning to exclude people from low socio-economic backgrounds. School leavers are weighing up the cost of studying against the “benefit” of a degree. In other words – Is it worth living in poverty for at least three years only to spend years more paying off huge student loans?
Until the late 80’s university students were not all middle class. Students whose parents had professional or managerial jobs were over-represented but still a minority. A slim majority of university students, around 52%, had working class parents. From 1991- 2000 university enrolments fell and the people who were now missing out were members of the working class. The majority of students now came from professional or managerial backgrounds. The number of students who identified themselves as Maori decreased dramatically – falling by 28% in three years. For pacific islanders it was worse with a fall of 25% in one year between 1996 and 1997. Students from to poorest schools are much less likely to enrol at university after leaving school than students from the richest.
The explanation of this is simple – Fees. The more they rise the more university become a privilege of the ruling class. Labour and National both justify their attacks by claiming that working class taxes were subsidising the children of the rich and middle class to go to university. But the introduction of user-pays has not helped working class families – it has merely added an extra hurdle on the road to university education. A hurdle the rich can easily jump.
But don’t graduates benefit from their degrees?
University graduates often struggle to find jobs and are not well-paid.
The only ones with starting salaries above the average wage are those with degrees in medicine, veterinary science, technology or forestry. These make up about 5% of graduates. Many students end up doing routine white-collar jobs (skilled workers) on mediocre wages.
A very small minority may gain huge financial benefits from a degree, but all graduates are saddled with crippling costs.
As any recent graduate will tell you, even if education was free and university leavers were not left with a mountain of debt to pay, young people leaving university must still contend with the prospect of finding a job at a time when there is a near universal freeze on graduate recruitment. In the UK, which at the current time has arguably more job opportunities than New Zealand, for every 1 graduate job being advertised today there an average of 48 graduates chasing it. This; combined with the fact that graduates are not only fighting for a smaller number of jobs, but are also competing with more experienced workers who have recently been made unemployed; means that jobs are hard to come by whether or not you have a degree and a degree is not a guaranteed way to find employment and a good wage.
So who does benefit?
The real beneficiary of our Education system is big business. Under capitalism, businesses need a large amount of highly skilled graduates – this is necessary for the economy.
Education has increasingly been organised around the needs of business. Many campuses have dedicated research facilities directly linked to major corporations, not just in New Zealand but worldwide. Universities are being sold to the highest bidder. For example, at Cambridge University, they have a Shell chair in Chemical Engineering; an ICI chair in Applied Thermodynamics; BP professorships in Organic Chemistry and Petroleum Science; a Glaxo chair of Molecular Parasitology; a Unilever chair of Molecular Science; a PriceWaterhouse chair of Financial Accounting and a Marks and Spencer chair of Farm Animal Health and Food Science. In this situation the objectivity of the scientist becomes dependent on the interests of capitalism, and their findings the corporation’s property. Research is directed at where profits are anticipated, not for social need. As the government makes cuts in education in order to finance the deficit created to bail out the banks, the universities will become more dependent on private funding to survive.
Courses that do not fit to drive for profit – such as Russian studies and Design – are being dumped. Yet because of the continuing crisis of profitability within New Zealand capitalism, bosses want to get their new, skilled workers as cheaply as possible.
Government funding of universities has fallen from 97% of campus budgets in 1987 to well under half of the university income today. On the other hand student contributions towards costs have risen from nothing to over 30%. This was the main reason why the government was able to give away $3 billion in tax cuts in the late 90’s – 70% of which went directly to the top fifth of income earners.
“User-pays” shifts the cost of training away from businesses and the rich, who used to pay through taxes, apprenticeships and on-the-job training and onto their future employees.
In the end “user-pays” amounts to making students pay instead of businesses, and results in the blocking of university and polytechnic education for those who cannot afford the cost of an education.
There is plenty of money for war, for hi-tech detention centres, for handouts and tax breaks for the bosses. We pay for all this with cuts to public education, health and welfare.
It's yet another example of the lack of democracy in our society. Polls consistently show that most people want their taxes spent on these fundamental services; even that they'd be prepared to pay a bit more. And the polls and mass demonstrations also showed that a majority opposed war. But our rulers ignore us. The only way we're going to win real gains in these areas is to build a movement that challenges their priorities, and their right to rule.
There should be a return to public funding to ensure that all those who can benefit from higher education should be able to attend. Education should be seen as an investment for life not a profit making activity or something decided by the market place. It is essential for the economy and for people’s individual growth and development.
Many, including the likes of the NZUSA, believe that if labour got into power they would lower fees but all of the evidence suggests otherwise. The situation will only change for the better if students and workers around the world stand up for their rights.
Fighting back
Throughout the world there is a general attack taking place against education in the form of course cuts, cuts in student service and staff redundancies and increasing fees. This is part of the broader picture of deficits running across the whole of the public sector. The question must be asked: why should students and staff pay for the economic crisis not of their making with job losses and education cuts?
This is a crisis of capitalism – a classic capitalist crisis of overproduction as described by Marx more than 100 years ago. The crisis has been worsened by an over-extension of credit over the last period. This gave capitalism a temporary breathing space after the crises of the 1970s and 80s, at the cost of eventually a deeper and more severe crisis. Today we have entered a new period of austerity and crisis. This is the type of crisis described by Marx over 150 years ago.
Rather than staff redundancies, investment in more university staff is clearly required in order to boost standards. Yet this does not fall under the logic of capitalism.
All around the world, and especially in Europe, students have been standing up for their rights and fighting back.
Recent struggles at the London College of Communication, where students have gone into occupation as part of a campaign to oppose planned cuts, show that students are already beginning to fight back against the increasing threat of funding cuts, whilst the strikes at the University of Westminster by the University and Colleges Union (UCU) indicate that students are not alone in their fight for free and improved education. This follows on from large student protests and mass demonstrations and occupations taking place in universities across Austria and Greece.
There are many examples of students in New Zealand standing up before, such as the occupations in Otago in 1996 and the campus struggles in 1999, but in the last ten years, not helped by the weakness and ineffectiveness of the majority of student unions, they have failed to take any definitive action. This allows big business to walk all over them. There has to be a realisation that it is not the lecturers and heads of department that are to blame but the management. Lectures and students must stand up together against all cuts and fee rises in order to be at all effective and not risk putting there education at risk.
There should be a return to public funding to ensure that all those who can benefit from higher education should be able to attend. Education should be seen as an investment for life not a profit making activity or something decided by the market place.
The majority of students have to work to survive and as a result their education is impaired.
In our current university system, rather than producing enlightened, well-educated young adults with independent opinions and beliefs, the system encourages a culture of jumping through the hoops of the examination board and intellectual prostration to the lecturer, ultimately preparing subservient young workers in the marketplace.
When any new western government comes into power it does so preaching the mantra ‘Education, Education, Education!’ For the majority of people who enter the education system, whether they are now looking for work or are planning to continue their studies, they are faced with a system in crisis.
The whole situation demands that students struggle with workers nationally and internationally to resist the attacks and prepare the way to overthrow capitalism and transform society. The recent university and factory occupations throughout Europe and the rest of the world, show that this is possible if we adopt the right strategy and tactics. Ultimately, the struggle for this movement lies within the student unions, the workers organisations, the trade unions and the party they could create. It is the mass of the students and workers that will transform and reclaim their organisations and then change the way the system can be run.
The present crisis of capitalism has destroyed the ruling classes’ capacity to develop education in the interests of the mass of workers and young people. The present generation are the best educated job-seekers in history.
The ultimate goal of education should be the improvements in science and technique and with that the increased leisure time available for the mass of the population to participate in and further the development of art, literature, philosophy and the many other cultural achievements of mankind. However under capitalism the discoveries of science are not used to further the cause of the human race, but to lay-off worker and replace them with machinery and develop ever more devastating weapons of warfare.
Tom Mann, in fighting for an eight hour day in 1891 said: “…the demands we, as workmen, now make, is for leisure to think, to learn, to acquire knowledge, to enjoy, to develop; in short, leisure to live.”
Under socialism, with society under the democratic control of working people, the vision of Tom Mann, one of the founders of the organised labour movement, could become a reality. Education could become a life-long process; a tool to eliminate ignorance and raise the aspirations and dignity of humankind to newer heights.
The only way to achieve this is through the unity of the working class - students and workers alike- as they have started to do before.
Join the International Socialists.
What we demand:
Big business out of education! Break the control of big business over education. Replace it with representatives of students, teachers and the labour movement.
No course closures.
No redundancies. Reduce class sizes at schools and universities – invest in staff.
No attacks on services – student support, nursery and day care facilities must be maintained and expanded.
Abolish all student debt, giving graduates a decent start to life.
The immediate abolition of all student fees and the introduction of decent a living grant for all students.
The right to work! For real employment or decent benefits upon graduation.
No to temporary or unpaid “training” jobs – young people want paid, permanent work!
A massive expansion of training schemes and apprenticeships under trade union control.
(CONTRADICTS NZUSA - NZUSA and students all around the country have an expectation that Labour will keep its promise of lowering fees. Bringing down the cost and removing user pays in public tertiary education will benefit the whole community by encouraging people into tertiary education and keeping them out of high levels of student debt.)
(coal, steel and the railways in Britain)Fees and Education
by Joe Llewellyn, August 2010
The measure of any civilised society can be seen in the way it is able to nurture and prepare the next generation. A society that cannot hand over the same living standards and opportunities it has enjoyed is fundamentally flawed.
In equal measure securing a prosperous future for the youth is the guarantee of a dignified retirement for the older generation. Yet the crisis of capitalism threatens all of this. Rising unemployment and attacks on infrastructure, housing, social services and education means increased exposure and lost opportunities for the most vulnerable in society. A whole layer of young people risk being lost in a vicious circle of unemployment and temporary work, of cuts in welfare and declining living standards.
The education system in particular is by no means immune from the effects of the capitalist crisis. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century the idea of well-funded schools, colleges and universities accessible and free to all should not seem like an increasingly distant pipe-dream. Employment upon graduation, without the saddle of massive debt, should be a basic right in any decent society.
Yet in the past few years, full with its economic crises, there have been more and more attacks on an education system already in serious disrepair. Course closures and staff redundancies are being threatened in Universities worldwide.
Traditionally capitalism saw education as a means of training a new labour force. The system determined who were going to be the managers and who were to be the skilled and unskilled workers. In the past, would-be social reformers believed that educating working people was the key to general prosperity, narrowing inequality and even paving the way toward an egalitarian society. However they failed to take into account the class society that exists beyond the four walls of the class room.
A Short History of Fees
Tertiary education was made free to all in 1940 by the labour government. This was introduced because of the pressure of the labour movement and resulted in gains for working people and gave new opportunities to working class people. This reform preceded work from the Labour movement worldwide which at the time wrung a series of concessions from the hands of the ruling class, including the nationalisation of various industry and in the UK, the introduction of the NHS.
Tertiary education remained free until the late 70’s when the national government brought in a $1,500 fee for international students. This was immediately met by protests nation-wide, with students in Canterbury carrying placards which stated – “1979 - $1,500 fees. What comes next?”
They were soon to find out. Just over 40 years after introducing free education Labour abolished it all together. In 1988 they announced an 80% increase on the $80 “administration fee”. The following year, Labour’s current leader Phil Goff, toured the campuses as an education minister carrying the message that the country could no longer afford free tertiary study. This coming just six months after labour gave the rich their biggest tax cut in New Zealand history. He introduced the flat $1250 standard tertiary fee for full-time and full-year students and is responsible for introducing tertiary fees.
The incoming National Government abolished the $1250 flat tuition fee in the 1991 Budget, however allowed tertiary institutions to set their own fees without any government regulation. Most institutions introduced their own flat tuition fee, however over time they introduced differentiated fees for different subject disciplines and levels of study.
In the 1990s, fees rose by an average of 13% per year. The domestic equivalent full-time student (EFTS)-based “bums on seats” funding model was also introduced in the 1991 Budget. As the rate of funding per student decreased, tertiary institutions sort to recover funding decreases by increasing their fee levels. In 2004, economists Scott & Scott reported that funding to universities per EFTS fell by 34.76% (in 2002 prices) from $11,293 in 1980 to $7,367 in 2002. Between 1991 and 2002, EFTS funding fell by 73 percent of university total operating revenue to 42 percent.
Fees have continued to rise in recent years apart from the Labour-Alliance Government’s fee freeze for 2001, 2002 and 2003. Fee rises have been back on the cards for most students following the government introducing the Fee and Course Costs Maxima (FCCM) Policy in the 2003 Budget. Fee maxima levels were announced for 2004, 2005 and 2006, and fee maxima levels for 2007 were announced in the 2006 Budget.
Although the government claims that the fee maxima policy is about maintaining affordable tertiary education, this is far from the case when the policy has resulted in fee increases. The maxima levels announced in the 2003 Budget were all set significantly above the 2003 average fee levels, and the maxima levels for 2007 are 2.5% higher than the 2006 levels.
Under the fee maxima policy tertiary institutions are able to increase fee levels, and most have, by as much as 5% (the Annual Fee Movement Limit) towards the relevant maxima. However, some tertiary institutions have applied to the Tertiary Education Commission for exemptions to the 5% AFML and this has resulted in 10% fee increases for a number of students at a number of institutions.
The 2004 Income and Expenditure Survey revealed that 79% of students agree that fees are too high, while two thirds believe that public tertiary education should be fully funded. However, the fee maxima policy has failed to address and recognize student opposition to the current fees regime.
Total collective debt owed to the New Zealand Student Loan Scheme currently sits above $8 billion and continues to grow, with 60 percent having been borrowed to pay for fees. In 2005 alone, $608.9 million was borrowed from the loan scheme for fees so that students could enrol. More alarming is that since 2000 a whopping $3.4 billion has been borrowed from the loan scheme by students to pay for fees. This is only increasing.
Why should we stand up for free education?
There is a lot more at stake than students not wanting to pay. There is the reality that many students can’t pay and that many are choosing not to attend university because of the huge dept they will acquire. Fees directly affect who gets to go to university.
Fees, as they were pre-1940, are once again beginning to exclude people from low socio-economic backgrounds. School leavers are weighing up the cost of studying against the “benefit” of a degree. In other words – Is it worth living in poverty for at least three years only to spend years more paying off huge student loans?
Until the late 80’s university students were not all middle class. Students whose parents had professional or managerial jobs were over-represented but still a minority. A slim majority of university students, around 52%, had working class parents. From 1991- 2000 university enrolments fell and the people who were now missing out were members of the working class. The majority of students now came from professional or managerial backgrounds. The number of students who identified themselves as Maori decreased dramatically – falling by 28% in three years. For pacific islanders it was worse with a fall of 25% in one year between 1996 and 1997. Students from to poorest schools are much less likely to enrol at university after leaving school than students from the richest.
The explanation of this is simple – Fees. The more they rise the more university become a privilege of the ruling class. Labour and National both justify their attacks by claiming that working class taxes were subsidising the children of the rich and middle class to go to university. But the introduction of user-pays has not helped working class families – it has merely added an extra hurdle on the road to university education. A hurdle the rich can easily jump.
But don’t graduates benefit from their degrees?
University graduates often struggle to find jobs and are not well-paid.
The only ones with starting salaries above the average wage are those with degrees in medicine, veterinary science, technology or forestry. These make up about 5% of graduates. Many students end up doing routine white-collar jobs (skilled workers) on mediocre wages.
A very small minority may gain huge financial benefits from a degree, but all graduates are saddled with crippling costs.
As any recent graduate will tell you, even if education was free and university leavers were not left with a mountain of debt to pay, young people leaving university must still contend with the prospect of finding a job at a time when there is a near universal freeze on graduate recruitment. In the UK, which at the current time has arguably more job opportunities than New Zealand, for every 1 graduate job being advertised today there an average of 48 graduates chasing it. This; combined with the fact that graduates are not only fighting for a smaller number of jobs, but are also competing with more experienced workers who have recently been made unemployed; means that jobs are hard to come by whether or not you have a degree and a degree is not a guaranteed way to find employment and a good wage.
So who does benefit?
The real beneficiary of our Education system is big business. Under capitalism, businesses need a large amount of highly skilled graduates – this is necessary for the economy.
Education has increasingly been organised around the needs of business. Many campuses have dedicated research facilities directly linked to major corporations, not just in New Zealand but worldwide. Universities are being sold to the highest bidder. For example, at Cambridge University, they have a Shell chair in Chemical Engineering; an ICI chair in Applied Thermodynamics; BP professorships in Organic Chemistry and Petroleum Science; a Glaxo chair of Molecular Parasitology; a Unilever chair of Molecular Science; a PriceWaterhouse chair of Financial Accounting and a Marks and Spencer chair of Farm Animal Health and Food Science. In this situation the objectivity of the scientist becomes dependent on the interests of capitalism, and their findings the corporation’s property. Research is directed at where profits are anticipated, not for social need. As the government makes cuts in education in order to finance the deficit created to bail out the banks, the universities will become more dependent on private funding to survive.
Courses that do not fit to drive for profit – such as Russian studies and Design – are being dumped. Yet because of the continuing crisis of profitability within New Zealand capitalism, bosses want to get their new, skilled workers as cheaply as possible.
Government funding of universities has fallen from 97% of campus budgets in 1987 to well under half of the university income today. On the other hand student contributions towards costs have risen from nothing to over 30%. This was the main reason why the government was able to give away $3 billion in tax cuts in the late 90’s – 70% of which went directly to the top fifth of income earners.
“User-pays” shifts the cost of training away from businesses and the rich, who used to pay through taxes, apprenticeships and on-the-job training and onto their future employees.
In the end “user-pays” amounts to making students pay instead of businesses, and results in the blocking of university and polytechnic education for those who cannot afford the cost of an education.
There is plenty of money for war, for hi-tech detention centres, for handouts and tax breaks for the bosses. We pay for all this with cuts to public education, health and welfare.
It's yet another example of the lack of democracy in our society. Polls consistently show that most people want their taxes spent on these fundamental services; even that they'd be prepared to pay a bit more. And the polls and mass demonstrations also showed that a majority opposed war. But our rulers ignore us. The only way we're going to win real gains in these areas is to build a movement that challenges their priorities, and their right to rule.
There should be a return to public funding to ensure that all those who can benefit from higher education should be able to attend. Education should be seen as an investment for life not a profit making activity or something decided by the market place. It is essential for the economy and for people’s individual growth and development.
Many, including the likes of the NZUSA, believe that if labour got into power they would lower fees but all of the evidence suggests otherwise. The situation will only change for the better if students and workers around the world stand up for their rights.
Fighting back
Throughout the world there is a general attack taking place against education in the form of course cuts, cuts in student service and staff redundancies and increasing fees. This is part of the broader picture of deficits running across the whole of the public sector. The question must be asked: why should students and staff pay for the economic crisis not of their making with job losses and education cuts?
This is a crisis of capitalism – a classic capitalist crisis of overproduction as described by Marx more than 100 years ago. The crisis has been worsened by an over-extension of credit over the last period. This gave capitalism a temporary breathing space after the crises of the 1970s and 80s, at the cost of eventually a deeper and more severe crisis. Today we have entered a new period of austerity and crisis. This is the type of crisis described by Marx over 150 years ago.
Rather than staff redundancies, investment in more university staff is clearly required in order to boost standards. Yet this does not fall under the logic of capitalism.
All around the world, and especially in Europe, students have been standing up for their rights and fighting back.
Recent struggles at the London College of Communication, where students have gone into occupation as part of a campaign to oppose planned cuts, show that students are already beginning to fight back against the increasing threat of funding cuts, whilst the strikes at the University of Westminster by the University and Colleges Union (UCU) indicate that students are not alone in their fight for free and improved education. This follows on from large student protests and mass demonstrations and occupations taking place in universities across Austria and Greece.
There are many examples of students in New Zealand standing up before, such as the occupations in Otago in 1996 and the campus struggles in 1999, but in the last ten years, not helped by the weakness and ineffectiveness of the majority of student unions, they have failed to take any definitive action. This allows big business to walk all over them. There has to be a realisation that it is not the lecturers and heads of department that are to blame but the management. Lectures and students must stand up together against all cuts and fee rises in order to be at all effective and not risk putting there education at risk.
There should be a return to public funding to ensure that all those who can benefit from higher education should be able to attend. Education should be seen as an investment for life not a profit making activity or something decided by the market place.
The majority of students have to work to survive and as a result their education is impaired.
In our current university system, rather than producing enlightened, well-educated young adults with independent opinions and beliefs, the system encourages a culture of jumping through the hoops of the examination board and intellectual prostration to the lecturer, ultimately preparing subservient young workers in the marketplace.
When any new western government comes into power it does so preaching the mantra ‘Education, Education, Education!’ For the majority of people who enter the education system, whether they are now looking for work or are planning to continue their studies, they are faced with a system in crisis.
The whole situation demands that students struggle with workers nationally and internationally to resist the attacks and prepare the way to overthrow capitalism and transform society. The recent university and factory occupations throughout Europe and the rest of the world, show that this is possible if we adopt the right strategy and tactics. Ultimately, the struggle for this movement lies within the student unions, the workers organisations, the trade unions and the party they could create. It is the mass of the students and workers that will transform and reclaim their organisations and then change the way the system can be run.
The present crisis of capitalism has destroyed the ruling classes’ capacity to develop education in the interests of the mass of workers and young people. The present generation are the best educated job-seekers in history.
The ultimate goal of education should be the improvements in science and technique and with that the increased leisure time available for the mass of the population to participate in and further the development of art, literature, philosophy and the many other cultural achievements of mankind. However under capitalism the discoveries of science are not used to further the cause of the human race, but to lay-off worker and replace them with machinery and develop ever more devastating weapons of warfare.
Tom Mann, in fighting for an eight hour day in 1891 said: “…the demands we, as workmen, now make, is for leisure to think, to learn, to acquire knowledge, to enjoy, to develop; in short, leisure to live.”
Under socialism, with society under the democratic control of working people, the vision of Tom Mann, one of the founders of the organised labour movement, could become a reality. Education could become a life-long process; a tool to eliminate ignorance and raise the aspirations and dignity of humankind to newer heights.
The only way to achieve this is through the unity of the working class - students and workers alike- as they have started to do before.
Join the International Socialists.
What we demand:
Big business out of education! Break the control of big business over education. Replace it with representatives of students, teachers and the labour movement.
No course closures.
No redundancies. Reduce class sizes at schools and universities – invest in staff.
No attacks on services – student support, nursery and day care facilities must be maintained and expanded.
Abolish all student debt, giving graduates a decent start to life.
The immediate abolition of all student fees and the introduction of decent a living grant for all students.
The right to work! For real employment or decent benefits upon graduation.
No to temporary or unpaid “training” jobs – young people want paid, permanent work!
A massive expansion of training schemes and apprenticeships under trade union control.
levels of student debt.)
(coal, steel and the railways in Britain) |
