Universities Challenged (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Government White Paper on Higher Education (HE) entitled ‘Students At the Heart of the System’ has created controversy since its publication in the summer. As the new academic year begins, we take a look at its likely impact.

The White Paper is to form the basis for a new Higher Education Bill in 2012, after the current consultation period ends in a few weeks time. In truth it is the latest in a rather long line of papers and reports setting out a future for HE in the UK since the 1960s. In particular, it follows in the footsteps of the Robbins Report of 1963, the Dearing Report in 1997 and then – most recently of all – the Browne Report of 2010 commissioned by the Labour Government.

During this time, HE in the UK has seen developments that have been similar to those affecting university sectors in many other parts of the world. In particular, there has been a massive expansion in student numbers  – impelled by, among other factors, the conversion of former polytechnics and colleges of HE into what are sometimes termed the ‘post-1992 universities’ and the increased government funding that then allowed them to rapidly expand. There has also been a significant expansion in vocational HE beyond traditional areas of engagement like teaching, law and the ministry. This has been reflected in the growth of what some have considered to be more esoteric subjects like sports management and herbal medicine, and particularly in the development of Business Schools, which only grew to be of any significance in the UK in the 1980s but which are now commonly one of the biggest discipline areas in universities of all kinds.

Unsustainable

The previous Labour government famously set a target of 50 percent of school leavers going on to study at university and while this has never been reached, decent enough progress was nevertheless made, prompting some to complain of a ‘dumbing down’ of entry standards. In 1955 less than 5 per cent of school leavers went on to study in HE, a proportion that had risen to 12 per cent by 1980, to 19 per cent in 1990 and then to over 35 per cent for most of the years in the last decade.

This growth, like many things in the market economy, has happened for a reason. As capitalism has developed and its operations have become more sophisticated, the working class of wage and salary earners who operationally run capitalism from top to bottom have needed to have a different and often more developed set of skills than was required, say, a hundred years ago. While the economy of course still needs production workers, miners and other manual and physically skilled staff, capitalism has developed a vast administrative apparatus around buying and selling, the service economy and the state sector which is needed to ensure that this all runs smoothly.

Figures from the Office of National Statistics have shown that the percentage of workers in the UK employed in manufacturing and construction fell from around a third in 1983 to just under 20 per cent in recent years, confirming a long-term trend. At the same time there has been a significant growth in the service sector, in particular. This has necessitated government encouragement for more young people to seek out the type of education and skills supposedly provided by a university education. The problem has been that in doing this, the government has created a huge amount of additional expenditure to be funded out of general taxation, and as we have seen on a range of fronts in recent times, state expenditure tends to have its limits – especially as the burden of taxation has ultimately to fall on the profit-generating sectors of the economy (i.e. the private sector).

As more and more students have entered HE the cost of their tuition as well as contributions towards their living costs have become too burdensome for the state. This has over the last two decades led to periodic attacks on what many students of earlier generations took for granted. These attacks have included the removal of the right for students unemployed during the holiday periods to claim benefits for this, through to the full-scale assaults on the student grant system and the highly controversial introduction of tuition fees (with students loans to pay for them) mooted under John Major’s Tory government but carried out by Labour under Blair.

In this respect, the Government White Paper is but the latest in a long line of initiatives with a common thread and a common purpose.

Main features

There are several aspects to what is proposed currently and little if any of it is genuinely new. Indeed, what is most striking about it is how it usually develops existing approaches or applies other approaches already implemented by government in other fields. The main features of the proposals in this respect are these.

• Increase debt and reduce (or disguise) the burden on taxation. This is a continuation of what occurred under Blair and Brown when tuition fees and student loans were introduced.  The approach this time is more radical (if radical be the right word) as tuition fees will rise hugely from £3,375 to between £6,000 and 9,000 a year, depending on institution. This is to make up for the fact that in England at least (Wales and Scotland will stick to variations on their existing systems for now), the funding that government gives to support student tuition is to be removed almost completely. This will happen to all subjects except those already in receipt of higher levels of subsidy from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) because of their elevated cost levels e.g. science subjects, medicine and engineering. To achieve this change, a modification of the student loan system is to be introduced whereby those earning over £21,000 after graduation will begin to pay back their loan through the taxation system with interest charged at RPI plus 3 per cent. In many respects, this is becoming ever more like a disguised graduate tax, with the advantage for the government that those leaving the country after they graduate will still have to pay it back. Like most taxes – whether disguised or not – it  will eventually mean that wages will have to rise, other things being equal, so that people can pay it, in this way cutting into employer’s profits in an indirect and more subtle way.  Furthermore, the attitude of government to the huge (and about to become even bigger) student loan book is also revealing, as they estimate that the amount borrowers will be liable to repay will have risen to £70 billion by 2016-7. Few seemed to have noticed that the government has just asked Rothschilds to develop a plan for ‘how to monetise the loan book’ including ‘selling [the loans] outright to financial investors, or selling loans to one or more regulated companies set up to manage the loans’ (White Paper, p.24). Clearly the recent financial crisis and its causes has been forgotten already.
• Outsource/privatise where possible, introducing ‘competition’. Until recently, the only private-sector university in Britain was the University of Buckingham, though now BPP University College of Professional Studies (owned by the Apollo private equity group) has acquired taught degree awarding powers and others are lining themselves up to be granted university status. This is in part an attempt to provide competition so that existing universities don’t all charge fees at the higher end of the permitted range (as most are proposing to do at present) while being a philosophical nod in the direction of ‘free markets’. The main problem here is that fears about the quality of academic provision declining in these circumstances have some substance. The proliferation of so-called ‘degree mills’ in countries like the US and Canada has long been an issue (where students can effectively buy a degree) and the largest private university in the world by most counts, Phoenix University, Arizona, has seen its applications plummet in the last two years because it has been subject to legal action by no less than 10 Attorney-Generals in different states over its ‘deceptive practices’. Coincidentally, and perhaps unfortunately, it is also owned by the Apollo private equity group.
• Increase links between the universities and the private sector, binding the two ever closer together. Again, this has been happening for years and it is standard practice for universities to check when they are validating new courses that they meet the needs of relevant employers. However, the government is concerned by the recent decline in ‘sandwich years’ for students with business and in internships, and wants to see these encouraged. It also wants to see the links between research and private business developed and commercial opportunities exploited to the full. Interestingly, postgraduate courses already receive little by way of HEFCE funding and have had higher fees to make up the difference as it has long been assumed that much postgraduate study is sponsored by employers (something the government would like to see extended to undergraduate study too, wherever possible).
• Target state support rather than universalise it. Student grants to help with living costs will be targeted at the poorest families only and the old education maintenance allowance for 16-19 year olds studying before they get to university is to be abolished on the grounds of cost. Similarly, HEFCE funding is only likely to remain for those high-cost courses that students couldn’t otherwise pay for themselves out of their loans, and which employers would be reluctant to sponsor as this wouldn’t be appropriate or they would be too expensive, such as medicine, veterinary science, etc.
• Set up a complex regulatory framework to oversee it all. The Browne Report had recommended uniting HEFCE, the Quality Assurance Agency for HE (the university academic quality watchdog) and two other related bodies into the one organisation dealing with the oversight of HE. This will not happen now, and the complexity of the proposals, the loans, the targeting and the new entrants to university status means that the regulators will clearly have their work cut out.

The devil is in the detail

The details of much of this could change and probably will, but the general trajectory is clear: a business-led HE sector; an expansion of vocational courses; students in debt for most of their lives, wedded to wage-slavery just to pay off their loans (and that before any consideration of mortgages and likely personal debt). As there are over 120 universities currently in the UK it is likely that some will go bust (and the government has explicitly stated that it will not ‘underwrite’ the finances of the existing HE providers), especially given the likely falling away of full-time student numbers consequent on higher fees. And the drive for ‘efficiency’ in the HE sector will be pushed ever harder, with the government setting up the Diamond Review into how universities can be run more efficiently (if this doesn’t entail recommending that universities ‘outsource’ much of their central services like Finance and Human Resources it will be a surprise).

The most obvious and predictable effect of these changes is likely to be a move away from full-time HE by 18-21 year olds, reversing the decades-old trend for more school-leavers to go to university. The precise extent of this is likely to depend on the buoyancy or otherwise of the job market, with those who can often choosing employment and relevant training over university and a lifetime of debt. It is also not difficult to predict a rise in the coming years of students studying part-time and flexibly alongside their employment, in many cases linking one to the other through programmes of negotiated work-based learning, for instance (another one of the growth areas in HE in recent times) where people receive academic reward for their personal learning in and through the workplace.

A sane society

It is clear that many potential students have already been put off university for life. But of course, as the old saying goes, it doesn’t have to be like this. Education should be available for those needing it and people shouldn’t expect to have to commit themselves to a lifetime of drudgery to pay for it either. Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with studying a subject like history or art simply because you are interested in it, but this has become more difficult in recent years and will now be more difficult still as pressures from business and through the job market dictate that students have to study what will make them employable.

Nevertheless, one of the more interesting developments in the last ten years or so has been the whittling away of some of the old snobbishness and elitism that has existed in universities across the country. An unintended consequence of the rise in vocationally-oriented courses has been that some have discovered that what is often called the ‘knowledge capital’ of society exists mainly outside the Ivory Towers. To many professors this is a frightening concept that challenges their very legitimacy as ‘the experts’. But experiential learning – that is learning by doing, typically in the workplace – has started to come into its own, along with reflection on how people work and learn together this way. The deliberate division between learning passively in a seminar room or lecture theatre and learning through doing has sometimes been necessary but when reinforced systematically as has been the case in HE until recently it became a strangely lopsided way for an education system to operate – the ‘University of Life’ is indeed a valuable and important place and universities were in denial about it for quite some time. Stripped of the functionalism required by employers and the market, this could be a useful educational development.

We can certainly add to this that a co-operative society of the future would seek to ensure that a university education would be genuinely meaningful – not just for the participants but for society as a whole, being finally freed from the narrow constraints of the market and money, loans and liabilities. Situated within a society of common ownership and with common purposes for the dissemination of wealth and happiness it could indeed, finally, be part of a rounded University of Life.

Dave Perrin

Greasy Pole: Postman’s knock? (2006)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Devotees of conspiracy theories could be excused for descrying some determined backroom manoeuvring to ensure so swift a climb up the Greasy Pole”

The next time a flood of junk mail and red-printed bills comes through the front door do not, as it were, wish you could kill the messenger. Be aware that the friendly local postie may one day be Prime Minister of Great Britain or, even more distressingly, Leader of the Labour Party. Such an event may be heartening to anyone who is sustained by a conviction that this is a great land of opportunity and that capitalism is the finest arrangement of affairs as it allows anyone, no matter how humble their origins, to rise by their own abilities up to the highest  points in society where they can look down on those whose mail they once delivered.

For example there is Alan Johnson, whose mother died when he was 12, four years after his father had abandoned the family. It looked as if he would be placed in a children’s home but his sister, although only 15, persuaded their social worker that she could care for both of them. Living where the Westway flyover now belches noise and fumes, Johnson went to a local grammar school where he did not get his name onto the varnished honours board; in fact he says the school were “glad to see the back” of him. He took a job as a shelf-filler at Tescos but a problem about his lunch break put an end to that; he already had a child so he moved to Slough, to work as a postman. That led to him being elected as a local trade union official.

A long time after life in a council house under the Westway and then in John Betjeman’s favourite Buckinghamshire town he won a seat in the House of Commons. A few minor ministerial jobs developed into a place in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education. At this year’s Labour Party conference, among the pushing and shoving, the arm twisting and back stabbing, Johnson was spoken of as a challenger for the Leadership but he seemed to lose his appetite for the job – in spite of setting up websites with names like Johnson4leader.com.

Conspiracy?

Devotees of conspiracy theories could be excused for descrying some determined backroom manoeuvring to ensure so swift a climb up the Greasy Pole. Johnson’s constituency – Hull East and Hessle – was previously held by Stuart Randall, who had started out as an apprentice electrician before blossoming into a computer expert – which did not prevent a parliamentary journalist describing him as “nondescript”. Randall resigned from the Commons in 1997, allowing Johnson to take over a rock solid  Labour majority and Randall to be shuffled off to the House of Lords.

Then there was the matter of Johnson’s promotion in September 2004 to his first Cabinet job, as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (where he could start work on harassing Incapacity Benefit claimants back to work). The previous occupant of this job was Andrew Smith, who obligingly decided that he needed to spend more time with his family and with his constituency of Oxford East.

Perhaps he was alarmed by the slashing of his 2001 majority of over 10,000 votes down to 963 in 2005. And perhaps Johnson’s promotion in Smith’s place was not unconnected with the fact that, before he got into Parliament, he had been the only member of Labour’s NEC to support the new Leader Blair in his determination to get rid of Clause Four.

Tuition Fees

Like many New Labour leaders, Johnson shows some embarrassment about his past, about those carefree days in opposition when a budding politician could say almost anything, join almost any organisation, provided it seemed radical and exciting. Interviewed in the Observer Magazine (17 September), he insisted that “the first thing about me is I was never a Trot, or a semi-Trot. I was never, ever a Trot.” But he did not then go on to admit that he was once a branch official in the Communist Party.

Of course he has put all that nonsense behind him now that he is in the serious business of  government. His record of support for Blair is unblemished – so pure that when he was the Minister of State for Further and Higher Education under Charles Clarke he played what Tony Blair later described as “a vital role in the successful introduction of variable tuition fees during the last parliament”.

This mannered praise refers to the fierce battle the government had to endure before they were able to bludgeon the measure through Parliament. In that conflict Johnson’s smooth negotiating talents were crucial alongside Clarke’s belligerence. It was, Johnson said, “. . . a charm offensive. I was the charm and Clarke was offensive”.

This joke may not have gone down well with students and their families who struggle through the time at university and then emerge with the right to wear an academic gown and to pay off a substantial debt. Johnson offers this as justification for his attitude: “If I thought it was going to damage working-class kids, I wouldn’t have backed it”.

Another way of putting this feebly circular case would be to argue that the very fact he had backed the tuition fees must mean that they did not damage anyone; it is a style often used by Tony Blair to justify indefensible actions such as the war in Iraq. In any case Johnson’s attitude is rather at variance with his account of how his daughter was treated by the education system. In an area which still had grammar schools she failed her 11 Plus and was placed in a comprehensive school: “She was very bright but, well, probably life chances were lost then…So am I bitter about selection? Yes. I’ve seen what it does to kids”. But he does not seem to be “bitter” about his support for the proposals to set up “trust” schools which, however words are twisted and whatever promises are made, are intended to operate selection policies which can cost the pupils “life chances”.

Claptrap

On other issues Johnson has solidly supported the government – on ID cards, the war in Iraq, foundation hospitals, the “anti-terrorism” laws. And there will be many more examples, as he strives to promote his career through expressed loyalty to the government.

When he was appointed Secretary of State for Education, the postie who delivers the mail to his office brought a long letter from Blair which set out the tasks ahead of him: “…build on our unprecedented record of economic achievement…ensure the long term security and prosperity of our country and its people…deliver real improvements for ordinary hard working families and to underline our Government’s commitment to social justice through policies to expand opportunity and tackle the most deep seated causes of social exclusion”. At the very end of the letter Blair slips a bit of reality into the clap trap: “Your plans will, of course, need to be set against the background of lower growth in funding than in recent  years”.

One symptom of that reality is that there are 60,000 children in care in this country who are, according to Johnson, treated “appallingly”. This is after nine years of a Labour government presiding over the crises and failures of capitalism.

How does the ex-postie, with all his talents for smoothing over uncomfortable facts, explain that away?

Ivan

Voice From The Back: Informing the people (allegedly) (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Informing the people (allegedly)

[In New York City] a small trucking company known as Advertising in Motion has 15 vehicles with several big windows, each displaying a different advert every seven seconds. And now there is the night crawler, Technique Mirage, which to the cynical and busy New York is just one more piece of aggravation. It trundles around flashing adverts on the sides of buildings such as the Empire State or St Patrick’s Cathedral. Financial Mail on Sunday, 8 February.

Progress

According to the New York Times last November, after the Chrysler Corporation spent more than half a billion dollars to convert a car factory in Newark, Delaware, to produce big Dodge Durango sport utility vehicles, it held a party in September to open the new assembly line. Delaware’s political leaders stood with Chrysler’s chairman on a podium decorated with red and white bunting and waved victoriously to hundreds of cheering auto workers whose jobs had been saved. When the Durango went on sale this fall, dealers could not keep enough in stock. And Chrysler, which barely breaks even on ordinary passenger cars, began to pocket $8,000 in profit for every Durango sold. There is just one problem: The Dodge Durango has a much worse environmental record than the Dodge Intrepid, the full-sized sedan that the factory used to build. The Durango gasoline consumption and output of carbon dioxide, a principal cause of global warming, are 57 percent higher than those of the Intrepid. And the Durango emissions of nitrogen oxides, the main cause of smog, are twice the level of the car it replaced.

That’ll teach them!

New figures from researcher at the London School of Economics, calculated for the Commons Education Select Committee, estimate a student paying full fees and his or her own living costs with no parental support will leave university with a £15,000 debt which could take 27 years to repay. Mail on Sunday, 22 February.

A black Mickey

In his office at Team Disney headquarters, Reggie Whitehead, vice-president of Special Markets, admitted that the sales pitch to the Afro-American community had broadly failed. “We haven’t made a good job of making Disney relevant,” says Whitehead, ruefully pointing out that blacks, even more than whites, would benefit from the realise from urban reality that a Disney holiday offers. “When Mickey and Minnie attend job fairs at black colleges they wear traditional African costumes,” Howard notes proudly. To ram home the “diversity” message, cast members are issued with a calendar that lists, for example, Black Poetry Day and First Female FBI Agents Day. There is a pecuniary as well as a moral motive to this. The real magic of Disney is its skilful conversion of dreams into dollars. In 1995 the company worldwide earned $13 billion. American blacks now generate $400 billion a year. “And that is bigger than the economy of Mexico,” murmurs the lady co-ordinator of the BET project, which intends to rollercoast a healthy proportion of those greenbacks into Mickey’s pockets. Guardian, 15 January.

Quote

"My formula for success is rise early, work late, and strike oil". Paul Getty.

They were expendable

South Africa’s high mine accident rate and the dangers of high dust levels in coal mines remained issues of great concern, Dick Bakker, the acting director-general of minerals and energy, said [Johannesburg Star, last November]. He told the parliamentary minerals and energy committee that between 1994 and last year [1996], transport-related accidents accounted for 49 percent of the 1484 fatalities in the mining industry while rockfalls and rockburts accounted for 47.7 percent. Environmental and health factors accounted for 3.2 percent.

Thou shalt pay

The number of households cut off from a gas supply because of debt has almost doubled in the two years since competition was introduced, according to the figures yesterday from the Gas Consumers Council. In 1995, BG cut off 14,511 customers, whereas in 1997 its successor, British Gas Trading, disconnected 29,767 consumers. Guardian, 12 February.

For the birds

Pigeons at the Sellafield nuclear plant are so contaminated that a thousand of them are being exterminated. Guardian, 12 March.

New Deal

“Any person refusing a New Deal option without good cause will first have their whole benefit suspended for 2 weeks followed by a 4 week period if they refuse again to take up the option after adjudication.” TEN Briefing, July 1997, p2.

Greasy Pole: Grow up and understand (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

You can’t help feeling sorry for coalition ministers with their sleepless nights and restless days having to do something they call Taking Tough Decisions even when these lead to thousands of people catapulted into unemployment, agonising over whether to pay the rent or mortgage or buy food or try to keep warm in the winter. So it helps to know that, at any rate for those struggling ministers, there is another way. Some spin doctor in the deeper recesses of Westminster has come up with the idea that the victims of current policies might regard themselves as less repressed and impoverished if they could accept it all in a more mature and perceptive manner. One great advantage of this reasoning would be that it promises to be stunningly cheap to operate. Another is that any residual resentment by penurious benefit applicants and the like might well be stifled by their feelings of guilt at their own inadequacy in accepting reality.

Clegg

Here, for example, is Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, seemingly unshaken by his being abruptly transmogrified from the focus of a national mood of “Cleggmania” into “the most hated man in Britain”. The tension between the LibDems and their patient fans was aggravated by the fact that Clegg had led his party into the coalition along a path of dishonoured pledges and his excited complacency at holding so eminent a governmental post. Last November, before the Commons voted on the proposal to increase the university tuition fees, Clegg wrote to the President of the National Union of Students and, after asserting that the government’s intention was that graduates on lower incomes would be better off than now, stated that “I believe it is crucial that all of us are able to ensure that people know the true picture”. Take note of the use of words like “crucial…all of us…ensure…true picture…” designed to imply that anyone who does not fit into this compliant mould has defects which are – well, crucial. This argument might be more effective if it was not put by the same Nick Clegg who, when he was touting for votes during the general election, said that to raise tuition fees would be “a disaster”. So while we consider how to maintain a maturely informed attitude among the confusion, can we also settle where we place Clegg? Are we impressed that he eventually admitted the LibDems (including himself) should have thought more carefully before signing those flamboyantly reckless pledges? Or would it be more instructive to remember that this confession was a response to lost votes and the fact that Cleggmania had decayed into a septic memory of a disreputable past.

Cable 

Which brings us to the Deputy Prime Minister’s deputy who, while never embellished by Cablemania, has coincidentally been reduced from the world’s most immaculately insightful economist to piteously Vincible Vince. Among a procession of savaging blunders in early November Cable boasted to two undercover reporters from the Daily Telegraph who came to his constituency surgery pretending to need his advice that he had the power to scupper Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to completely take over BSkyB and that to get his own way in the coalition he could operate the “nuclear option” of threatening to resign from it. Although supposedly a hardened political operator, the terror of affluently bonused bankers, Cable seemed powerless of suspecting that he was being set up precisely to embarrass himself in such an unwise, almost terminal, style. An outraged David Cameron swiftly relieved him of these feverish delusions – and of some of his ministerial responsibilities. But he clung on as Business Secretary, in which post he had brushed aside the protests at the planned rise in tuition fees: “I think a lot of the people who are protesting actually don’t understand what’s being proposed. It doesn’t actually affect them – we’re talking about a system of graduate contribution that will only affect people who start going to university in a couple of years’ time”. There are however problems for anyone eager to give any weight to Cable’s views in this matter since he has himself demonstrated a distinct confusion in understanding – at times declaring himself to be in favour, then against, the rise in fees, then that he would abstain from voting (there are no prizes for guessing that, when he came to it, ambition overruled and he obediently supported the rise). But how are we to regard anyone so susceptible to trickery and confusion, who nevertheless tells us that we “don’t understand” our everyday problems?

Cameron

From the other bit of the coalition David Cameron, in what seemed like a fit of exasperation, hit out at the opponents of the “reform” of what are called public services (in which this government is merely following Labour’s policy). Cameron’s complaint is that the critics need to grow up and realise that what counts is the standards of the service rather than which organisation – state, private, charity – delivers it. Well growing up – although not in the way Cameron means – is mostly a useful, not to say necessary, process from which a certain education is assumed to follow. But until that happens we must work with the outrageous fact that an Old Etonian, ex-member of the vandal Bullingdon Club such as Cameron can lecture us about maturity when he is unable – or perhaps reluctant – to confront the fact that the working class exist under continual pressures of survival in their everyday lives. Dependency on employment in order to survive is a vastly educative, maturing experience. For example the housing charity Shelter recently reported that some 3 million people have problems paying their rent or mortgage, which means that millions of people live under the persistent threat of being homeless. According to Shelter’s chief executive “thousands of people are hanging on to their homes by the skin of their teeth…”. That is the kind of experience which should be enough to result in such enlightenment about capitalism as to be mightily serious for the Tories, Labour, LibDems and all other supporters of this chaotic, degrading social system.

Ivan

Student Protests (2013)

From the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last twelve months have seen some of the biggest student protests in recent memory. On 11 April, Chilean students marched in their thousands, with 250,000 estimated national turnout and 100,000 in the capital. These protests have rumbled on since 2011. The leader of student representation is Camila Vallejo, a Castro-fan and member of (purportedly) Communist Youth of Chile, other members of this group involved in the protests include Camilo Ballesteros (President of the Student Federation of the University of Santiago de Chile), Camila Donato (president of the Federation of UMCE ), the secondary school leader Roberto Toledo. The protests are in part a result of tremendous inequalities across all the Chilean educational system due to the school voucher system. Some 1800 students have been arrested.

In Quebec, the symbol of a red square was adopted when 500,000 students took to the streets to protest in May 2012. Its objective was to freeze or eliminate tuition fees. It was described as the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. One of the key figures has been Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois of the CLASSE (Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante). It considers mass mobilization as a catalyst of social change. It favours local general assemblies as decision-making instances to referendums, which are considered less democratic. Anarchopanda is an unofficial mascot for the protests, known for hugging students and police. Some 2500 students have been arrested.

In Sussex in Britain, the symbol of a yellow square was adopted. Hundreds of students staged a rally and occupation in March in opposition to privatisation of campus jobs. Some students carried a huge black banner (the biggest thing visible) with white words reading Communism and on the reverse in Latin ‘Omnia Sunt Communia’ which translates to ‘All things are in Common’ and was used originally in the 15th Century by German rebel leader Thomas Müntzer. Despite the riot police presence and its retreat, no arrests were made.

Chile has been the most reformist, Quebec somewhere in between, Sussex, though the smallest, has been the most explicit to call for ‘Communism’. Student unrest could presage a positive movement in the class struggle.

DJW

Education as tainted by capitalism (2010)

From the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

State schools have always turned out various grades of worker. Now universities are to be allowed to charge the going market rate for their courses.

The Browne review of higher education in England proposes the abolition of the £3,290 cap on tuition fees and declares that there should be no limit on what universities can charge their students. It plans for typical fees of up to £12,000 per year for a degree course, with a continuation of the system of loans. In addition to a loan for the tuition fees, most students would have a further loan (for maintenance) of £3,750 and would have interest to pay on that, as well.

Once in employment, former students would begin to repay the cost of their loans (together with interest) from a salary level of up- to over £9000 per annum, upwards. This is not a high income to have to start paying back the loan, particularly for workers living in cities, where the cost of living is higher. Therefore, huge numbers of young people, on modest salaries will face these loan repayments, on top of either having to pay high rents for accommodation or taking out large mortgages. Economists have been advising people not to get further into debt but the Browne Report will undoubtedly contribute to the level of debt rising significantly for many.

The university guide, Push, estimated in August 2010 that student indebtedness could rise to £25,000 for a degree course. Clearly, for many with the extra expenses of accommodation, books, other course materials, etc, the figure would be substantially higher, quite likely, in access of £30,000.

So, the result of this is that most working class students will have an unenviable choice: either (1) to enter higher education and to be burdened with enormous amounts of debt, especially when accommodation and maintenance are considered, or (2) having to give up higher education altogether, with the probable consequence of stunted intellectual growth, temporarily, at the very least.

This is all capitalism can offer the vast majority of people: a huge burden of debt which induces a form of enslavement or missing important opportunities in life in order to reduce the debt.

As regards schools, dubious methods are being resorted to by more affluent parents in an attempt to get their children into schools which occupy a higher position in the league tables of the exam treadmill. Many of these better off parents often try to segregate their children from those of poorer backgrounds, through the use of tutors, private schools and faith schools. Desperate efforts are made by some parents in an attempt to get their children into the desired schools. The measures employed include moving house into the catchment area of the targeted school or allowing their children to move temporarily into the homes of relatives or friends who live in the sought after catchment area. All of this, in an attempt to deceive the LEA (Local Education Authority).

Then, there are the exams themselves: GCSEs, AS-levels and A2-Levels, with the perennially critical claim that “standards are dropping” in comparison with the past. Lesson time is largely devoted to the demands of passing these exams, rather than giving students a real understanding and appreciation of the subjects which they are supposed to be studying. In fact, many believe that lessons are much more about how to pass the exams rather than learning about the subjects for their own sake. Numerous teachers complain about the rigidity of the syllabus and about how their lesson plans are being constantly supervised, something which previously only applied to those who were in their first six months probationary period.

Aims of the Education System
Political leaders and mainstream educationalists usually claim that the purpose of education is along the following lines:

(1) Acquisition of knowledge, development of mental and physical skills and personality to enhance the life of an individual.

(2) The achievement of the above, it is then declared, will enable individuals to make a contribution towards the overall economic, social and cultural wealth of society.

To a limited extent, in the developed countries at least, much of this has been partially achieved. However, in a class-based society such as capitalism education, like much else, is subordinated to the interests of the ruling class. Those interests fundamentally involve the creation of profit which is a vital source of the wealth of the capitalists.

Although on occasions, mainstream education may refer to isolated ideas which criticise some of the policies of ruling elites (generally policies which took place in the distant past, such as Britain’s involvement in the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th century), the reality is that the education system has rarely radicalised students, apart from a brief period in the 1960s and 1970s. Usually it has taught them to accept the status quo and to fit into it. This lack of radicalisation of students has been maintained through the following factors:

The very limited nature of the education received by many students. Most of that education is geared to the demands of industry and commerce.

Capitalism has so far at least, managed to pressure most students into thinking more about getting employment at the end of their course, rather than to consider becoming radical.

The prevalence of status quo ideas in the education system: the values of religious organisations in feudal times and, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the values of the capitalist class.

In more recent times most people’s understanding of the society in which they live has been influenced hugely by an expanding media, much of which is controlled by wealthy corporate owners and other commercial interests.

In the present society the main aim of education is to provide the knowledge and skills base necessary for employment in capitalism. A workforce educated according to the demands of the profit system will then maintain and, in favourable trade cycle periods, boost the wealth of the owners of the means of production.

An obvious consequence of these objectives of education has been a strong emphasis on subjects considered to be relevant to employment: maths, English, science, computer and business studies. The Education Reform Act of 1988 set up the National Curriculum which was designed to standardise what was taught in schools. The intention of this was to facilitate assessment and led to the creation of “league tables” showing the academic performance of schools in exams. Most significantly, maths, English, science and information technology were established as compulsory subjects up to the minimum school leaving age of 16. In contrast, under the 2002 Education Act, subjects such as history, geography, foreign languages, art and music could be dropped at the age of 14 since most of them were thought to be less relevant to the employment process.

Education and Income Group
Under capitalism, there has always been a very strong income factor determining educational achievement. Children from better off homes overwhelmingly do better than those from poorer families. The children from deprived backgrounds are frequently and erroneously labelled as being “less able” by those educationalists who are entirely ignorant of the vital socio-economic factors influencing educational development and the gaining of qualifications.

A useful book which refutes the claims of the “less able” educationalists is Education and Working Class by Jackson and Marsden, written in 1962 and which has been on the reading lists of many teacher training courses. The authors concentrate mainly on differing levels of educational achievement within the working class itself (as mainstream sociologists frequently do). They show by statistics and surveys, how children of unskilled manual workers are far more likely to leave school early, with few qualifications. In contrast to this, those with white collar, managerial parents, were more likely to pass a greater number of school exams and then to go on to university. Aspects of the book may be criticised by socialists for its emphasis on the material, social and economic divisions within the working class itself, rather than including a comparison with the children of the capitalist class. Nevertheless, it is still of significant value since it illustrates clearly how a lack of material resources and encouragement can seriously affect a child’s progress in education.

In 2007 a report entitled Chicken and Egg: Child Poverty and Educational Inequalities by Donald Hirsch, shows how little has changed, after another 45 years of capitalism. By the age of three, Hirsch concludes that “being in poverty makes a difference equivalent to nine months’ development in school readiness.” He continues: “At each stage of compulsory schooling, the poverty gap grows. In particular, there is a big jump early in secondary school, with poor children nearly two years behind by the age of 14.”

Hirsch adds: “Children who do badly at primary school are less likely to improve at secondary school, if they are poor. Children who are only slightly below average at primary school are more likely to be among the worst performers at secondary school, if they are poor.

Young people with parents in manual occupations remain far less likely than others to go to university. Even though their prospects have improved, they have not been the main beneficiaries of university expansion. Children of non-manual workers are over two and a half times as likely to go to university than children of manual workers.”

Like Jackson and Marsden, Hirsch is mainly looking here at different layers of the working class. All the same, it is a clear demonstration of how material circumstances in capitalism affect outcomes in education.

In February 2010 the Sutton Trust supported research which showed that “the vocabulary of children from the poorest backgrounds lags more than a year behind that of their classmates from richer homes by the time they start school.”

“Those from the poorest 20 percent of homes, where household annual incomes averaged £10,300 before tax, had an average developmental age of 53.6 months…Children from families in the richest 20 percent, on around £80,000 reached a development age of 69.8 months.”

In other words, children from the more affluent homes had a developmental age more than 16 months ahead of those from poorer homes. This is clearly a result of material circumstances.

Certainly, the demands of the capitalist education system, to restrain monetary expenditure and investment, cause highly significant barriers, particularly for children from more deprived backgrounds. Additionally, these cutbacks create real problems for many other working class children from less deprived backgrounds. The wealthy can purchase places for their children in private schools and universities, usually without any fear of indebtedness. For the rest of the population (the working class), the situation is very different and in recent years these inequalities have been increasing rather than diminishing.

Education in Socialist Society
So, what would education be like in a socialist society? A detailed description obviously cannot be given since it will be up to the people at the time to decide upon exactly which forms education would take. However, it is very clear that, in complete contrast to capitalism, socialism will put human need first. The welfare and needs of people, both as individuals and as a community will be treated as a priority.

The importance of developing to the full, the mental, physical and social abilities and talents of everyone, as individuals, will undoubtedly be recognised. Most significantly, education will inevitably be considered a lifelong process and certainly not something to be compartmentalised into time slots, like happens under the present system. As a result of this, people will be able to lead far more satisfying lives than could ever be even remotely achieved under capitalism. This satisfaction would derive from the contributions to the overall material, intellectual social and cultural wealth of society which people would be able to make and, of course, from the fact that, as individuals, they would be able to enjoy the fruits of the common store.

A quotation from Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto sums up the situation well:

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Here, the term “free development” can be taken to include education. In socialist society, there would be no financial constraints since the monetary system will have been abolished and production will be carried out solely for human need. The stresses and strains of cutbacks and needless austerity measures will finally have been abolished forever and at last, humanity will be able to move forward, considerably through genuine and effective education, towards real progress, both as individuals and as a community.

Vincent Otter