Education should be about teaching people how to think, not what to think. Third level education today however has become no more than state subsidised training. Universities are now just a huge assembly line churning out regimented workers for the benefit of corporations, banks and big business. Terms such as “market-based education”, “user charges”, “tuition fees” and “cost recovery” are now common.

This new approach to education funding stems from the influence of World Bank policy advice, and conditions for loans and debt relief, which consider free public services for all “financially unsustainable”. Rather than places of enlightenment, the primary role of universities today is to meet the labour requirements as stipulated by employers.

Students should be allowed to reach their own conclusions rather than have opinions forced upon them by conservative and rich professors. Most people never consciously choose to be capitalists; it is forced upon them from birth and consolidated in the state education system. While our education system must teach people skills so they can make a contribution to society and create wealth, we must not let it be hijacked by big business for their benefit. There is pressure on public universities by both legislators and state system governing boards to design accelerated degree completion programs, credit-for-work experience, distance education links to industry sites, and other options for the non-traditional “adult learner”. The Arts are under attack while employers want more students studying maths and science so that the labour market in these areas will become glutted and wages forced down.

Students must fight to keep third level institutions as places of learning and not places of training. Lecturers and students alike nowadays cynically describe university education as a ‘factory’. The notion of the University as a mechanised profit machine is where the term derives its critical force. When the philosophy department at Middlesex University was shut down, the ‘Save Middlesex Philosophy’ campaign’s occupation strung an enormous banner out of a first floor window reading: ‘The University is a Factory. Strike! Occupy!’ The slogan became the emblematic image of the campaign. Part of the neo-liberal agenda is the casualisation of labour and the normalisation of precarity.

The student struggle for free education, therefore, is intrinsically linked to the workplace struggles of university staff. There is a lack of political engagement of ‘radical’ academics—Marxist or otherwise—and there seems to be no translation from critical thinking in the scholastic debating chamber to actual support for struggles taking place even within their own workplaces, including for the cleaners who sweep their departmental corridors. It is the economy and its needs that determine the quantity and content of the education that students receive. In the Culliton Report 1992, education was examined in the context of the contribution it could make to improve the competitiveness of the Irish economy, and it was stressed that the fostering of usable and marketable skills should be a priority within the educational system. Free education respects the intrinsic value of knowledge and ideas irrespective of their subjective value on the labour market. It is about the pursuit of learning for its own sake. It is therefore the opposite of the neo-liberal agenda, which sees the university as a factory churning out graduates for the benefit of big business, and which seeks to restructure the university to fit the priorities of big business and the markets. Performance indicators based on productivity and efficiency have become the current definition of accountability, and success in satisfying these measures is often the basis for funding allocations. It is important to oppose the commercialisation and commodification of education, which will lead to the prioritisation of subjects and areas of research that are profitable for businesses, to the detriment of others, regardless of their value to society. Measures should be put in place against the dilution of teaching which leaves graduates being equipped only with the skills and knowledge most desirable of employers. All this leads to the detriment of students’ intellectual and personal development. There should be an end to the distortion of scientific and medical research for private profit. There is a tendency towards casualisation amongst University staff. This includes the increasing composition of temporary staff, workers on sessional teaching contracts, and the way the increasing burden of work is being shifted to PhD students who are remunerated at a rate that is wholly inadequate to draw a living from. In recent times, universities have undergone a massive shift towards short-term contracts for both teaching and non-teaching staff. This places a downward pressure on wages and conditions, and undercuts the ability of trade unions and professional associations to organise on university campuses. Graduate students as an exploited class in the University’s internal economy, are used to depress wages, limit full time job openings, and operate in sync with the tendency towards pay-per-hour lecturers across the University sector as a whole. The university can much more easily cut the wages of contracted workers, safe in the knowledge that there are plenty more to take their place once their contact expires, should they decide to kick up a fuss.

For what drives PhD student teachers is resume building; what drives casualised University workers is staying within the system. In both cases, consciously submitting to exploitation is premised on the belief that the future will hold out better things to come: that temporary pain will pave the way to long-term success.

The University isn’t a factory is a post from Free Education for Everyone

On November 2nd, 2011 the Fine Gael / Labour government paid out over 700 million euro to the unsecured bondholders of Anglo Irish Bank – a bank that no longer effectively exists or functions as such, a bank that so far has swallowed up billions of euro of Irish taxpayers money to pay for its gambling and speculation. On the 25th of January 2012, the government again paid out unsecured bonds of over 1 billion Euro to Anglo’s bondholders. These bonds were unsecured – this means that the government was in no way obligated by any law or agreement to pay it. It was paid only to appease the vultures of international capitalism that hold this country and others to ransom through their enforcers in the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

On Monday the 24th of October 2011, Free Education for Everyone in NUIG confronted Fine Gael senator and Junior Minister for Training and Skills Ciaran Cannon over several issues concerning the rising cost of third level education in Ireland; one of his responses was that it would cost an estimated 500,000,000 Euroto fund free education for a year in Ireland. This, he said, was impossible. And yet, in one single day, his government can pay a cabal of faceless financial gangsters over € 700,000,000? Makes sense alright..

The fight for free education and against the commercialisation of our campuses is inextricably linked to the fight against the austerity programme being implemented in this country at the behest of the IMF – a direct consequence of the financial criminality carried out by the likes of Anglo Irish Bank and their cronies in government. The increase in the registration fee, the cuts in grants, along with the far more widespread cuts in education, healthcare, and every other section of society, all lead back to the IMF, and back further to the criminal actions of the gangsters of Anglo Irish Bank. And yet, to this day, the Fine Gael / Labour government, like their Fianna Fáil / Green buddies before them, are determined to continue bailing out these failed institutions, these money pits, at our expense.

We say this is inexcusable.

 We say this is criminal.

 WE SAY ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

Billions for Banks; nothing for us! is a post from Free Education for Everyone

How would you feel if you were bombarded with Sky News upon entering the university library? Considering there are a few TV screens around the library giving information about catalogue training etc. Would anyone object to this public space becoming private? I frequent the Kingfisher gym and there’s not one, not two, but seven plasma screens pumping out Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda. Exposure to Sky News and its imagery penetrates our consciousness and as a result, shapes our worldview by giving us a false sense of what is news. There are some recurring images namely; the flag of the USA, the Union Jack, war/fear, Arabic people portrayed as terrorists, and of course, advertisements. Is there any need for TV screens in a university gym, and do we collectively need exposure to the above themes?

The “news” is on a loop and it’s the same sensationalist doggerel replayed every few minutes. I have often raised this issue with members of gym staff, who are quick to reassure me that ‘it’s just news.’ Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is enormous: it is the largest media company in the world by market capitalisation ($38 billion). For most people, the conservative news channel Fox comes foremost to mind when asked what they think of Murdoch’s media empire – but the company’s holding is far larger: it includes Sky News, Asia’s Star TV Network, the National Geographic Channel and even the iconic TV Guide network. Widely respected academic, Noam Chomsky, calls these news stations “the myth maker” whose role is to make emotional potent oversimplifications in an effort to keep the ordinary person on course. These myths, as Chomsky puts it, are ‘necessary illusions.’ Or what might be called in more honest days as, propaganda. If we want to understand how our society really works, the first place to look is who is in a position to make the decisions that determine the way the society functions. The major decisions over investment, production and distribution are in the hands of a relatively small group of major corporations, conglomerates and multinationals. They are the ones who staff the key executive positions in government, own the media and have a huge role in controlling our lives. Their need to satisfy their interests inflicts very severe constraints on the political and ideological system. This form of media (Sky News) aims to determine, select, shape, control, and restrict us, in ways which serve the interests of the dominant elite groups.

It appears that we are seeing an encroachment of this type of media that has been generally indoctrinating the minds of people in the USA. Speaking of which, when the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ story swept the internet I was in the gym “watching” Sky News. You guessed it, instead of showing us what’s really going on in the world, Sky News were focusing on the historic image of the Queen tipping a TV presenter on the shoulder with a sword, he is now Sir Bruce Forsyth, congratulations to him. But, still no coverage of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ or ‘Occupy London’ or occupy anywhere for that matter. This is because these movements are a threat to the elite who run the system and who own the media. But how can this be justifiable? Surely it cannot. Shouldn’t we be seeking out these forms of authority and essentially challenging their legitimacy. They [those who own the media] are not going to advertise any movement which is fundamentally a protest against their corruption and their coercion of so many. Do people really just take what they’re fed by this awful media?

The big question seems to be about public space being colonised by private interests? The Kingfisher club is a franchise that is under contract with NUIG. Once they honour the contract they can show whatever they want on their numerous TV screens.

Recently, shopping centres have been described as ‘mass private spaces’ as opposed to public space. As a citizen, I am, and yes you are, entitled to certain rights and freedoms in public spaces. Once we enter these ‘mass private spaces’, we give over some of our rights and freedoms as citizens. In the case of NUIG, another pertinent question is, what type of space am I occupying on campus? Does this change when I go from the canteen or College bar, to the library, the lecture theatre to the gym? Should students have a say in the content of media used on campus irrespective of location? If so, then how is this to be decided, and according to what criteria? I wonder why people go to a gym. I can only say why I go, to keep my body fit and healthy. I do not go to the gym to catch up on “news.” I have no problem with people watching “news”, but I think it should be done independently. After my workout, I may decide to meet some friends in the College bar for lunch, what is the first thing I see upon entering the bar? Yes, Sky News. This time it’s coming at me in the form of a cinema screen. I cannot seem to escape it! I often feel like Winston Smith out of Orwell’s 1984. Orwell would say ‘in a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me and do other students, or staff for that matter, not see anything wrong with this.

How do you feel about this issue?

Sky News: The Commercialisation of Campus is a post from Free Education for Everyone

The autumn and winter of 2010 saw the sudden and dramatic re-emergence of radical student movements, with mass student uprisings taking place across Europe and the United States in opposition to both the austerity measures being levelled against ordinary people as a result of the crisis in capitalism, and the neoliberal restructuring of education to the needs of capital. Across the Western world, governments are introducing measures to transform universities into “factories of precarious workers” – institutions devoted to the production of graduates equipped with the skills and ideas desired by industries increasingly reliant on immaterial and mental labour, turning ideas into profits, and who are willing to work in increasingly precarious situations, either entirely unpaid, or for increasingly low wages on increasingly short-terms contracts – a transformation that is increasingly meeting resistance from both students and academic staff, and which has only accelerated since the present crisis began. Meanwhile, in the Arab world, students have played a key role in the mass uprisings to topple Western-backed thugs such as Zine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak.

Springtime is a collection of writings from those at the forefront of the student resistance in the UK, Italy, France, California, Greece, and Tunisia (with brief mentions Algeria and Egypt) – a kind of scrapbook of resistance, from a diversity of perspectives and political backgrounds – featuring both first-hand accounts of the student protests, and more theoretical writings on the changing character of education, labour and student politics, as well as some historical flashbacks, in which, unsurprisingly, May 68 features heavily.

In each section we get a flavour of the peculiarities of the student movements in various countries. In the UK, we encounter the raw anger of a generation of young people betrayed by the political system – first by Labour and then by the Liberal Democrats – who suddenly find themselves faced with the trebling of tuition fees, the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance, and future of indebtedness and precarious work, if they’re lucky, and unemployment if they’re not. In France, on the other hand, the youth are well aware of their power as political actors, having defeated right-wing government reforms on several occasions; but we also encounter a working-class divided along racial lines, with occasional clashes between the immigrant population of the banliues and the proportionately more white/middle-class student movement. In the US, unlike most of Europe, student occupations of their campuses are met almost immediately with swift and brutal police repression: with beatings and mass arrests. In North Africa, then, we encounter student resistance against the crude and brutal face of capitalist imperialism: the Western-backed thugs and their repressive authoritarian regimes whose role is to maintain Western influence over some of the largest energy reserves in the world.

The Italian section, in particular, merits careful reading. In one particularly excellent piece, we are given quite an in-depth discussion of the Bologna process, which is changing the character of higher education across Europe: directing universities towards the production and normalisation of precarious labour (a process in which students are simultaneously treated as consumers of a product, and raw materials being transformed into commodities), devaluing degrees, turning universities into psuedo-corporations run by business elites, and pushing a greater and greater debt burden onto students and their families. In order to fulfil the dual tasks of producing more graduates for industry and maintaining the university’s role in sustaining class privilege, “diversified inclusion” mechanisms are employed to create a two-tier system,with the best opportunities being made available to the children of the wealthy.

The thread of Counterfire (a UK Trotskyist group that broke away from the Socialist Workers’ Party in 2010) politics runs throughout the book, which brings an unfortunate element of sectarianism into the mix. In the introduction, for example, “fashionable sections of the left” (i.e. anarchists and autonomists) are decried for denouncing the state, while a substantial part of the UK section is devoted to arguing that the successes of the spontaneous, leaderless and decentralised student movement will come to nothing if they fail to adopt Leninist forms of leadership and organisation. Additionally, too much space is devoted to historical contextualisations, which often amount to little more than nostalgia for May 68, Students for a Democratic Society et al., with very tenuous links to the modern day student rebellions, which are beautiful and inspiring entirely in their own right, and not as re-enactments of uprisings from over forty years ago.

But these are minor criticisms of what is ultimately a fascinating, stimulating and inspiring collection of texts. Where Springtime is most powerful is not in the complex theoretical and ideological discussions which the Left so loves to preoccupy itself with, nor in the rhetorical flourishes and analysis-poetry of some of the book’s more stylistically accomplished sections, but in the simple stuff: the individual experiences of betrayal, abandonment, despair, anger, radicalisation, and hope – of a generation abandoned by their supposed leaders both in mainstream politics and the supposed counter-power of the trade and student unions and the official left learning to stand up for themselves together. As one young British Further Education student put it:

“I used to moan at people who said politicians were all liars and were all as bad as each other. I realise now how naive I was. Protesting against tuition fees has not only allowed me to express my opinion, it has allowed me to grow up.”

WORDS: Aidan Rowe

Review: Springtime, the New Student Rebellions is a post from Free Education for Everyone

“One World – One Struggle, Education is NOT for Sale!”

To mark the International Day of Action Against the Commercialisation of Education , Free Education for Everyone (FEE) will be hosting a public meeting and discussion on Thursday, 6th November at 5pm in UCD.

*Gregor Kerr (INTO) will be speaking on the Budget’s Education cuts and the growing commercialisation of education, particularly in primary level

*Dan O’Neill (UCDSU) will be talking about the ongoing fight against the reintroduction of third level fees.

* A member of FEE will lead a discussion on what steps we need to take to fight fees.

Room F101, Arts Block. UCD.
5pm

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Background: Groups in at least 23 countries are preparing protests/actions/events for Nov.5th/6th.

http://www.emancipating-education-for-all.org

UCD Public Meeting on the Commercialisation of Education is a post from Free Education for Everyone