Why you should march for free education

Submitted by Matthew on 1 October, 2014 - 9:06 Author: Beth Redmond

The National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts is organising a national demonstration in central London for free education on Wednesday 19 November.

Other student organisations such as the Young Greens and the Student Assembly Against Austerity are also collaborating. Students will be marching under the banner of “no fees, no cuts, no debt”.

For the first time in several years, this year's annual conference of the National Union of Students (March) voted in favour of free education policy (grants not fees and loans), despite hard attempts from the leadership to get it voted down. The conference was in general more left-wing than it has been in recent years, and as a result many members of the National Executive Council and several of the full time officers consider themselves to be left-wing.

A NCAFC meeting in June – attended by people from all over the UK, as far as Aberdeen and Exeter — democratically decided that we should organise this national demonstration in the first term of 2014-15 student year.

The demonstration now has the backing of NUS National Executive, and the only people who voted against support were members of Labour students.

The number of people being priced out of education is higher than ever; more people are having to pay for further education courses; fees for international students, postgraduates and undergraduates are astronomical and probably going to rise even more; apprentices are having to survive on poverty wages and without the old maintenance grant education is hard going for 16-18 year olds. It isn't okay that education should only be accessible to those with vast quantities of wealth.

The transformation of universities into businesses and education into a commodity is not only detrimental to the students at the institutions but to society as a whole. Education is a social good, it enables people to research medicine and provide healthcare when people are sick, it allows people to design and then create the homes we live in. If society is benefiting from that education then society should fund that education. And that means taxing the rich as they are the people who can best afford it.

When university management look at their students as “customers” or “consumers”, a culture of competitiveness is created.

Money which is necessary for welfare services or fair pay for staff is taken away and spent on really cool adverts and logo redesigns. Subjects which are deemed less profitable by management get the chop, and money from businesses becomes important. That gives people who have no right to interfere with our education a “legitimate” say in what kind of things we learn.We can't let these people control what we learn in our universities. Ending the need to pay for further and higher education is not the answer to this problem, but it is a leap in the right direction.

This is also worrying for people who are worse off in society — women and BME people — and have many hurdles to jump over already.

No one involved in organising the national demonstration is under any illusion about how hard this fight is going to be, and we are not expecting to win free education on 20 November.

This demonstration is the embryo of a movement which has the potential to change the education structure as we know it, and in order for that movement to be effective we need maximum momentum from the get-go.

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