Student protests: today is our 1968 moment

[marmar]

Student protests: today is our 1968 moment
A coalition victory in the tuition fees vote could turn our protest into a mass anti-privatisation movement

Michael Chessum
The Guardian, Thursday 9 December 2010


Less than a month after the first national student demonstration, the coalition has given up on real argument. The line now being pushed by Nick Clegg and David Cameron is that students – the full-time readers, the doctoral researchers – simply haven't read the government's proposals, or don't understand them.

We have read them, and we don't like them. These proposals will put up barriers to access for poorer students who fear a lifetime of debt; they will hammer arts and humanities; and they will lead to the closure and merging of universities that are reliant on teaching grants, most of which are disproportionately populated with students from less privileged backgrounds. Yes, the salary at which graduates will start to repay tuition fees has risen to £21,000; yes, there will be a national bursary pot. But the concessions and apologies of recent days pale in comparison to the privatisation and marketisation of higher education. The reforms threaten to turn universities into businesses and students into compliant consumers. If the protests have shown anything, it is that we are nothing of the sort.

It is the government that is failing to understand the situation. At the time of writing, something like 30 universities have gone into occupation, and school and FE students have come out in tens of thousands to defend their right to basic levels of educational maintenance support and accessible university education. The government is doing more than plugging a funding gap, it is fundamentally changing the purpose of education: not simply orientating it towards the logic of the market, but introducing the market directly into the system. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/09/student-protest-tuition-fees-vote

[customerserviceguy]

1. 1968 was about being sent to die in a war that would never be won

Student protests in Europe are simply about the price of an education that already costs too much and delivers too little.

[some guy]

2. Wrong focus.

from the article:

The student movement is no longer picking at the seams of a rise in fees; as in France in May 1968, the injustice of the vote may awaken a broader crisis. But while in 1968 protesters fought for a new society and a new history, today we contest the supposed end of history – the idea that human progress is now and for ever linked to free markets and corporate interests. It is a paradigm that continues to form the backbone of mainstream political discourse.

[Ghost Dog]

3. Yes. The 1968 reference is to Europe, not USA.

The 1968 events in France, but also in Prague, were also very inspiring for the anti-dictatorship movement(s) in Spain that eventually led to the 'transition' to the present constututional 'democracy'.