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| Our Glorious Financial Leaders |
So this week Danny Alexander, the Scottish comprehensive school boy whose Oxford
University fees were paid by British workers, tells us that student loans
are to be privatized. The precious responsibility for upfront financing of students
in higher education is to be handed over to ruthless profiteers. Nobody
whose parents or personal trust fund can’t foot their university bill is likely to find mortgaging the remainder
of their working lives to virtually unregulated moneylenders a reasonable price
for a degree.
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| H. Briggs, 'The Ancient Britons Instructed by the Romans' |
As a nation we have forgotten that an educated populace is an inherent good. Until well into the Renaissance the
inhabitants of what are now called the British Isles were regarded as the backward
primitives of Europe on the periphery of the civilized world, as in this
picture I discovered on the same day the loan shark book news broke. Plus ça change.
We have forgotten that humans can use their brains to organize activities, including education, without letting the financial market dictate all. I am astounded at our
collective passivity as the vampire of capitalism advances into areas of
society where it has no business intruding. Unless we do something I predict that
within the next fifteen years fees will be introduced for education of 16 to
18-year-olds.
My incomprehension of
the prevalent apathy amongst my colleagues set in on 9th December
2010, when hardly anyone in Classics nationally registered the symbolic importance
of the abolition of state contributions to most university fees. They certainly did not come to join the nation's students outside Parliament. Of my own then colleagues at Royal Holloway, only one came along, the
others saying that they could not shift the date of their Christmas
dinner (some later admitted they had been deluded). But from Oxford there did come the
indefatigable Tim Whitmarsh, who has organized the petition against the loans policy
you can sign here.
That freezing day very
nearly proved that people power can stop retrograde legislation: the policy was
approved by 21 votes, after five hours’ debate during which we were charged by
police horses outside Parliament. But during that five hours, the majority
decreased by nearly seventy-five per
cent. With a few more establishment figures joining the protest, we might have
succeeded in keeping that small collective public stake in our nation’s
universities.
My current research
investigates the ways in which poor Britons in the long 19th century
managed to get themselves some education despite every single obstacle the ruling
classes placed in their paths. This week I read the inspiring story of John Relly Beard,
author of numerous books to enable working people to study the languages and
culture of Greece, Rome and England, including Latin Made Easy (1848) and Cassell’s Lessons in Greek…Intended
Especially for those who are Desirous of Learning Greek without the Assistance
of a Master. He was adamant that
that his purpose was ‘to simplify’ study ‘so as to throw open to all who
are earnest in the great work of self-culture.’
Yet for all the
impoverished Victorians who managed to teach themselves, the doors of the
universities remained firmly closed to them. They are about to slam shut again. In the same year as Beard wrote those inspiring
words, an education-starved Chartist addressed a rich Cambridge undergraduate: ‘The real reason for our exclusion is because we are
poor—because we cannot pay your exorbitant fees...because, by your own
unblushing confession, it insures the University of “the support of the
aristocracy”' (in Alton Locke by
Charles Kingsley, 1850).
Education has been before where incompetent leaders want us to go
again. Let’s not let them win!
