Education is the UK is in crisis. Over the year-and-a-half period of my
sixth-form life the Department of Education has enacted a systematic
campaign of violence against this country's schools, colleges and
universities. Teachers' financial and career security has been put
under risk amongst an increasingly claustrophobic culture of fear. Fixed
pay scale points has been ceded to performance related pay has
supervened, and teachers will be 15% worse off in real terms under this
Government. Placing teachers' pay decisions under senior management
opens up the payroll to bullying and control. Professionals and students
are instructed that the transmission of ideas should become a political
issue. A recent study by the Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA) concluded, “the overall picture reveals no
relationship between average student performance in a country and the
use of performance-based pay schemes”[1]. We are party to the
neo-liberal ploy of monetising every aspect of our once sacrosanct
public services thereby defiling an area of life that must remain beyond
the world of finance. The lot of the class of '14 has been to witness
the failure of our hopes: the verdant prospect of reasonably priced
higher education had morphed into a horrific concatenation of increasing
student debt, overworked lecturers struggling to maintain tenure on
threadbare salaries, and underpaid domestic staff kept on their
sub-living wage contracts only by lack of other work available. At
college, haggard, overworked staff struggling to respond to the daily
challenges of prescriptive classroom teaching supplemented by the
Sisyphean task of marking appears an unforgiving yet ubiquitous
spectacle. Of course, no teacher is able to speak out beyond union
involvement, but this is superfluous: in the tired looks and throwaway
satirical remarks about Gove, a resentment towards an increasingly
monolithic and repressive educational apparatus is all-too-obviously
immanent.
In short, what we are witnessing under this current Tory government is a war on our fundamental ideal of affordable world-class education consigned to the past so as to future the programme of the centre-right ideologue. Trotsky wrote in 1922 through education “we form the concrete human beings of our epoch”. What we are forming in the UK is a polarised division of the clever and the lucky against the rest. The outcome is clear: by making education an increasingly unattractive career option for graduates the number of staff will decline. We will see harassed, overworked teachers unable to prepare adequately for their timetables of over-full classes. We will see a decline in the conditions of college facilities, events, and extra-curricular activities. Knowledge and enjoyment shall become increasingly the exclusive preserve of the “gifted and talented”, that wonderfully vague signification eliding the truth: the rich and the clever who are prepared to keep quiet about the depreciating conditions will preside, and all else confined to the dustbin of zero-hour contracts. With the withdrawal of EMA in 2010, a £30 a week subsidy for students from low income households that 2010, this government's stance on the vulnerable became clear: to separate the student demographic and exclude the poor from access to education and the potential assertion to stronger economic positions. I now have a friend who is often unable to feed himself whilst at school. But we are all marginalised, forced into what at worst seem like thetic qualifications whilst the government demolish the pedagogic architecture of our once world-class state education system.
The department of Education is forestalling the potential of its citizens to accede to the same positions they did - rejecting not juwantst a generation but the future nation. As we tend towards an American, finance-based model students remain powerless to formulate a response because all of the channels are -violently- foreclosed. We watch the staff who care for us and work for us pushed to the limits of capability as the form of education the government prescribes requires a precise model for the teacher to assume. The only outlet is the occasional action organised by the NUS, an organisation notionally with students' interests at heart but substantially in the thrall of the Labour party. If we wish to accede to this increasingly calcified pedestal of traditional legitimisation we must be prepared to cast off of any hope of security or support. The alienation which Marx writes of (here a propos religion):
“becomes the spirit of egoism, the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community but the essence of division ... It has been tossed among various private interests and exiled from the community”[2].
Is this not exactly what we see happening to our education system? It is increasingly subjected to the laws of capital, the perverse degrading logic by which we find ourselves in a progressively more hostile pedagogic environment. Abiding by strict notions of what knowledge consists of is more valuable than intellectual or creative ability. We increasingly can't support each other in learning because we are fighting each other for respect and jobs. For example, Gove would like to remove careers advisers from schools[3] to further his programme of fear and obfuscation. The very idea of collective resistance is foreclosed under the workings of the ideological apparatus incessantly reminding us of the necessity to become useful: this hysterical discourse of ordering the impossible has become the endemic demand of the state institution within late capitalism[4].
The government has cut fast this year, culminating in the announcement by Danny Alexander that student debt would be partially privatised[5], shifting the graduate's lot from being debt-laden to toxic. To the financial system, progressively assuming the insidious role of arbiter of worth, we will be worse than nothing, subjects which exist only to owe to business. In the current climate there is little assurance of employment awaiting. But still we are instructed not to disrupt the functioning of the superior discourse of Power.
Therefore, when the NUT staff strike on the 26th March I shall walk out of college too, as will hundreds of others, tired of the persecution, tired of pretending that this is acceptable, tired of false genuflection. The message is support for the teachers who seek to create a system where the academic discourse is open, and who desire to see students and teachers represented in mutual harmony rather than obscured behind financial scrivening. Students' persecution by the state will be foremost in the consciousness of the thousands of students at my school, ready to be discussed and militantly defended at every campus they reach. What we require is a belief in the capability of the state to aid rather than control, to guide rather than force.
1: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/
2: http://www.parliament.uk/
3: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society p.277 (Anchor Books: 1967)
4: For the textbook discussion of this "the reproduction of the conditions of production" I refer the reader to Althusser's Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: http://www.marxists.org/
Whilst the concept is expounded is insufficiently developed there (or elsewhere by Althusser himself) it remains essential reading for anyone concerned with the politics of education.
5:https://www.gov.uk/government/
In short, what we are witnessing under this current Tory government is a war on our fundamental ideal of affordable world-class education consigned to the past so as to future the programme of the centre-right ideologue. Trotsky wrote in 1922 through education “we form the concrete human beings of our epoch”. What we are forming in the UK is a polarised division of the clever and the lucky against the rest. The outcome is clear: by making education an increasingly unattractive career option for graduates the number of staff will decline. We will see harassed, overworked teachers unable to prepare adequately for their timetables of over-full classes. We will see a decline in the conditions of college facilities, events, and extra-curricular activities. Knowledge and enjoyment shall become increasingly the exclusive preserve of the “gifted and talented”, that wonderfully vague signification eliding the truth: the rich and the clever who are prepared to keep quiet about the depreciating conditions will preside, and all else confined to the dustbin of zero-hour contracts. With the withdrawal of EMA in 2010, a £30 a week subsidy for students from low income households that 2010, this government's stance on the vulnerable became clear: to separate the student demographic and exclude the poor from access to education and the potential assertion to stronger economic positions. I now have a friend who is often unable to feed himself whilst at school. But we are all marginalised, forced into what at worst seem like thetic qualifications whilst the government demolish the pedagogic architecture of our once world-class state education system.
The department of Education is forestalling the potential of its citizens to accede to the same positions they did - rejecting not juwantst a generation but the future nation. As we tend towards an American, finance-based model students remain powerless to formulate a response because all of the channels are -violently- foreclosed. We watch the staff who care for us and work for us pushed to the limits of capability as the form of education the government prescribes requires a precise model for the teacher to assume. The only outlet is the occasional action organised by the NUS, an organisation notionally with students' interests at heart but substantially in the thrall of the Labour party. If we wish to accede to this increasingly calcified pedestal of traditional legitimisation we must be prepared to cast off of any hope of security or support. The alienation which Marx writes of (here a propos religion):
“becomes the spirit of egoism, the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community but the essence of division ... It has been tossed among various private interests and exiled from the community”[2].
Is this not exactly what we see happening to our education system? It is increasingly subjected to the laws of capital, the perverse degrading logic by which we find ourselves in a progressively more hostile pedagogic environment. Abiding by strict notions of what knowledge consists of is more valuable than intellectual or creative ability. We increasingly can't support each other in learning because we are fighting each other for respect and jobs. For example, Gove would like to remove careers advisers from schools[3] to further his programme of fear and obfuscation. The very idea of collective resistance is foreclosed under the workings of the ideological apparatus incessantly reminding us of the necessity to become useful: this hysterical discourse of ordering the impossible has become the endemic demand of the state institution within late capitalism[4].
The government has cut fast this year, culminating in the announcement by Danny Alexander that student debt would be partially privatised[5], shifting the graduate's lot from being debt-laden to toxic. To the financial system, progressively assuming the insidious role of arbiter of worth, we will be worse than nothing, subjects which exist only to owe to business. In the current climate there is little assurance of employment awaiting. But still we are instructed not to disrupt the functioning of the superior discourse of Power.
Therefore, when the NUT staff strike on the 26th March I shall walk out of college too, as will hundreds of others, tired of the persecution, tired of pretending that this is acceptable, tired of false genuflection. The message is support for the teachers who seek to create a system where the academic discourse is open, and who desire to see students and teachers represented in mutual harmony rather than obscured behind financial scrivening. Students' persecution by the state will be foremost in the consciousness of the thousands of students at my school, ready to be discussed and militantly defended at every campus they reach. What we require is a belief in the capability of the state to aid rather than control, to guide rather than force.
1: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/
2: http://www.parliament.uk/
3: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society p.277 (Anchor Books: 1967)
4: For the textbook discussion of this "the reproduction of the conditions of production" I refer the reader to Althusser's Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: http://www.marxists.org/
Whilst the concept is expounded is insufficiently developed there (or elsewhere by Althusser himself) it remains essential reading for anyone concerned with the politics of education.
5:https://www.gov.uk/government/
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