Is Higher Education a privellege?
- Thread starter tbaldwin
- Start date
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Nemo said:
Hear hear.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
tbaldwin said:
That's not what he said, balders.
You really do need to pay a little more attention before going off on your little rants.
taffboy gwyrdd
Embrace the confusion!
Higher education is not a privelidge.
At least it oughtnt to be. It is certainly becomming one though.
higher education should be free. End of. However, it is a lot harder to defend the notion that students should recieve money from the state for living expenses while studying.
This is what part time work and the loans system are more justified for.
The state is deliberately making it cost £20 to 30k to go to Uni, when I was at uni in the early 90s a couple of Norwegian students had a hard time getting us to believe that they would owe so much (though pay in Norway is higher)
The state wants graduates in massive debt so they will be obedient cogs in the capitalist machine to pay it off.
At least it oughtnt to be. It is certainly becomming one though.
higher education should be free. End of. However, it is a lot harder to defend the notion that students should recieve money from the state for living expenses while studying.
This is what part time work and the loans system are more justified for.
The state is deliberately making it cost £20 to 30k to go to Uni, when I was at uni in the early 90s a couple of Norwegian students had a hard time getting us to believe that they would owe so much (though pay in Norway is higher)
The state wants graduates in massive debt so they will be obedient cogs in the capitalist machine to pay it off.
taffboy gwyrdd said:
Why do you think a privellege like H/E should be free?
Around 1% of the worlds population have a higher education.
Do you really think that 1% of the population should get it for free!
Or would it be better to see more people get a basic education up to the age of 16?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
tbaldwin said:
Instead of constantly asking what other people think (usually with the intention of answering any points they make with cries of "liberal!") why don't you set out, in detail, exactly what YOU think should be done?
That is, if your ideas go beyond the kind of bar-room railery you usually display.
f for fake
Beer & whisky please
education is everyones right
higher education shold be there for those who want it, not for those who can afford it, or if they can afford it from any future job income they get. With more edumicated people we may make it a better place it live.
But then again those who want to bum of the government and do no work will always do that, not student but people on the dole...
ViolentPanda said:
higher education shold be there for those who want it, not for those who can afford it, or if they can afford it from any future job income they get. With more edumicated people we may make it a better place it live.
But then again those who want to bum of the government and do no work will always do that, not student but people on the dole...
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Tertiary education isn't a "right", only primary and secondary education are (conditionally).f for fake said:
The system isn't "fair", the system is, in fact, still loaded against w/c people due to the debt issue.
It's been a long while since you've been able to get away with claiming JSA willy-nilly, so "bumming off" the government is no longer a viable long-term proposition for most people.
tbaldwin said:
That was in response to the weird dichotomy "Or would it be better to see more people get a basic education up to the age of 16?". Not everyone has the aptitude or the inclination for academic HE study, why bash square pegs into round holes? But you have to have a universally high standard of basic education otherwise there's no way to distinguish egregious talent from what is just a result of enhanced opportunity (this is definitely the problem in the UK at the moment).
Personally I'd turn the whole education system on its head, I reckon much of it is just a demoralising waste of time and a kind of authoritarian preparation for wage-slavery. It's too much too young as well, a sausage-factory education that prepares people for work at 16, rather than giving them more of a chance to develop socially in the presence of adults before formalising their education in their peer-group (something Plato though was best left until the student's early twenties). There'll be no change under capitalism though.
tbaldwin said:
I don't see what the problem is, to be honest. A good example of how it can be done in my opinion is the system of music education in the former USSR; everyone got basic tuition free at school, nothing fancy but enough to get people started on an equal footing. The more talented had the option to go to the local music schools and then if they were the most successful there onto the top conservatoires in Moscow and Leningrad. Obviously the students that made it up to this level were a privileged elite, to a certain extent, but I don't see how the system was unfair particularly. And it was certainly effective - musicians from the USSR dominated the concert and competition circuit for decades.
Are you saying that for the system to be fair eveyone would have to have to right to study at the highest level, regardless of how mediocre they might be at their chosen discipline?
Part of what's been lost since a degree has become a necessary pass-card even to get some shite job in admin, and now that the whole final-year engineering tripos in cambridge can go en-masee to work within the square mile, is any sense of tertiary education as being a type of training that reflects a particular ability or interest in some specific subject. Or at least, that role has shifted to postgrad (where there are hardly any public funds available at all, particularly in the humanities), and the undergraduate university course has just become another life-stage for the middle classes, like a gap-year. Socially it functions as kind of the officer training course of the labour army, attempting to rekindle some vague sense of self-motivation after years of spirit-crushing drudgery at school.
Definitely not a privilege. It's outrageous that our governments spend untold billions on all kinds of awful foreign policies, yet can't pay what would amount to a relatively miniscule amount in tuition fees each year.
I can sort of understand people having to get loans for living costs (although there should still be a grant) but shouldn't have to for the tuition.
I can sort of understand people having to get loans for living costs (although there should still be a grant) but shouldn't have to for the tuition.
fractionMan
Custom Title
That would be an advantage, not a privellege numbnuts.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
tbaldwin said:
What argument? You haven't made an argument, just chuntered out a stream of dislocated insults and slogans.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Mum scared by a bearded polytechnic lecturer?bruise said:
Similar threads
