A Londra gli studenti in marcia per evitare che l'educazione diventi un lusso

Oggi proponiamo un articolo del Guardian scritto da Michael Chessum, uno studente che è tra gli organizzatori del movimento di protesta contro i tagli all'educazione e l'aumento delle tasse universitarie. 

Un movimento che negli ultimi 2 anni ha fatto sentire la sua voce, pur nel totale disinteresse dei sindacati e con un sostegno assai flebile dell'opposizione laburista (che invece di triplicare le rette universitarie le vuole "solo" raddoppiare). Un movimento da cui è poi nato "Occupy London" e che è parte integrante della protesta globale contro l'austerity. Una voce controcorrente nel desolante panorama politico britannico. 

Students are marching to stop education becoming a luxury

 di Michael Chessum

Tens of thousands of students will march through London today in defence of education and the welfare state. Much has changed since the present wave of the student movement began on 10 November 2010, when 50,000 marched, and Millbank Tower was occupied. This is a movement that has ended the notion that young people and students are incapable of serious political agency, and has challenged the impotence of dissent in an era in which there were supposed to be no alternatives to the further marketisation of every public service and every area of life.
Two years on from the tripling of fees, the mood is no longer one of fresh optimism or resignation, but a feeling that a long and concerted struggle is ahead between competing visions for education, and competing interests in society. Today's demonstration should be the beginning of a new, and necessarily radical, wave of direct action.
The agenda of the government is clear: raising fees, slashing the university teaching budget and scrapping the education maintenance allowance was just the beginning. The broader plan for universities – outlined in the higher education white paper – is an attempt to introduce a full-blown market into the sector, with private and for-profit providers. Funding streams – especially for arts and humanities and teaching – will become increasingly unstable, and fluctuating student numbers will bring frequent chaos to institutions and cuts to departments.
It is becoming increasingly clear that this situation is fundamentally about class. The system being designed by the coalition – which rewards prestige, high tuition fees and research concentration – will strip funding away from universities that are disproportionately populated by working class students, forcing them to close and cut student numbers.
Meanwhile, fear of debt and inadequate student support will keep even more potential students from poorer backgrounds out of further and higher education. Education, for years a publicly funded system in which critical minds could be nurtured, however imperfectly, from all backgrounds, is becoming once again a luxury for the rich, and a mechanism for producing a compliant and productive workforce of debtors.
In the face of this onslaught of privatisation, exclusion and austerity, students must articulate a clear political alternative – one that is capable of capturing the imagination of ordinary people. Tuition fees have never been popular and, perhaps as a result of the past few years of marching and direct action, there is significant support for the idea of education as an accessible public service which serves society.
This principle cannot be held in isolation from the fate of other public services, many of which are being torn to pieces by the coalition. The student movement is now irrevocably tied to a growing web of movements among workers and communities struggling against austerity – not only in rhetoric, but also in practical action on campuses and in workplaces.
Most importantly, we must challenge the idea that user contributions are a fair or sustainable way to fund a public service. The National Union of Students' official slogan for the demonstration – Educate, Employ, Empower – fails to seriously make this case.
The only coherent argument to make is that public education should be free, and funded by taxing the rich. This must go alongside a campaign for the abolition of debt – not only because this is the logical corollary of free education, but also because debt is becoming a means of controlling ordinary people's lives.

The student movement is still important because of what it represents and what it is capable of doing. On 5 December, when George Osborne makes his autumn statement to the House of Commons, we will co-ordinate more localised direct action. As struggles in Britain and abroad have shown over the past two years, the strength of any social movement is in the streets.


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