Juan Cole: How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War

[marmar]

from truthdig:



How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War

Posted on Nov 22, 2011
By Juan Cole


The deliberate pepper-spraying by campus police of non-violent protesters at the University of California-Davis on Friday has provoked national outrage. But the horrific incident must not cloud the real question: What led comfortable, bright, middle-class students to join the Occupy protest movement against income inequality and big-money politics in the first place?

The University of California system raised tuition by 9 percent this year, and the California State University system upped tuition by 12 percent. The UC system is seriously contemplating a humongous 16 percent tuition increase for fall 2012. This year, for the first time, the amount families pay in UC tuition will exceed state contributions to the university system.

University students, who face tuition hikes and state cuts to public education, find themselves victimized by the same neoliberal agenda that has created the current economic crisis, and which profoundly endangers democratic values.

.....(snip).....

The assault on publicly funded higher education is wrapped up in the discontents that provoked the Occupy Wall Street movement. Inexpensive state universities are central to the ability of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to move up in the world. The United States used to be known as a society where those at the bottom could hope to get ahead, and where being born with a silver spoon in your mouth was no guarantee of lifetime prosperity. Now, upward mobility has gotten harder, the rich more often stay rich, and Europe is the land of opportunity. European state support for institutions of higher education is key to that mobility. The United States of America, born in a rejection of an aristocracy by birth, is increasingly a land of hereditary oligarchs. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_students_landed_on_the_front_lines_of_class_war_20111122/

[geckosfeet]

1. ++1 highly recommended - a must read

Take away education, and you have a society of button and paper pushing automatons. Ready to work for minimum wage and unaware of the workings of government and business.

How convenient.

How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War

The ideal that California embraced in its 1960 master plan for higher education, that it should be inexpensive and open to all Californians, is being jettisoned without much debate. The master plan exemplified the thinking on education and democracy typical of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson. In 1786, Jefferson wrote from Europe to a friend,

"Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils , and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. ..."

That is, Jefferson believed that the alternative to publicly funded education was the rise of an oppressive oligarchy that would manipulate the ignorant majority.

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Not only are UC-Davis students being hit with massive tuition increases to pay for the penitentiaries and their policing, they are also being treated like unruly inmates by a militarizing police force. In the meantime, the country is taking giant strides toward the future Jefferson feared, of poorly educated citizens at risk of being manipulated by rising oligarchs.

How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War

[saras]

2. Students spend a huge amount of money on school every year. That money can be stolen, and isn't yet