I'll chime in with some thoughts soon, but just wanted to flag this up:
Mute Special on Struggle in Education Today: 'Don't Panic, Organise!'
The cuts, lay-offs and tuition-fee hikes that are besetting higher and
further education internationally are naturally a direct response to the
drama of the financial crisis and its ricocheting bomb of personal,
commercial and national debt. But they also have deeper roots. They should
be understood as part of the more gradual process of what George Caffentzis,
in his analysis of the international situation, calls the 'breakdown of the
edu-deal'; the inability for capital, and therefore the state, to pay for
the costs of producing a well educated workforce or to guarantee that
investment in education will result in a more vigorous economy and increased
living standards for those with qualifications.
This breakdown, and the dogmatism of free market economics which seeks to
alleviate it, has seen the imposition of a business rationale onto what
previously had been regarded as the provision of a public service, sometimes
even a 'public good'. From the investment of endowment funds on the market,
to the conversion of students into (badly ripped off) consumers, to the
no-frills fixed-term contracts being doled out to staff, to the speculative
purchase of the future IP generated by scientific and technical departments,
to the intended exchangeability of all qualifications under the Bologna
Process, education has been infested by the value form.
With the ground changing this fast under staff and students' feet, the
ability for collective action to fight the savage rounds of cuts has itself
suffered as a result of a generalised precarity and fragmentation. Despite
the hostile conditions, we are nevertheless seeing an intermittent but
persistent wave of strikes, actions and occupations, both wildcat and union
co-ordinated, breaking out around the world. Other initiatives such as
cross-institutional teach-ins, blogs, power-mapping exercises, conferences
and demonstrations are also creating a steady hum of background pressure and
preparation. All of this begs the question, will it be enough to save any
residual quality and equality within education and its institutions? With
the state of struggle in education our principal question, Mute has created
a mini-dossier of reports, questionnaires and analyses on the education
crisis as it unfolds in the UK and beyond.
Read it here: http://www.metamute.org/en/node/13308
Charlotte
Dr Charlotte Frost
Arts Writer/Academic
<http://www.digitalcritic.org/> http://www.digitalcritic.org
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