Higher Education is not a right it's a privilege

Brendan O'Neill hitting the nail on the head, as usual.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10018/

One idea that exploded on to the UK political scene towards the end of 2010 is that ‘Education is a right not a privilege’. Policemen were literally beaten around the head with those words, by students protesting against the Lib-Cons’ hike in tuition fees, while at the same time similar phrases were being spouted by the Lib-Con metrosexuals and white-haired old duffers in the Commons and the Lords. The only disagreement between the rowdy students and their supposed betters was over the question of whether tuition fees will improve or hamper young people’s ability to exercise their right to education.

This meant that the whole debate was pretty much a non-starter. Because when you mash together the language of rights with the pursuit of higher education, you end up sullying both. There is no ‘right to be a scholar’. There is no ‘right to be a pursuer of excellence’. By their very definition, these pursuits require both self-selection (a clear determination on the part of the individual to apply himself in a particular way) and external selection (someone deciding whether you’re up to the task of considering and understanding high ideals and ideas). 

There can be no automatic access to a university education. I’d go so far as to argue that the placard-wielding students got it completely the wrong way around: higher education is not a right, it’s a privilege.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as a right to education. Between the ages of four and 18, everyone, regardless of background, parental income, religious belief or intellectual capability, should have free, unfettered access to excellent schooling. For the majority, that schooling should expect and nurture the highest academic standards. For a minority, for example those with serious learning difficulties, it should be catered to their needs and abilities. But there is not a child in Britain who shouldn’t receive a free and decent education.

University, however, is different. It is not schooling, and it is not for everyone. It is driven by the very important ideal of vocation – ‘the action of calling a person to exercise some special function’ – and it is a profound contradiction in terms, a serious warping of both terminology and values, to promote the idea that all of us should have automatic access to a vocational calling. Having been properly, freely schooled, every pupil should have the opportunity to sit exams for university – but that doesn’t mean they have the right to go to university. That’s a bit like demanding the right to be the next Einstein. What the language of ‘rights’ and ‘access’ in the higher education debate overlooks is that there is a very important dynamic of discrimination within the academy, without which it ceases to be an academy at all: that is, intellectual discrimination, choosing between those who are able and those who are not.

It’s important to point out that this is nothing to do with discrimination on the basis of class or race. The poorest boy in Britain should be able to go to a serious university if he has a brilliant mind and a willingness to apply it both independently and under the guidance of professors. And it’s important to point out that these poorer students will require some form of financial assistance. Certainly they should not have to pay fees, and possibly they should be awarded a grant, in order to ensure their survival during three or four years of study, debate and reflection.

But they are not exercising a right. Rather, having demonstrated their intellectual superiority, they are being granted a privilege – the privilege to spend time in an institution in which ‘the intellect may safely range and speculate’, as Cardinal John Henry Newman put it. According to the OED a privilege is ‘an advantage enjoyed by a person beyond the common advantage of others’. And that is precisely what higher education ought to be – an advantage some people enjoy over others, not because they are richer or have the right skin colour, but because they have demonstrated a notable, uncommon capability and willingness to pursue knowledge and higher educational ideals.

Introducing the idea of automatic access into the debate about higher education, so that it is considered borderline barbaric if any person is excluded from university life, denigrates the purpose of the academy. It sacrifices the key attribute of intellectual discrimination at the altar of the PC notion of ‘access for all’. What people end up demanding access to is more schooling – the right to be sustained by the state through the education system up to the age of 21. Successive British governments, particularly New Labour and the Lib-Cons, have no one to blame but themselves for this state of affairs: having cynically and philistinely repackaged higher education as a mish-mash of learning and youth training, which virtually every single young person should experience, they can’t now be surprised when students fight back by saying: ‘Where’s our RIGHT to go to university?’ The consequence of this all-must-have-degrees approach is that university education has been cheapened into more of a mass consumer commodity, with many students effectively paying for degrees that aren’t worth it. So, the right towhat, exactly?

Even after weeks of protesting and heated debates on higher education, there are still some great unspeakables: the question of whether so many young adults should be in higher education in the first place; the fact that some youngsters should be told that higher education isn’t right for them, or rather they aren’t right for it; the transformation of the academy from a privileged zone for the best and keenest minds into a kind of holding camp between childhood and adult work. In demanding that the state pull the purse strings in order to ensure that everyone goes to university, the students manage to sound radical – but they’re actually denigrating their own interests by making themselves complicit in the hollowing out of both university life and what it means to be an adult.

When the state and anarchists fought gun battles in London

The centenary of the Siege of Sidney Street is a reminder of a rather different age of radicalism.

By Mick Hume

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10004/

This week marks the centenary of the bloody events that led to a blazing political gun battle in London’s East End, known as the Siege of Sidney Street. The coincidence puts the current hysteria about protests in the capital in some historical context.

It is a reminder of a time when ‘anarchy in London’ meant much more than some ‘A’ for anarchist symbols painted on walls with broken windows; when the London authorities sought to crush their opponents with guns and real artillery rather than kettles and water-cannons; and when the Liberal government’s home secretary – Winston Churchill – appeared at the barricades to supervise the siege rather than at press conferences to fire soundbites at the media.

One hundred years ago, on 16 December 1910, a group of Latvian anarchists and radicals were disturbed during an attempted robbery of a jeweller’s shop in Houndsditch in the City of London. They opened fire on the police, killing three officers and seriously wounding two others. To this day these remain the worst casualties sustained by the Metropolitan Police in a single incident. The officers killed are being commemorated this week.

The killings sparked a major backlash, aimed particularly at the Eastern European political refugees who had fled to London’s East End. ‘Who are these fiends in human shape?’ demanded the Daily Mirror headline, while the authorities offered a sizeable £500 reward for the capture of named suspects. In the days that followed, the police found one of the robbers dead, having been accidentally shot by his comrades during the clash, and rounded up several other Latvian anarchists and revolutionaries.

A fortnight after the shootings the police received information that the last two or three of the wanted men were holed up in a house in Stepney. In the early hours of 3 January 1911, the Siege of Sidney Street began. Hundreds of armed officers surrounded the building, occupied the local area and began pouring gunfire into the house, while crowds hung out of windows to watch the spectacle and the media gathered to report it; it was one of the first news stories to be filmed live, by Pathé News, for the newsreels shown in cinemas.

However, the story did not go to script. The rump of anarchists turned out to be better armed than the entire Met, with German Mauser automatic pistols and plenty of ammunition. The authorities called in the Irish Guards, armed with rifles, to join the battle. By now Churchill, the home secretary, had turned up at the scene to direct operations, looking like a caricature of a visiting toff in his fur-collared overcoat and silk top hat. At his suggestion an artillery gun was wheeled in to shell the anarchists. Before it could be deployed, the house in Sidney Street caught fire. Churchill refused to allow firefighters near the blaze, and the Latvians refused to come out. The bodies of two of them were found in the ruins.

After the fiasco of the siege, attention quickly turned to the fate of the mysterious ‘Peter the Painter’, one of the men named on the reward posters and allegedly the leader of the Latvian group. Many believed he had somehow escaped from the Sidney Street conflagration, though there is no evidence that he was ever in the house and indeed no certainty that he even existed. Nevertheless, Peter the Painter became something of a rebellious folk anti-hero around the East End and beyond; the Mauser pistols used by the Latvians were reportedly referred to as Peter the Painters during the Irish War of Independence against the British Empire.

Nobody was ever convicted of killing the three policemen. One of those tried and acquitted, Jacob Peters, returned to Russia where, after the Bolshevik Revolution, he became a leading player in the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police. Peters was executed by Stalin during the purges of the 1930s. Donald Rumbelow, a British former policeman and real crime author, has long claimed that it was Peters who fired the fatal shots in the Houndsditch police killings, though others see this claim as tinted by the Cold War worldview.

Whatever the truth about who did what, the legend of Peter the Painter and the Siege of Sidney Street offers a reminder of a very different age of radical politics and state repression. The elusive ‘Peter’ has been described as ‘the Osama bin Laden of his time’, but these revolutionaries were not terrorists as that term is understood today – although their hard schooling in the autocratic empires of the east meant they were not averse to violence and armed robbery where deemed necessary. Many of the thriving communities of East European anarchists and communists in London at that time had been involved in the popular 1905 revolution against Tsarist Russia, and had gone into exile to escape the repressive regime of terror, torture and executions that followed. In 1907 Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and other leading Russian revolutionaries attended a congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in an East London church.

In recent years, another British author, Phil Ruff, has concluded that the most likely candidate for ‘Peter the Painter’ is Janis Zhaklis, a leading member of Latvia’s revolutionary Social Democratic movement who reportedly took part in armed attacks on the Tsarist regime’s prison and secret police department in Riga in 1905-6 before being forced into exile. Zhaklis’ commitment to armed struggle over political struggle apparently led him to split from the Social Democrats and move in a more anarchistic direction. In exile his political group, like others, raised funds for their struggle against autocratic oppressors through ‘expropriations’ – aka robbing the rich. The young Stalin was a noted bank robber for the Bolsheviks, arguably his most useful contribution to the revolutionary cause. (Zhaklis is also said to have given Lenin some of the funds from an ‘expropriated’ Helsinki bank.) Before the abortive raid on the Houndsditch jewellers, Peter the Painter’s group of Latvians had staged another failed robbery in north London in January 1909, this time of a factory’s wages. The ‘Tottenham Outrage’ as it became known culminated in a six-mile armed police chase across the Lea Valley that left two dead and two dozen injured.

Although the Latvian anarchists were eventually routed, the disastrous Siege of Sidney Street of a hundred years ago was to act as a catalyst bringing British policing, politics and the media closer to the modern era. The authorities’ embarrassment at being outgunned by two (or three?) opponents led to the rearming of the Metropolitan Police Force with more modern weapons. The turning of a policing operation into a major media spectacle, complete with running film, was a step towards the phenomenon of news-as-theatre with which we are now over-familiar. And at the centre of this show was Churchill, an Edwardian imperialist-turned-celebrity statesman who liked nothing better than spectacle and always wanted to be in the front line of events (even trying, as an elderly wartime prime minister, to join the Allied forces crossing the Channel on D-Day in 1944). On his return from the siege, according to Martin Gilbert’s biography, Churchill told his horrified secretary that ‘It wath such fun!’, his excitement for once causing him to let slip his lisp.

However, Churchill was to be widely ridiculed for his preposterous appearance at the Sidney Street debacle, both by the jeering public and his rivals in the political establishment. Tory opposition leader Arthur Balfour noted in parliament that, ‘We are concerned to observe photographs in the illustrated newspapers of the home secretary in the danger zone. I understand what the photographer was doing, but why the home secretary?’ That is one question current Tory home secretary Teresa May is unlikely to have had to answer when grilled by MPs over the policing of the recent London protests. But then I suppose the anarchist wall-daubers she is hunting are not quite Peter the Painter.

An exhibition about the Houndsditch murders and the Siege of Sidney Street opens at the Museum of London Docklands this week.

Is economic growth feasible or desirable?

Next Birmingham Salon meeting on Tuesday 11 January 2011 

Daniel Ben Ami, author of 'Ferrari's for All', will outline his arguments for unfettered economic growth.

Somnath Sen, University of Birmingham Dept of economics, will defend 'growth scepticism' as a way of defending the welfare of the poorest in society.

Since the start of the first Industrial Revolution, economic growth has generally been seen as good and desirable. However, over the last forty years, the growth of the economy and the spread of prosperity have increasingly been seen as problematic rather than positive. While some are still willing to defend economic growth, highlighting the gains to humanity it has brought in terms of material wealth, technological progress, increased life expectancy and personal consumption, others accuse prosperity of encouraging greed, damaging the environment, causing unhappiness and widening social inequalities.

So, does economic growth offer solutions to the problems of the world, or is it one of them? Are there limits to growth, whether natural or social, or are possibilities limitless? Isn't the pursuit of happiness more important than the acquisition of wealth? And, as the world enters yet another recession, is continuous economic growth even possible?

Ferrari's for all is a rejoinder to the growth sceptics. Using examples from a range of countries, the author argues that society as a whole benefits from greater affluence. Action is needed – not to limit prosperity, but to encourage creativity and growth in resolving the problems of poverty, inequality and the environment, to increase abundance and to spread it worldwide.

See you on the 11th.

Are humans unique or are we 'just another ape'? podcasts

Recordings from the Birmingham Salon meeting on Wednesday 8 December 2010




Helene Guldberg's introduction to Birmingham Salon

http://salonrecordings.s3.amazonaws.com/helene_guldberg_speaks2.mp3

Jeremy Taylor's introduction to Birmingham Salon

http://salonrecordings.s3.amazonaws.com/Jeremy_Taylor_speaks.mp3

Comment on modern childhood.

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Brendan O'Neill latest piece on the problems with the student protests.

Brendan is editor of http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/

Britain’s lively student protests against the government’s plans to raise university tuition fees show us one thing for sure: you can’t take young people, or institutions for that matter, for granted. Ours may be a politically anaemic era, in which daring, future-oriented movements are notable by their absence, but that doesn’t mean the Lib-Cons should automatically expect compliance with their cuts agenda. The demos, which culminate in a mass action in London today, confirm that both young people and higher education staff will not meekly play the political roles fashioned for them by Cameron and Clegg.

One of the most striking things about the demonstrations is their leaderlessness. At the protest in Trafalgar Square last week, I was amazed by the utter confusion that prevailed, the gathering in the square of various, seemingly unrelated pockets of protesters, some of whom were chanting about education cuts, others of whom were dismantling bus stops. There was no evidence that these groups were linked by anything other than a desire to let off steam. No speeches, no meeting point, not a megaphone in sight… it resembled a rowdy night out in the city more than a revolution ‘to bring down a government’. 

As one journalist who joined the protest put it: ‘I don’t know who is leading us, but we don’t stop running.’But the protests show us something else, too; something less edifying. They reveal the glaring absence of political vision and solidarity in contemporary protests against the cuts. They show the extent to which those agitating against the Lib-Cons’ response to the recession actually accept the idea that we need austerity, and are determined simply to shift the impact of that austerity away from themselves and on to others. Motivated more by sectionalism than solidarity, whatever positive elements exist in these student acts of defiance are likely to be exhausted by the lack of a progressive objective.

Of course, throughout history a great many protests started out leaderless, even shambolic, as people took to the streets to express instinctive fury. But normally, leadership eventually emerged: the most ambitious or clear-eyed individuals would come to the fore to organise and direct the public expression of grievance. In contrast, not only have the anti-fees demos remained leaderless throughout a series of eye-catching public actions, but their very leaderlessness is now celebrated as a virtue.

‘This is a leaderless protest with no agenda but justice’, gush sympathetic journalists. One reporter says the student occupations at colleges are creating ‘leaderless rooms’, which spring from ‘an embryonic coagulation of disparate groups’. No amount of journalistic effort to get into Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye can disguise the fact that what we’re witnessing here is the sexing up of political confusion as organisational experimentation. Onestudent writer says: ‘Unruly, leaderless and difficult to contain - this may well be the future of protest.’ Another, referring to thekids who have bunked off school to join the demos, says ‘it’s the children who are leading us’.

These are desperate attempts to make a virtue out of the political vacuum at the heart of the anti-fees protests. The truth is that the failure of any serious leadership to emerge really speaks to the absence of clear goals, of overarching political ideals, even of a common language of solidarity around which to cohere this ‘embryonic coagulation’. Questioning the absence of leadership is not to say that what these students really need is a charismatic leader or two to march them to glory (though there’s nothing wrong with charismatic leaders, of course); rather it is to point out that this culture of leaderlessness springs from the dearth of political goals and of a strategy for achieving them. Instead of these failures being discussed in an upfront fashion, they are repackaged as Glorious Leaderlessness, with spontaneity elevated as the supreme virtue of protest, over and above discussion, debate and direction. It’s an inability to address the incoherent nature of the protests dressed up as political freestyling; a lack of direction masquerading as anti-elitism.

Closely aligned with this cheering of leaderlessness is the celebration of the apparent spontaneity of the protests. They’re ‘just happening’, we’re told. Children are suddenly deciding to walk out of school and students are taking ‘spontaneous moves to occupy their university buildings’.

It is worth questioning just how spontaneous the protests really are, given the important dynamic of implicit adult approval and media cheerleading in much of the action that has been taken by student protesters in recent weeks (some adult observerspatronisingly refer to the protesters as ‘Harry Potter radicals’). Still, the widespread talking up of the alleged spontaneity of the protests, the celebration of it, is striking. Because spontaneity in politics represents the ascendancy of the unconscious over the conscious, of intuition over consideration. Bigging up the spontaneous nature really speaks to an unwillingness to elevate the conscious back above the unconscious, and to take a step back and ask what the protests are for and where they’re going. The fetishisation of their spontaneity is a way of avoiding addressing their intellectual disarray.

And looked at coolly, the political content of these demonstrations is not an unalloyed good. What the protests capture is the worrying flowering of sectionalism and self-interest in the prism of today’s austerity debate. Increasingly, to the extent that there have been protests against the cuts agenda, they have taken the form of one section of society defending itself against cuts at the expense of another. In the absence of any serious ideological challenge to the broader concept of austerity, even the radical response to the cuts agenda has largely accepted the fundamental need for limits to growth and progress. And thus protesting against cuts takes the form of merely trying to deflect the consequences of austerity away from oneself.

This can be seen in the way health workers suggest that the military should be cut, not them. Or the way arts bodies wonder why other public services aren’t being slashed. And the student protesters also argue that there are other areas of public life that should be trimmed before education, signalling their fundamental acceptance of the idea of austerity. Even when they defend their own positions, they do so in narrowly economic terms. The Free Education Campaign argues that the economy benefits by £2.60 for every £1 it spends on higher education, through the training of young people for future careers. Not only does this reveal a spectacularly philistine attitude towards education - it also shows the extent to which some student protesters accept the economic straitjacket, the ideas straitjacket, that the Lib-Cons are seeking to wriggle Britain into, and only want to make their place within that straitjacket a little less painful.

The broader failure to challenge the austerity aficionados who rule over us exacts a high price: an emptying out of political solidarity and the spread of sectional radicalism. The demo in London today may be big and even rowdy. But because this protest phenomenon is running mainly on self-interest, it has a sharply limited scope for solidarity and durability. In a sense, this means the student protests only reflect the broader political weakness of the radical, critically-minded political outlook today. But why should we patronise students by saying, ‘Well, they’re only expressing bigger trends’? They are adults (most of them anyway), and the disappearance of the old political language and ways is as much an opportunity for them as it is a challenge. If they put their minds to it, if they challenged that doubt-disguised-as-flattery which tells them that their spontaneity and leaderlessness are a wonder to behold, maybe they could put forward, and get behind, some striking new political ideas.

I have a chapter in this book which I'm told is now available to buy.

"Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in Britain"

Author(s): Alex Deane (Ed)

Format: paperback

ISBN: 978-1-84954-044-5

Publication date: 29/11/2010

Price: £9.99

We now live in a state that takes a disturbingly close interest in our everyday lives. The government enjoys an array of powers over individual freedoms unprecedented in a democratic nation and inconceivable to our forebears.

Britain has the largest DNA database per capita in the world, more CCTV cameras than any other country, an Intercept Modernisation Programme to record details of everyone’s phone calls and emails, Stop-and-Search powers under the Terrorism Act and even data chips in bins to monitor our rubbish.
Big Brother Watch charts the encroachment of a surveillance culture and the erosion of civil liberties in the UK. The aim of its expert contributors is to highlight the increasingly illiberal nature of life in modern Britain, and the terrible consequences this could have for us all.

Contributors include: Josie Appleton // Tony Benn // Luca Bolognini // Stephen Booth // Simon Davies // David Davis // Alex Deane // Terri Dowty // Damian Green // David Green // Daniel Hamilton // Michael Harris // Guy Herbert // Francis Hoar // Martin Howe // Julian Huppert // Philip Johnston // Dominique Lazanski // Mark Littlewood // Leo Mckinstry // Stefano Mele Brian Monteith // Jesse Norman // Pietro Paganini // Dominic Raab // Simon Richards // Jason Smith // Harry Snook // Toby Stevens.

Big Brother Watch brings together a collection of essays by experts in fields affected by the increasingly authoritarian nature of British culture – in a country so illiberal it’s almost as if normal life is becoming unlawful.