As a student myself, by the time I've left this Summer, I could be at least £20,000 in debt, no thanks to the creeping privatisation policies we've experienced in Post Thatcherite/Blairite (is there much difference?) Britian, where successive goverments seemed to have been intent on following the US model, regardless of whether this is going to benefit future genrations or not, and completely missing the point of what eduction is supposed to be about anyway - investing in the future, not shortchanging it with shortsighted goals.

I've only one thing to say to Thatcher, Blair and Bown - live in my shoes for a while and see if you can on my income!

... would be good methinks

but can you really put a price on a media studies or sociology degree?

Can you put a 'value' on Fine Arts training?
Can you put a 'value' on Philosophy training?
Can you put a 'value' on Creative Writing training?

Can you put a 'value' on a creative thought?
Can you put a 'value' on the right to be able to do these things?
Can you put a 'value' on the way these activites enrich our society (and therefore humanity) as a whole?

Would you ask a Moslem or Christian what 'value' their prayers might be?

Sometimes in life the desire to do something has little or nothing to with it's financial cost or it's marketable merits.

You don't have even have to be religious to realise the world is not all about the financial 'value' of things.

i nearly choked on my lentils and tripped over my sandels when i read the comments above

instead of paying top up fees for useful degrees like golf course management, sociology, media studies and surfing they should offest these by increasing fees for worthless courses like physics, chemistry, medicine and engineering

i mean what benefit are they this country needs more artists like damien hirst and social workers to take kids away from their family and give them to homosexuals who they dont know

lets start a protest

Clearly this teacher hasn't done their history homework, because Human Culture has never just been about what makes money - at least up until the current disproportionate hegemony of multinational corporations, intent on enslaving us all given the chance.

What makes any culture memorable and unique in the long run is not always their deeds on the battlefields or in the boardrooms, but the public works that are left behind. Libraries, Mosques, Temples, Cathederals, sculptures, literary works (spoken and written), and more recently musical works.

In other words, the public works that comprise all the activities we are disparagingly told from an early age in a post industrial world are not 'proper jobs'.

In fact, quite often the only way we DO know of the great deeds of this or that general on the battlefield is because someone built a memorial to them, sung about them, made a painting about them or wrote their story down, none of which is possible unless you live in a society with some educated and skilled people living in it.

I wonder if by NOT having an educated population such things could be still be achieved?

I suspect not.

Sarcasm gets you nowhere 'Teacher' - it's not big and it's not clever.
It's a shame you see fit to use YOUR education to attempt to belittle others, beause it doesn't work.

How about showing a little more solidarity with students instead?

Anyone demanding that they receive free education is merely demanding that someone else has an obligation to pay for it.


Taxes pay for most higher education. Every worker pays taxes. Not every worker goes to university. This immature, naive call for 'free education' is merely a call for higher taxes.

You forget there IS free education available.

It's called life, learning from one's own experience therein and learning from each other, something governments would do well to do more of.

Alas they do not.

Instead they come up with stange and interesting notions of the ilk that it is somehow more 'economical' to send people to their deaths in the Middle East for Oil (spending billions of pounds doing so), and it is somehow more 'economical' to bail out Banks who have gambled away other people's fortunes (spending billions of pounds doing so) than it is to actually invest in fellow Human Beings, by putting those wasted billions into something more useful - like a decent education system.

Now I think Pete may have taken a wrong turning, so I'd better help him find his way back.

I think you might want this site:
 http://www.conservatives.com/

...Not indymedia!