Students are right to march against the markets. Why can’t education be free?

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

After the 2008 crash, the most sensible reform would have been to make the financial system more like education, not vice versa

There is a certain type of joy only felt the first time one makes history, and you can’t really describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Yesterday about 10,000 young people from across the country discovered what it’s like.

19 November 2014, the date of the Free Education march, will surely be remembered as the start of a new student movement. Without the support of any major party or institution, abandoned even by their own National Union of Students, organisers nonetheless managed to mobilise thousands, including teenage college students and schoolchildren, supported by a smattering of veterans from the mobilisations of 2010.

Still, unlike the occupiers in 2010, this was not a defensive action, not a call to halt the cuts; students were calling for a complete reversal of the entire direction of higher education policy – and by extension, the direction this society as a whole has taken – for the last 30 years.

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