As the economic crisis deepens across the world the ruling class throughout Europe is launching a fresh offensive against education as it tries to squeeze working class students for as much as they’ve got. In April education ministers from all over Europe met in Prague to announce the success the of the Bologna process: a Europe wide plan to further open up public education to the pillaging forces of the market. (https://communist.red/bologna-process.htm)
The stated aim of the process, when first announced in 1999, was to create a common market for European education. The idea was that there would be a standardised system of qualifications throughout the continent making it easier for students to work and study in foreign countries. That sounds all very well, we support students having the maximum possible opportunity to study abroad and better themselves by being able to get work in other countries. It’s hard enough to get Scottish qualifications recognised in England, let alone in France or Germany! However, Bologna has been the bourgeoisie’s code word for counter reform and privatisation.
In recent months students and workers across Europe have began entering into a new wave of struggles as one government after another has unleashed attacks on educational provision as part of the so called Bologna process. A recent article in the Economist revealed starkly how the ruling class have used the cover of Bologna to roll back the gains that have been won over decades of struggle: “Governments embraced Bologna… to give cover for reforms (read counter-reforms) they wanted anyway. Shorter more work related degrees appealed to the Germans, keen to stop students hanging on for years at the taxpayers’ expense. In France, changes to university financing have been called ‘Bologna’. In Spain ‘Bologna is the excuse for introducing fees for Masters degrees.” (Economist 25/4/2009)
The Marxists in Spain, France, Austria, Italy and Britain have played an active role in these struggles and fully support their escalation whilst opposing any moves to hinder the educational opportunities of working people or attacks on workers in education. However, these struggles cannot be viewed in isolation from the capitalist crisis. It is only by understanding the role that education plays under capitalism that these struggles can be brought to a favourably conclusion.
Education serves ruling class
Under capitalism education for working class people serves the needs and purposes of the ruling class to train a workforce able to perform the ever more complicated tasks required of them. We need to remember that free and universal education is a relatively recent right afforded to working class people for just over a century in Britain. This was gained in the immediacy by pressure from the emerging British labour movement and the wider needs of British capitalism to have a better skilled and disciplined working class capable of dealing with ever more complicated requirements of industrial production. It was the requirement of the British army to have competent soldiers able to read maps following disasters in the Crimean war that saw the initial push for education for working people.
As the productive forces have developed capitalism has the highlighted the requirement for an ever more educated and skilled workforce capable of playing a more specialised role requiring a higher level of technique and understanding; particularly with the massively increased use of computers in the work place. This is what the mouthpieces of the British bourgeoisie have called moving towards a “knowledge based economy”. What this means in practice is that workers are increasingly employed in white collar and service sector jobs that require a different kind of education. Paradoxically this has also led to a situation whereby swathes of the population are employed in low paid service sector jobs and do not enjoy either access to universities or the old skilled trades apprenticeships that may once have been afforded to them in heavy industry.
The organisation of education under capitalism, and in particular the high school system (as it is known in Scotland) prepares young working class people for the realities of the work place. The division of the school day into strict rigid blocks of time, obedience to a hierarchical management and the alienation of working towards an external reward (exam passes) all ingrain young people with the routine of working life. The structure of high school explicitly divides its classes between failures resigned to a future on the dole or in menial jobs and those supposedly destined for university and careers in management and beyond. From about the age of fourteen most working people’s destinies are already mapped out for them.
Anarchy of labour market
The anarchy of the labour market has led to a situation whereby large numbers of workers qualified to degree level are unable to find employment that uses the skills they have been taught. This demonstrates the rottenness of a social system where society and individual students put out resources, time and effort to gain a ‘good education’ only to see the fruits of this wasted as many never utilise what they have been taught at university. This contradiction will only sharpen as more and more graduates face the prospect of unemployment upon completing their course. In 2008, before the present crisis began to hit employment figures; University College Union has shown that unemployment figures for graduates from the 2006/07 year was already 5.6% in 2008 which was slightly above the national average for the period. (UCU 8 August 2008) This situation has resulted in an increasing number of people applying for places in post graduate and under graduate courses and has already resulted in 80 000 would be students missing out on places as 8.8% more people applied for courses according to the university entrance agency UCAS. Many people are applying for university courses in the hope of securing funding because they cannot find a job. This is particularly true of people applying for PHD and Master’s degrees aiming to find a way to support themselves after completing their initial degree.
The product of this situation is one whereby an already overstretched education system is being artificially brought to breaking point as thousands of people who are eager to work are unable to do so. This creates an environment of cut throat competition between an increasing number of applicants applying for a comparatively smaller number of places. When young people who want to work but cannot get a job go on to do yet another course out of necessity rather than choice their skills are not being utilised. Of course the blame does not lie at the feet of applicants attempting to get by for another year but with a system that requires mass unemployment and force the workers to pay for the bosses’ crisis.
So what has the government’s response been to this situation? An increase in educational provision perhaps? A job creation scheme for young people? Far from it. In their wisdom they have decided that at the current time the best way to deal with this situation is to launch one attack after another on British universities. Naturally it is ‘the new universities’, largely rejuvenated polytechnics, which appear to be bearing the brunt of this. This is demonstrated by proposals to sell off large parts of infrastructure and lay off hundreds of members of staff at Strathclyde University in Glasgow and the Metropolitan University in London. Already both of these proposals have been swiftly met tby the resistance of students and workers who at the Met have gone as far as to occupy their university and take strike action respectively.( https://communist.red/video-student-occupy-london-met.htm) The Strathclyde proposal clearly shows the direction that the Bologna process aims to put education in. The university is due to become focused on research rather than on under graduate teaching and the faculties outside of engineering are to be merged. Most privately financed research for engineering comes from arms companies; in practise this proposal amounts to an attempt to turn Strathclyde University into a research subsidiary for private capital. (https://communist.red/bologna-process-hits-glasgow.htm) The marketisation of universities can only be at the expense of teaching provision, particularly for undergraduates. Universities should primarily be places for study and objective and socially useful academic research. With weapons companies already sponsoring computer science and engineering courses how long is it before the likes of BUPA are sponsoring ‘shortened work focused’ medicine degrees?
This process is not confined solely to universities and is part of a general attack on the public sector and within education in particular. In recent years the government has privatised schools wholesale under the banner of city academies, allowing groups including private companies and fundamentalist Christian nutcases to set the curriculum in schools, with government support. Alongside this the Public Private Partnership in Scotland and Private Finance Initiative scheme in England, Wales and the north of Ireland has seen private companies cream off the profitable parts of schools through maintaining and running school buildings at rates that could be easily under cut at a higher quality by the public sector. This also results in a situation where the workers at a given school are divided due to maintenance staff having a different employer to those directly employed by local authorities making it more difficult for unions to exercise collective bargaining rights.
More attacks due
In the current climate even these attacks may look mild compared to what could follow as the recessions sees wide scale cut backs in public sector funding. Already there have been campaigns against proposed school closures in Edinburgh and Aberdeen over the last two years, with ongoing struggles in London and Glasgow. These campaigns have radicalised working class communities and have seen parents and school students thrown into social struggles to save their education. In Glasgow in particular communities previously divided along sectarian lines have been united in a campaign of school occupations and large demonstrations that have exposed the opportunism of the Labour council. (https://communist.red/glasgow-schools-occupied.htm)
Marxists oppose any attack on the provision of education for working people and any attacks on the conditions or employment of workers in education. Capitalism is unable to give working class people a full and comprehensive education. If we are lucky most working people are able to enjoy being students for a small part of their lives before being faced with the daily drudgery of the dole or the workplace. Humans are naturally inquisitive and want to learn. The current struggles against the attacks on education throughout Europe are having a radicalising effect on a whole generation of young workers and students and must be supported. As these struggles take on a logic of their own many of those involved will start to question the system of education and capitalism as a whole. The poor quality of education that workers are granted now can only be solved when the working class takes its destiny into its own hands. Only an education system that is ran by and in the interests of working people and not the capitalist class can give us the education that we deserve. Such a system would take advantage of a shortened working day and free education available for all ages to deliver workers a high standard of learning throughout their lives.
