27.03.1997

Education for the struggle

A revolutionary view of students and education was presented by the SLP’s parliamentary candidate, Stan Keable, at a public debate between candidates in Brent East on March 19.

Sitting MP Ken Livingstone, like his Tory and Lib-Dem challengers, saw investment in education as serving the dual purpose of improving Britain’s competitiveness in relation to its European rivals and securing social stability. Educational opportunity can divert those at the bottom of the social pile from the danger of rebellion into the safe avenue of struggle for personal advancement. While Livingstone and the Lib-Dem, John Hunter, blamed Britain’s relative decline on its comparative failure to invest in people, Tory Mark Francois vainly championed Britain’s economic success.

To fund increased educational spending the Lib-Dem offered all-round tax increases, while Livingstone referred to tax corporations and incomes above £40,000pa, but admitted he would have supported a larger increase in council tax to fund education. “We are an undertaxed society” he declared.

In contrast, Stan Keable proclaimed the need for education which will produce freedom fighters, not loyal subjects and obedient servants. The working class must overcome all oppression in order to liberate itself, he said, but this task will fall above all to young workers who have not yet been ground down by the system.

All young people over 16, he argued, should be on a minimum wage of £275 a week, whether in work or in education - then try talking to them about how their education should be run and how the world should be run! You would have to listen, instead of drilling them with moronic obedience. He put forward a number of demands for democracy in education:

• No privileges for the wealthy, no elitism: abolish private schools; free comprehensive education from nursery to degree level for all who want it.
• The right for students to organise and strike, including school students unions.
• Students’ right to full maintenance from the age of 16, regardless of parents’ income or wealth: ie, a minimum income of £275 a week.
• Schools and colleges should be run by elected representatives of students, teachers, local working class organisations and, where appropriate, parents.
• No separate schools based on language, religion, colour, ethnic group, etc.
• The right to be educated in your mother tongue, and the right to assimilation, to learn and be educated in the majority language.
• Smash the Job Seekers Allowance and all government slave labour schemes: for real training under workers’ control.

Either we strive to produce cogs in the mechanism of an oppressive class society, he said, or fully rounded human beings forged in the democratic struggle for human liberation.

Ian Farrell