Subjects Archives: Education

  • Student protest

    University strikes: where do we go from here?

    On February 22nd the University and College Union (UCU) called for the beginning of a nation wide strike in response to Universities UK’s (UUK) attempt to shift of the Universities Superannuation Scheme from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution pension.

  • "Taylorism" by Lars Plougmann

    Willetts the conqueror (part 4): audit culture

    This reserve army provides an increasing number of desperate and mostly unionised workers to occupy the new, outsourced, deprofessionalised jobs while remind those lucky enough to retain work that they can be replaced if they dare to cause trouble.

  • Teaching by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

    Willetts the conqueror (part 3): human capital

    The following post is the third instalment of the multi-part review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Life’, you can find here the Introduction; Part 1 and Part 2. Parts 3 and 4 take a slightly different approach, diving deeper into the fundamental principles of marketisation, which centre on the conversion of qualitative experience and practice into quantitatively measurable outcomes, which can in turn become proxies for higher education’s exchange value.

  • We are students not customers

    2008 financial collapse all over again…? We need to understand the student loan speculation bubble

    For those who may have missed it, a major economic indicator emerged regarding student loan debt last week. Excessive debt, like student loans, has become one of the biggest barriers to current economic growth in the United States. On Thursday, March 1, 2018, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, appeared before U.S. Congressional representatives.

  • Eye of the snow storm.

    Willetts the conqueror (part 2): creative destruction

    Welcome to Pt. 2 of the multi-part critical Review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Education’. This part of the Review focuses on Willetts’ plans for so-called ‘alternative providers’ – a euphemistic term which should be read as synonymous with for-profit colleges and universities – and his reflections on wanting to see a British higher education (HE) monopoly rise up to compete with global HE mega-corporations.

  • David Willetts

    Willetts the conqueror: introduction

    Before Jo Johnson and Sam Gyimah, there was David Willetts. As the Minister of State for Universities and Science from 2010 until 2014, under the Tory-led ‘coalition’ government, Willetts oversaw the introduction of a market into the English higher education system – often referred to as ‘marketisation’.

  • Tiki Torch March

    DC school board member: ‘Feminists need rape’

    The Washington, DC Public Charter School Board oversees some 120 public charter schools in the nation’s capitol, serving more than 43,000 students. And one member of that school board, John Goldman, is an MRA with clear white supremacist leanings. He has admitted to having an alter ego, “Jack Murphy,” under which he posted to websites and participated in debates.

  • Mexico's First 'Seduction School', Rape Culture and Femicides | Analysis | teleSUR English

    Mexico’s first ‘seduction school’, rape culture and femicides

    On Sunday, the international press agency EFE did not have enough words to praise the not-even-that-new initiative of a Mexican “seduction school”, lamenting that this kind of workshop remains largely “taboo” in the country.

  • Safe spaces for colonial apologists

    The recent controversies about Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project and UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture” have both been defended on freedom of speech grounds. However, they are better understood as retrenching colonial thinking in universities.

  • Protest photo (Photo Credit: Amy Osika)

    Debt comes for us all

    “DON’T LET YOUR CHILDREN GO INTO CRIPPLING DEBT LIKE I HAVE!” I shout, as I and a group of students with SENS-UAW make our way to a major intersection just off Union Square. We wave signs, hoist our banner and merge into the crowd. We are protesting the new GOP tax bill, which will affect the lives of current, previous, and prospective students in critical and long-lasting ways.

  • David Harvey

    FreshEd #100: A Marxist critique of higher education

    To celebrate the 100th episode of FreshEd, I’ve saved an interview with a very special guest.

  • Berkeley 'Free Speech' week

    Limits on free speech

    Judith Butler asks what happens when free speech clashes with other basic values.

  • István Mészáros (photo credit: Carrie Ann Naumoff)

    Obituary: István Mészáros, hungarian Marxist political philosopher who taught at St Andrews

    István Mészáros, Marxist political philosopher. Born: Budapest on 19 December 1930. Died: Kent on 1 October 2017.

  • Shredded Grants. Union of Concerned Scientists.

    Trashing science in Government grants isn’t normal

    There is now a political appointee of the Trump administration at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), John Konkus, reviewing grant solicitations and proposals in the public affairs office.

  • Diane Ravitch

    ‘Public education is in a fight for survival’: Diane Ravitch

    The 25-year national gamble on charter schools has been a losing bet, resulting in a series of missed opportunities and creating a tragic distraction from what most education researchers agree are the real inequities underlying the so-called achievement gap, former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch said this week.

  • [Photo: Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, 1968]

    The effect of the whip: The Frankfurt school and the oppression of women

    Stuart Jeffries on the Frankfurt School’s absence of women and the points of contact between the thinkers associated with the Institute für Sozialforschung and theorists of feminism.

  • Making Black Lives Matter in our schools (Damon Davis)

    Making ‘Black Lives Matter’ in our schools

    How do you kill Mr. Phil and nothing happens?” According to parent Zuki Ellis, this is the question students at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in St. Paul were asking just a few days into summer. On June 16, the Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile, or Mr. Phil as students knew him, was acquitted on all charges.

  • Why Should Schools Have Salad Bars?

    Another privatization fail: 5 things you don’t know about school lunches (but probably should)

    One thing is clear: school lunches have a long way to go, and there’s no simple solution in sight. As school districts struggle to balance costs with meeting federal nutritional standards and other requirements, students are left to weather the storm with lackluster food choices that may not be having the positive effect on their mental and physical health that educators and parents want—and are certainly not having the tastebud-pleasing effects students hope for.

  • General formula for capital

    Political economy for radical lawyers

    The latest issue of the London Review of International Law features an interesting review essay by Robert Howse, in which he makes the case for progressive international lawyers attending to the discipline of economics and the insights that can be gained from it, in particular from what he sees as more progressive economists. Howse’s essay […]

  • Boycott Koch Industries

    Stealth attack on leftish scholar?

    “The ‘culture war’ against higher education has been an astroturfed conflict, a well-funded propaganda campaign bankrolled for decades…. Conservative’ figures from the business world (there is nothing conservative about unfettered capitalism that commodifies everything and makes ‘the market’ the arbiter of all moral questions) have funded a decades-long attempt to delegitimize higher education in the eyes of American citizens.”