THE SPHINX
9
Waste of time or pivotally important?
Adele Halsall From Monday 27th February onwards, the Guild rather quickly became transformed in front of our very eyes. Walls suddenly covered in repeated faces that would soon be extremely familiar to us (if they weren’t already); not being able to sit
at a table and eat lunch before sweeping away the piles of flyers that littered it; seeing clusters of students sporting themed t-shirts in support of their candidate of choice...perhaps even some Guild events being interrupted with candidate speeches to plug their own campaign (conveniently or inconveniently, depending on how you look at it). It’s the same stuff that comes around this
time every academic year, and whether we’re impartial to it or not, it’s undoubtedly one of the most crucial moments in our university calendar. It’s the Guild elections, of course. Two weeks later, after an excellent effort from each of our candidates and their campaign teams, Sam Butler was proclaimed the triumphant winner last Friday, the 16th, and will be planted firmly in the Presidency hot-seat for the upcoming academic year. Joining him will be new Vice Presidents Maggie Hayes, Chidinma Nwokoro and Tom Bee. Meanwhile, in the election for Student Trustees, Martin Poile and James Telfer came out on top, whilst Bob Sutton, Maggie Hayes, and Charlotte Nichols will be representing our student body at the NUS conference in April, ensuring that our views shape the national agenda. But what does it all mean? For those actively involved in political events at the Guild, and probably also a specific presidency campaign, there’s a whole world of incentives and matters of importance to deal with. With the Guild traditionally a place which students at the university can rely on for accurate representation, learning support and extra-curricular activities and social events that compliment their degree, one assumes the essential purpose of the Guild Elections is to make a change. But is change really possible in this current climate? Leaving that aside for a moment, what about those within the student body that don’t really keep up with how the running of the guild is managed, and furthermore, don’t care? During the campaigning period, LSFilm presenters went out into the campus streets to conduct brief interviews with students at random to discover just how much they knew (or cared) about the impending elections. What we saw was that very few people seemed to know what the
James Margeson
A quiet revolution is taking place in the back rooms of universities. Next year, freshers will wander cautiously into their first lecture, not as citizens enjoying a universal right, but firmly defined as consumers purchasing a product. This is euphemistically referred to within the echelons of university management as ‘the changing education landscape of the UK’. The men wielding a metaphorical JCB are David Willets and Vince Cable, co-authors of the Higher Education White Paper and the ministers responsible for vast cuts in teaching grants with the attendant raising of the fee cap to £9000. These are only the latest in series of moves over the last decade from successive governments, slowly but surely pushing for privatisation of our universities. At the heart of the matter is a battle over what higher education is for. Higher education (HE) has operated for the last century on the principle of generating knowledge through research, and disseminating it to students, thereby benefiting all of society. Students gain skills and knowledge, but crucially develop critical thinking. A more educated society benefits everyone; economically, socially and culturally.
current SROs have actually been doing, or, to a lesser extent, achieved. This is of course no reflection on the efforts of the SROs themselves; in my opinion, it is simply more likely that a) many students are in fact apathetic about the goings on within the Guild, or b) aims and progress of the Guild are perhaps not as well publicised as they could (or should) be. Or a combination of both. It’s quite ironic that whilst some people were ambling around in blissful ignorance of, or in apathy
“Is change really possible in this current climate?” towards, this spectacle-bound campus event, others were spending their days whizzing around campus stressfully organising and managing campaign plans, whilst others still were going all-out to cover every aspect of the elections they could and deliver the lowdown to the rest of the student population; whether it be in film, or in print. I too was once one of those apathetic people. Last year, I did care about the Guild and how it was run (it has of course played a huge part in my time at university in ways I can’t even begin to list). But somehow I viewed the elections as being somehow separate to what was going on. I saw the posters, the many eyes following me as I passed through the halls; I glanced at many flyers; I found the array of t-shirts entertaining. But I guess I never believed that whoever was going to be in charge the following year was going to have a massive effect on my time within the Guild. As long as I still had a place to eat lunch, practice with my band and meet with my favourite societies, I was set. Of course these things didn’t change as a result of 2011’s election results, but I have learned this year that there
are way bigger fish to fry. Being on the student council this year has opened my eyes to the magnitude of issues there are to actually deal with in regards to perfecting every aspect of the student experience. Campaigns (from international to local) and fighting higher education cuts have seemed to be high up on this year’s list of priorities for the S.R.Os. Can we say their presence and their efforts have truly benefitted our Guild? Such a question is down to individual opinion, but we cannot rule out that change may be a mere fantasy for hopeful leaders within student guilds and unions everywhere. Talking to a friend of mine, Band Society coPresident, Liverpool Pulse Society founder, and fellow student council m e m b e r, L e i g h - A n g e l B e v a n expressed her disdain at the way the Guild is run by the elusive powersthat-be; the higher staff that run and work for the Guild. Speaking of our recent President, she stated, “Maev McDaid is probably the most proactive and passionate activist ever to make presidency, yet even she can’t break the constraints enforced by the Guild, and make the changes we wish to see.” Her views made me wonder...are we dealing with circumstances we can’t control? No doubt there is always another side to the story when evaluating a leader’s apparent success or failure. And so, with this in mind, are Guild Elections still relevant? I believe Sam Butler will do well as next year’s LGoS President. His genuine, seemingly holistic approach to major student issues and openminded attitude are sure to be valuable assets within a place so easily governed by non-student orientated goals. Joined by ambitious power-woman Maggie Hayes and Chidinma Nwokoro, the only international student to have been elected, I personally feel quite hopeful for the welfare of Liverpool’s university students next year.
The quiet assault on public education This basic philosophy is the underpinning principle on which free higher education funded through general taxation was based. In recent years however, a different radically different agenda has been creeping in. David Willets views education exclusively in terms of career prospects, and the job that students gain at the end of it. This logic produces the ideological justification for tuition fees and student debt. A degree is a capital investment in your future earnings. The problem is that now nearly half of all young people go onto some form of HE. The assumption that a degree will vastly improve future earnings is increasingly misleading. By their very nature high paid jobs are exclusive and limited in number. “The cake is a lie.” In the USA, where this ideology of education has dominated for some time, the phenomena of ‘subprime’ degrees are beginning to be observed. In those cases, the graduate does not
earn enough to service their loans after graduation. In one extreme example, people leave university with a nursing degree that does not qualify the student to practice as a nurse. That such a system is unsustainable should be patently clear, and this is where, bit by bit, the government is taking us.
“This assault on the education system is not exclusive to H.E” The quiet assault on education is not just confined to HE. Education Minister Michael Gove has been vocal in his plans for history at secondary school. In a speech back in 2010 he called for students to learn about our “island story” as a “connected narrative”, as opposed to the skills based approach we currently have.
At the time Tom Devine, professor of history at the University of Edinburgh, rightly accused Gove of promoting “history as chauvinism”. Notorious reactionary historian David Starkey goes further than the Tories, demanding schools use the History curriculum to enforce a “monoculture” that immigrants must “assimilate” into. Conservatives view education as a means of depositing ready formed knowledge and narratives into students’ heads, with the ultimate aim that they gain the skills necessary for work. Educationalist Paulo Freire described this as the 'banking' model of education, depositing knowledge into empty vessels. By this model education is used to enchain students, moulding them into a shape that fits the world as it is, and getting them used to uncritically accepting facts and narratives. Ultimately we are faced with a stark choice about what education is and who it is for. On the one hand is an
unsustainable system that treats education only as a financial asset, to serve the world as it is now. The alternative is critical, or “emancipatory”, education. In this conception it is not the teachers’ jobs to simply deposit knowledge, but to promote critical understanding. This view of education enhances students as autonomous individuals, and prepares our population for possible futures, not just the world as it currently stands. It is clear who benefits from the two approaches. The first benefits employers, allows private firms to make money from an education and generally serves to perpetuate the financially unstable and ruthlessly class stratified society we have today. The second throws the benefits of education open to all of society, so everyone can have access to learning. Or, to borrow a slogan from the student protests of 2010, “education is not an asset or business or a privilege; education is a right.”