class-struggle-anarchism:

spitzenprodukte:

“FREE STANDING COLUMN” - This A5, double-sided photocopy from the student protest on November 30th 2010 was the first thing produced by the group that was later to become Deterritorial Support Group. Some of the strands of ultra-left rhetoric are clear but it has a much more tabloid tone. The drop-shadows remained. The term “Wolf-Eyed replicant” to describe Nick Clegg was coined by China Mieville I think.

I like the bit that says:

You don’t think that after all our “mickey mouse” media studies lessons we can’t see through your ,mock indignation at our violence…

hehe

jolly-dolly:

socialismartnature:

Affluent Students Have an Advantage and the Gap Is Widening | NYTimes.com

Low-income students with above-average scores on eighth grade tests have a college graduation rate of 26 percent — lower than more affluent students with worse test scores. Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference in the share of affluent and poor students who earned a college degree. Now the gap is 45 points. The gap has also grown in college entrance rates and spending per child on tutors, sports, music and other enrichment activities. Related Article »

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Confirms what we already knew, but still noteworthy. Our system does not reward the “smartest” and “most industrious” but simply the most wealthy. Even when a rich student and a poor student get the exact same test scores, the rich student is 6 times more likely to complete college than than the poor student.

And the poor student is more likely to be burdened with debt in the form of student loans, thus keeping them poor. Essentially, every time the not-rich move a step up the ladder, the wealthy saw out a rung.

(via resmc)

truth-has-a-liberal-bias:

It’s been three years since my only son Jermaine died. I’m trying to get past my grief — but I relive my son’s death every time I get a phone call from American Education Services asking me to pay back his student loan.

When Jermaine went to college to study music production, I was more than happy to cosign his student loans — he dreamt of making a better life for himself and I was proud to be able to help him do that. But no one told me I would be forced to pay even if he died.

…..

Nobody could have prepared me for the loss of my only child. Sometimes it’s impossible to get out of bed in the morning. I have been trying to work to make the loan payments, but in addition to grieving for Jermaine, I now need to help support the young son he left behind.

While he was alive, Jermaine made his loan payments. Jermaine never had an opportunity to use his education and I can’t use it either.

Jermaine had three student loans when he passed away — two from the federal government, and one private loan. The federal loans were forgiven within a month of his death.  But American Education Services refused to forgive their loan.

Thank you so much for your help.
- Ella Edwards 

PLEASE CLICK the link to sign the petition to ask American Education Services to forgive the loan.

I have no words for this.

(via titotansey)

reuters:

A riot policeman shoots a student protester with a pinball gun as he is arrested during a protest against the government to demand changes in the public state education in Santiago, September 27, 2012. Chilean students have been protesting against what they say is profiteering in the state education system. [REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado]

PHOTOS: The most-compelling Reuters images from around the world

(via myheadisweak)

socialismartnature:

Major victory for Quebec students! Tuition fee hike & anti-protest bills withdrawn! « Education Activist Network

Students and their supporters throughout the Canadian province of Quebec are celebrating the ousting of Liberal Premier Jean Charest, the withdrawal of Bill 78 and most importantly the freeze in tuition fees. This victory comes after six months of student strike involving more than 190 000 students.

Quebec students who already paid the lowest tuition fees across North America were faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Even if the planned increase had gone ahead, Quebec students still would have pay less than in any other Canadian province. Why? Quebec students have a strong tradition of fighting for free education since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. And if you fight you can win!

During the six month –long strike many the demonstrations held on the 22^nd of each month reached up to 500 000 protesters. However, it was the roughly180 local unions organised in CLASSE which carried the fight from day to day shutting down the Port of Montreal, ministerial meetings and nearly all classes in post-secondary education across the province.

In the face of state repression, the use of tear gas, shock grenades, the arrest of thousands of protesters, and riot police in college corridors, students didn’t buckle but instead called upon workers and the neighbourhoods to join in nightly pots and pans protests, the casseroles. Charest’s unpopular Bill 78 acted as a catalyist for the student movement to turn into a popular movement.

(via philosophy-of-praxis)

Whereas the average state tuition in the early 1980s ran around $8k (in 2008 dollars) for four years, most Millennials are forced into the mid-five-figures range for a second rate public university education. (Pell Grants—when the Boomers were attending college—covered 77% of the cost for a four-year public university. For us, the figure is 35%.) And it’s a servitude from which we can never escape. Forget bankruptcy. Default on a student loan and the government will garnish your wages until they get it all back, plus interest. They can even go after your social security money, off limits for all other debts.

The actual cost of universal free higher education is negligible—estimated somewhere between $15 and $30 billion. That’s a relatively tiny pinprick from the federal budget that could transform higher education overnight into a truly public good. And yet the US government is already spending roughly that very amount on higher education. But they’re not using it to pay our tuition. They’re using it just to prop up our heinous student loan system—through tax deductions and credits. They’re bending over backwards just to fuck us and collect.

(Source: azspot)

(Source: chomsky.info)

spitzenprodukte:

“THEY TALK ABOUT VIOLENCE” I collected a whole bunch of leaflets, propaganda and flyers during the 2010 student protests. I think I got this flyer at the second or third demo after Millbank, produced by one of the anarchist affinity groups which operated at the time.

(via class-struggle-anarchism)

(via azspot)

ilovecharts:

via Kurt White

NYU Professor Andrew Ross in a fascinating essay for Daily Beast. Read more. (via moneyisnotimportant)

Commoditized education is a perverse phenomena that anyone who cares about the right to education should oppose.

(Source: kiplinger, via moneyisnotimportant)

NYU professor Andrew Ross, who last November helped launch the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, in a piece that asks if it’s time you stop repaying your student loans. (via newsweek)

Good piece. Personally I don’t think it’s going too far to say that consumer debt these days is a financialized form of indenture. Student loans, credit cards, car leases, consumer loans, subprime mortgages — these are flagrant hustles designed to funnel people’s life energy into the ruling class’s vampiric upward redistribution scheme for half their lives or more, so that they live to pay their financial masters rather than living life for themselves. That’s some pretty fucking sinister shit.

(via zuky)

(via resmc)

shortformblog:

Under the radar in the U.S., but reaching a big scale: Quebec’s “grand awakening”

Canada’s big protests: Perhaps a bit under the radar for Americans, but last week saw a new peak for major student protests in Quebec, upset with Premier Jean Charest’s plans to raise tuition rates 75 percent. Quebec has long been home to public protests, but the current set, which has been going on for weeks, appears to be hitting a bit of a peak, as talks have broken down between the two sides, and protesters have slowly widened their reach into other issues. Even if the tuition issue is solved, it probably won’t roll back the overall movement. “This is no revolution, but instead a confrontation with a government that has given up some of its moral authority,” suggests University of Montreal philosopher Christian Nadeau. The Globe and Mail has a great roundup/thought piece about the “confrontation” and its gradual spread into other Canadian cities. (photo by  Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)

socialismartnature:

(Photo) If schools are little more than factories, it’s time to form a union. It’s time to strike.

(via myheadisweak)