Bloody Students

Student unrest is back! The spirit of '68 lives! Well that's probably a bit strong but nice to see the streets of London paved with spotty protestors again after all these years. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11726822 Quite takes me back to the days (well day really) when I marched under the NUS banner through the streets of that London. I was telling some of the youngsters at university about it and it reminded me just how far we have come in the three decades that separate my two degree courses.

Now nobody has ever called me a socialist and lived to tell the tale but I took to the streets back then in support of the NUS campaign for full grants for all students, regardless of means. Grants, yes bloody grants. They used to pay us to go to university and the amount you got depended on how rich your folks were. Never mind fees, we didn't have to worry about those. No, we got a grant to live on. Oh and we were taught in groups that could be managed without crowd control skills. A golden age? That would be a tad strong but it does make you think doesn't it. My thought process back then at the dawn of Thatcherism (befuddled of course by the drink I bought with my grant) was something like this:

• public funding of  further education was a good thing, a privilege which some of us abused but one worth preserving
• public funding should be applied even-handedly - we were old enough to vote and to fight in wars and it was insulting to be rewarded/punished for the poverty/wealth of our parents 
• a social contract existed which conferred on me certain privileges which came with matching reponsibilities. Quite possibly this last one was rather old-fashioned and Pooterish of me but it was how I had been brought up, also incidentally how my (state) education encouraged me to behave 

Which of these doesn't hold up today? I'm serious please tell me, and also tell me why we can't have a sane debate about precisely how many people we want to pay to go university (if any - I'm persuadable on this point I suspect). Current political debate is intellectually bereft which really is a bugger given how many of the people in it have had a university education. The whole issue makes me very sad. Does anyone other than me talk of a social contract any more? Is it the same as the Boy Cameron's bloody Big Society?

There is hope despite all this bollocks. I thought as much as I left the pub at lunch time after an illuminating chat about all sorts of guff but mostly about why I am now a post-structuralist having come out of my radical feminist phase, which, let's face it, lasted longer than anyone expected. I've never been a marxist so maybe I should give that a go as well, particularly since it is now so unfashionable. That Roberts, what are we going to do with him eh? I'm the only man who drifts leftwards as he gets older. We finish with another question - who is that in the picture? He's my new hero. A gift voucher for the Overgraduate gift shop for the first correct answer.