I have never experienced such a rush of loving emotion towards Lower Saxony in all my life. The last German region to charge university tuition fees has just scrapped them. This makes university education, across their entire country, free. And if they can do it, why can’t we?
It’s not as if they had been charging fees for all that long – as in England and Wales, charging was a recent experiment; and as in England and Wales, it turned out to be an awful idea. They asked for only a fraction of the £9,000 a year that many British students pay (our fees are now the highest in Europe, by far), but German students protested, and in some places took their protest to the courts and won; some of the fees were not even lawful.
You know all the arguments about social mobility, and how an expensive system helps the rich, so I am not going to repeat that here. My fear is more what happens to young people’s brains when you tell them that education is a business, and that nothing comes for free. I recently met a 19-year-old who had decided against going to university, because he is busy building himself into a brand on social media. He’s already got thousands of followers, and has worked out how many more he needs before he can monetise them, by selling them branded stuff. He’s calculated the cost of getting a BA, and the debts it would entail, and decided that it makes more financial sense to work on getting up his follower numbers – which he can do for free, on his phone.
And who can blame him? All he’s ever heard is that university is an expensive investment in your own earning capacity, a rather bossy equation that prompted him to do the maths in the first place. Nobody told him that university might be about expanding your brain so that delicious, sexy thoughts can live in there. So that fireworks can shape the way you take part in the world.
It’s not as if I loved school myself. Until we read Measure For Measure, and I found out that Shakespeare had written lines such as, “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know”, I hadn’t really understood that schools were places to teach you to look inside yourself. I didn’t know that Midsummer Night’s Dream was going to be about the seething brains of lovers and madmen, drugs and lust. I hadn’t guessed that the concept of covalent bonding, forced on me in a sweaty physics lab, could eventually become as beautiful as poetry. And that, even though I dropped out of university, messed around, changed courses and started again, the ideas I learned there would change me.
My friend teaches at an academy. The place where they serve the lunches – you know, the big space once known as the canteen – is now referred to only as a “restaurant”. The apparel formerly called a school uniform, which the students still wear, is “business dress”. The teachers have been given a handbook of new-speak terminology to memorise, so they don’t make the mistake of calling something by its actual name. (Sorry, I don’t mean teachers: I think they’re “learning consultants” now. I can’t remember exactly: by the time my friend had got to this bit of the story, the blood had drained from my head because I was banging it against the wall and screaming so loudly at the ghost of George Orwell that I couldn’t hear.)
My own local academy doesn’t let any student touch another student, ever. This is great if you want to make sure nobody gropes or punches anyone, but a bit weird if someone wants to high-five a friend because they aced a test, or put their arm around someone who’s crying.
When did we turn education into an unfeeling business? The Lib Dems will always be remembered as the party who promised to scrap tuition fees, and who lied. And if it was Labour who introduced them, it was the Tories who pushed the numbers even higher. Miliband says he may reduce fees by a third, if we put him in power, possibly… let’s wait and see. I’d vote for a party who got rid of them altogether. I’d campaign for them in the streets.
No wonder teenagers want to avoid the debts and start selling themselves instead. It’s time we followed the German example – let’s ditch the fees.