Unis offering cash bonuses for students because, as BBC put it, “this year it’s a buyer’s market”. If you’re looking for why the country is going backwards, start at the monetisation of education. No Aristotelian improving the self to improve the world. Just a path to a salary.
In Greece, my parents’ generation used to tell us: “να σπουδάσεις να γίνεις άνθρωπος”. It means “you study to become human”. And, no, this is not elitism, because it doesn’t mean degrees or letters after a name. It means a curiosity about and interrogation of the world around us.
Until education is seen as a worthwhile thing with inherent personal and societal value, we will continue to drown in this tsunami of proud ignorance, lack of critical thinking and anti-intellectualism; continue to struggle against the notion that opinion is equilibrant to fact.
Start by scrapping all fees. A young person’s education is not a transaction. It is an investment by the state in its human component. The reaching of a society as a whole for a better future. /END RANT
P.S. Isn’t “equilibrant” a magnificent word?
