Education - a right or a privilege?

I filled in a questionaire on Facebook the other day, you may have seen it. You answer a range of questions and it tells you which political party you most agree with. Its like a blind taste test to show who you should probably vote for...

There was a question, 'Should university fees be scrapped?'. There's room for discussion and debate about all of the questions, it's really nicely done. Someone had started a discussion with the comment 'No. Education is a privilege '.

What? A real person just said that? A privilege that you Sir are entitled to, but children born into households with less money than you simply aren't? Because? How can any human being think they have a born right to advanced education, but the guy down the road doesn't, purely because his parents don't have much cash.

Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Stephen King were all born into poverty. Steve Jobs had to drop out of college because his Foster parents couldn't afford it. Imagine what he'd have achieved with your privileged education.

My friend, maybe you simply need the education, that's why you have been given that right by birth.

Maybe the rich and powerful elite really do believe their cannon fodder servile classes shouldn't have ongoing study. Maybe if we think for ourselves we are a threat, that's why we shouldn't go to uni. Maybe that's why our children are being taught like robots to repeat only the exact correct answers, parrot-fashion

State Education is being run into the ground. Teachers are leaving in droves, those who stay spend half the lesson trying to work out how to share 7 iPads between 29 kids and the other half frantically ticking boxes through bloodshot eyes.

Plays, trips and clubs need supervision, but the teachers are filling out forms to say that they filled out all the forms and preparing lessons where they teach our kids alien words to pass an exam they'll only take once.

All our young people are stressed, depressed but music lessons and drama classes are being scrapped. No-one does pottery or crotchet, it's not core curriculum. No time, no money.

We don't teach them gardening or cookery, their food will be made by ALDI. We teach them 'Nutrition', so by 8 they feel fat and ugly and by 15 they are experts at Anorexia.

Artificial sugar which increases our chances of dementia threefold is being written into the law books as a replacement for the evil sugar, just as we realise we need real saturated fat in our diets or else we stay hungry whatever we eat.

We teach our kids that exercise occurs at the gym instead of just bloody walking home. And we even allow their parents to park right outside school after their 3 minute commute because 'you are allowed 5 minutes on a double yellow line to drop off'.

We're replacing real life and sanity with a processed pile of artificial reality. And we all pay the very rich for that privilege. The fuel barons, the artificial sweetener companies, the think tanks full of millionaires who decided testing 7 year olds was more important than making volcanoes and icing biscuits.

It all went a bit wrong and we're all sharing memes about running away to an island, living off the land with a bunch of our mates and not having to worry about politics and taxes and housing.  We already live on an island. Our mates are already here, but we're idiots. We made life super complicated and stressful and now all we really want to do is go back to the days we could claim a cave and catch something furry for tea.

I blame you Mr Privileged. You and all who think like you, because clearly you lot with all the money to make the decisions which affect all of us, you don't seem to be making the most of your privileged education.

There's an election  coming up. You might think it's boring, but it's important for you and for your kids. It always is. Whoever you vote for will probably be a millionaire businessperson anyway, but please vote....

Maybe just ask their opinion about whether university is a privilege your kids deserve before you vote, just to be sure...