Student finance

I was near the student protests (or riots if you prefer Sky's epithet to the BBC's) in Whitehall today, briefly. There were loads of police and reporters around, so the controversy is certainly making work for them.

The issue of whether education should be funded by the general public or by the individual direct recipient of the education is a false dichotomy. A lot of the cost of education is the cost of tuition, because we have to keep tutors in work in the current system, and we have to withhold education to keep the price of it up so people can make money out of it - because they have to because of the system.

The internet is already bursting with tons of educational materials. There's a lot of rubbish there too, which is a problem, but it should not outweigh the powerful advantage of the good material.

In a resource based economy, all education would be distributed freely and widely. Lectures would be streamed live round the world and recorded for future use. And because people would not be doing pointless, empty work (or socially destructive work) they'd have more time to absorb education, and share their own knowledge and skills. Technology would be fully exploited to help achieve this.

Take money out of the equation conceptually, just for a moment, and it is easy to see how the goal of education is personal growth, the promulgation of knowledge and understanding - that kind of thing. But acquiring money becomes an end in itself, just as it does in every field. In the current system if the true aims of education can be delivered while money is being made that's fine - an exact parallel of the role of money in many other  elements of life - but making money comes first, because of its position as the economic life blood on which everything else depends.