An angry students writing on a wall in London during widespread protests at London's decision to triple university fees
Americans watching the Egyptian Revolution might remember our own history and think about the demonstrations of a few weeks ago in Britain.
Students in Britain took to the street to protest the huge increases in tuition under the new British Conservative government. Those increases are well below the levels now being brought to America’s once “public” college system. We are already at a point where it is less expensive to attend Princeton than to attend the UW!
Our Tea Party conservatives love to wrap themselves in the paraphenalia of the founders … perhaps it would help these new patriots of they understood that the revolution began in Boston, led by British students, graduates of my own high school … Boston Latin School.
BLS was founded in 1635 as a public school because the British colonials of Boston knew they needed to provide education for their kids comparable to what the mother country provided for its upper classes. That education fed the forming minds of John and Sam Adams. To the South, Tom Jefferson would later describe the founding of another public school, University of Virginia, as his greatest achievement.
The incitement to revolution was a result of literate Americans reading the pamphlets and circular letters circulated by the Sons of Liberty, all BLS students.
Seems like something is missing in the Beck University approach to education.
Read more about privatization of the American public university.