The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred,
feel themselves born to ride us (Eric Hoffer)

When I was a student in the mid 1980s, the war cry on campus was “Education is a right, not a privilege!” True, it lacks the snappiness of “Ban the Bomb”, but this seven-word slogan tells us everything we need to know about the philosophical character of my cohort, the fag end of the baby boom generation.

The right to education means this: that no law shall be enacted that prevents a person from obtaining an education on the grounds of, say, his or her sex, ethnicity or religion. So, we can’t pass a law making it illegal to educate Jews, Catholics or women. If we did, to be educated would indeed be a privilege: “a special advantage…granted to or enjoyed by an individual, class, or caste…and exercised to the exclusion or detriment of others.”

Now, I’m pretty sure that no such law has ever existed anywhere in Britain. It has been a crime to teach certain things, but not, as far as I know, to teach certain people. Nor had the government of Margaret Thatcher announced its intention of enacting such a law. So what were the students so worked up about?

It transpires that the protesters had quite a different notion of what is meant by the ‘right to education’. They were outraged by Keith Joseph’s attempt to introduce a parental charge for university tuition fees (in order to fund a modest expansion in the science budget), and the right they were asserting was, in fact, the right to receive their education for free; or, to be more exact, the right to receive their education at other people’s expense.

All universal rights, the rights we possess by dint of being human, are negative rights. That is, they are exemptions from being subject to certain acts – from being murdered, coerced or robbed, for example. It is characteristic of such negative rights that we exercise them without making any positive demands on anyone else. Thus, it is only negative rights that enable us to stick to the principal that we are free to act as we choose, provided we don’t infringe the freedom of others: it’s only negative rights that are equal rights.

The right to pursue education is such a negative right; the right to receive a free education is not. Educations do not grow on trees, and if they did, those trees would have to be tended and pruned. Somebody has to pay. And if we are permitted by law to compel other people to pay for some good that we desire, are we not enjoying a special advantage to the detriment of those people? Indeed we are! So, if they’d been honest, the students’ placards would have read: “Free Education is Our Privilege, and We Want to Keep It.”

That’s even less snappy, but does avoid mendacious equivocation. What it doesn’t do, however, is allow pampered young men and woman, a-quiver with self-righteous indignation, to disguise their unassailable sense of entitlement to the fruits of other people’s labour by using the romantic rhetoric of class warfare. Spoilt brats? No, we’re heroic freedom fighters manning the barricades against privilege and oppression!

The sad thing is that many of them felt they were. The intellectual and moral vacuity of their position never once bothered their pretty little heads. Or mine. So much for the benefits of university education.

Keith Joseph resigned from politics a year later, his plans thwarted not by the antics of kuffiyeh-wearing students, but by those of their Volvo-driving parents. He was one of the most intellectually rigorous of the thinkers who influenced government policy in the eighties, a genuine radical who opposed privilege and vested interests. And the students, like the true reactionaries that they truly were, hated his guts for it.

When the Labour Government of Tony Blair finally passes the Higher Education Act, universities will be able to charge up to Ł3000 per annum in fees. Many of the bright young things who opposed tuition fees in the name of equality now advocate tuition fees in the name of equality.

Well, that’s great, isn’t it? Doesn’t that mean that they’ve learned their lesson? Doesn’t that mean that they now understand that taking from others to pay for one’s goodies is wrong? Won’t the taxpayer now enjoy an ‘education dividend’ ?

Not a penny. Having charged the poor sap for building and filling the trough, they’re now going to charge him when his kids stick their noses in it.

They’re still in the saddle, and there’s a long way yet to ride.

Heigh-ho, Dobbin, Gid’yup!