Dissecting the Media Spin on
the Montreal Protests for "Free" College Tuition
The CBC recently ran a story entitled How a Student
Uprising Is Reshaping Quebec by Jennifer Clibbon consisting of interviews
with two prominent francophone journalists and a political scientist, which is
available at:
The interviewees have ascribed to the student protesters
near-hero like status. While the
student protesters are portrayed as being incapable of doing wrong, the
government of Quebec is portrayed as being incapable of doing anything
right.
I plan to first dissect this apologia for the student
protesters in order to show how completely ridiculous this entire CBC article
really is. After demolishing some of
the fallacious arguments made by the three interviewees, I will argue that these
student protesters are actually conformists calling out to the government of
Quebec to enslave them further.
If these students think they are fighting for "freedom" and
"rights," then they are sorely mistaken.
The article paints the students as being ultra-modern,
cutting-edge, world- and media-savvy, and on the cutting edge of technology,
which differentiate them from their old and outdated elected leaders. One interviewee goes so far as to assert
that the students are "better placed than their elders to imagine what
kind of education system our society needs to face the challenges of the
future." To further this point,
the article stresses how the youth see no future because of the dominance of
the older generations who will consume most of the tax revenues in the form of
health care costs and pensions. In
other words: the students are the
future while the elected leaders are the out-of-touch past.
One of the most glaring problems with this past-future or
conservative government versus progressive students dichotomy is that the
student protesters have not offered one innovative, cutting-edge, or
modern solution to the education problem in Canada. If they were really revolutionaries "fighting the
Establishment," they would be offering us solutions such as privatizing
education in order to re-establish competition and choice in the education
system or they would be demanding that the leviathan bureaucracies and
teachers' unions be smashed. With such
private solutions, the student protesters could instead peacefully negotiate
the price of their education with various and competing service providers. But
no! Our revolutionaries, far from being
original thinkers daring enough to challenge the status quo, seem to be simply
recycling the old worn out ideas of the Syndicalists. The CBC article mentions that the student protesters use strikes,
boycotts, and picket lines and that there has been "violent actions on
campus against those who actively oppose the strike." How is this any different from the
definition of the Syndicalist approach advocated by George Sorel who wanted to
launch, under the name action directe, tactics such as riots, strikes,
general strikes, and sabotage? How this
can be called an "accelerated education in political culture" is
beyond me. If education is any sign of
civilized behavior then what we are witnessing is certainly the behavior of the
uneducated.
The media certainly enjoys portraying the student protests
as a spontaneous uprising of these young individuals. I have heard it used before by other Quebec
media sources and, unsurprisingly, this CBC article also mentions "the spontaneous
demonstrations." What is
rather humorous--one might say ironic--about this is that the term spontaneous
ordering is one of the most famous terms in economics of F. A. Hayek. But why on earth would a Hayekian term be
used to describe what these student protesters are doing? The sweet irony here is that our
anti-neo-liberal protesters--and if you ever watch CUTV they just love to
mention "neo-liberal" interminably--are using a term that is
neo-liberal!!! Don't our
"accessible" education freedom fighters know that Hayekian
economics--the evil neo-liberal economics that they hate so passionately--is
all about the study of the spontaneous--of what the student protesters
allegedly do!
The CBC article also tries to portray the student protesters
as receiving a "crash course in rights and freedoms." Unfortunately for these student protesters,
even rampant grade inflation is not going to save them from failing this
course. What "rights" have
these students learned about from these never-ending nightly protests? Their "right" to use the coercive
taxing power of the state in order to provide them with a "free"
education paid for by the extortion of the vast majority of other people who
clearly oppose this plan? Their
"right" to shape the national identity, whatever that is supposed to
be? I suppose that is their supposedly
collective "right" to deny the individual his or her right to shape
his or her life however he or she sees fit.
Their "right" to "build a different world" without
first getting the explicit consent of all the other people affected by the
imposition of their grandiose plan?
Their "right" to set up picket lines and infringe upon the
egress rights of their fellow students?
Their "right" to unilaterally impede upon the use of private
property and to deny the owners the ability to earn legitimate incomes from the
use of their own property? Their
"right" to spout off the fallacious economic theories that they
learned into their introductory political science course, which then somehow
entitles them to demand that taxpayers pay for more of this
"education"? Their
"right" to the "new world" of social democracy? What rights have they learned? Nothing!!!
Not one. The most basic
characteristic of a society is the right to freely exchange. Nowhere in this article do these students
call for free exchange. Instead, they
place demands upon people to give them what they want at the end of the
government's gun and then have the temerity to claim that they are "not
slackers."
Now, if they remain ignorant of rights, are they at least
conversant in the idea of freedom? Do
they know what freedom is? To
understand freedom, one must begin with the insight that aggression is unjust. When the state beats, shoots rubber bullets
at, harasses, and intimidates the peaceful protesters, is this not an act of
aggression against the bodies of these peaceful protesters? Yes, it is!
But what then do these student protesters want? They want free tuition! But who will pay for this education? Certainly not the students, they want the
government to pay for it all. But where
will the government in Quebec City get this money from? Will Ben "Helicopter" Bernanke
make a special trip with his helicopter to Quebec City in order to rain money
down on Jean Charest in order to solve his budgetary problems? Certainly not! The government in Quebec City will go to the taxpayers of Quebec
and force them to pay for something they do not want. Even the CBC article says that they do not want to pay for
this. "Against the students and
their allies," we are told, "there is a significant part of Quebec
society that doesn't support the protests (and the accompanying violence) and
approves of the increase in tuition."
So, it is wrong for the government to use aggression against the
allegedly peaceful protesters, but it is acceptable for the students to use the
aggression of the state's power to tax people against their will in order to
enrich themselves. Maybe the problem is
that the word "hypocrisy" has been confused with the word
"freedom"?
The reason for all of this confusion is that the CBC article
assumes throughout that education is actually the "real" issue
being debated here. The debate has been
framed in terms of "access to education" with comments claiming that
"higher education [is] a vehicle for economic and social
'emancipation.'" The simplest way
to reply to this is to point out that education is a phantom--it does not
exist in our public system. In her
important contribution to the history of education, Charlotte Iserbyt saw this
problem right on page one of her massive study concerning the Deliberate
Dumbing Down of America. She
writes: "the philosophies of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wilhelm Wundt, and John Dewey et al., reflect a total
departure from the traditional definition of education." Traditional education is as dead as a
Tyrannosaurus Rex. Moreover, in his
1931 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, Albert Jay Nock was already
lamenting the fact that education had already gone the way of the
dodo and had already been replaced by the "imposter system," i.e., training. So whatever these students are demanding of
the taxpayers of Quebec, it is certainly not education because education
does not exist today. What does
exist is the government's monopoly on training.
So what then do these students want? What these
students want is to be enslaved. To
make such a claim is certainly shocking and rightly so. They have failed to learn from one of the
greatest political philosophers of all time, Étienne de la Boétie who wrote of
the mindset of these Quebec students in his famous work The Politics of
Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary
Servitude. La Boétie warned the French
of his day of the dangers of tyranny when he observed that people are trained
to adore rulers. It is
fairly easy to see this parrot-like training of students in introductory
business courses. The economy is in a
depression, what should we do? The government
should intervene and spend! Too many
marketers are unscrupulous, what should we do?
The government should intervene and push some sort of
"social responsibility" agenda!
Prices are rising too quickly, what should we do? The government through its central
bank should intervene and slow down the rate of new money supply creation! The government has all the answers. The right answer to every question is the
government knows best. To put this
in terms that a teenager will certainly get:
the public "education" system is indistinguishable from the
system imposed by the Movementarian leadership on Edna Krabappel's
classroom. Do you really want to be in
a system in which Bart Simpson gets every answer right because the answer to
every question is "the Leader" did it?
In conclusion, training has nothing to do with
"education"; training has everything to do with maintaining
the status quo, i.e., of locking in one ruling group. To call for more public "education," i.e., to call for
more training is, in essence, to call for more rulers, more conformity
to the parrot-like memorize and regurgitate system, and more tyranny over the
minds of men. This is not a system that
encourages the development of an original mind; this is a system that produces
trained automatons. If these students
really want a lesson in rights and freedoms they should ponder this
question: why do you want to uphold a
monopoly system--a monopoly over your mind--when monopoly is the
very antithesis of the freedom you supposedly are seeking?
NEIL M. TOKAR
Niagara-on-the-Lake,
Ontario
June 5, 2012
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