UK Student Protests: 15 Year Old smashes generational apathy, is generally smashing

from anticuts.com

Suddenly I'm compelled to go teach in Britain. Watch the video, and come with me.

This kid (whose name might be Ady, or Rodney **But is actually Barnaby Raine--big 'ol hat-tip to  J.Z.!) comes from Wednesday's London Tuition rise protests (in which he was "kettled"--a word you might not know, but will probably recognize from somewhere) to speak passionately, eloquently and incredibly intelligently about how writing off the iphone generation is probably a bad idea--because they care, and they keep speaking up.

He also drops some sly jabs like this one:

 "I thought I was going to go down on lunch break and be back in time for lessons. Perhaps I should have known they put the guy in charge of the G20 in charge, perhaps I should have been more concerned with my life than for whether I was gonna get down for lessons, but when I tried to get out and I was told it was a sterile area, by police officers standing and not letting anyone out, I thought 'well that's why we need a University education, if we don't get one we end up in police uniforms'."

from anticuts.com

I don't make it a habit of routinely ragging on police--I know they're generally only as good as their institutions allow them to be, and each cop is different-- but considering their part in the ongoing fight for civil rights in the UK, this kid doesn't sound wrong. Least of all with 23 kids in London hospitals with their heads bashed in right now, from the very protest this kid was at. Sounds a lot like my Toronto.

The BBC gives us a breakdown of what the hubbub is about--in short, a 3x increase in tuition in the UK that would bring it to about 9,000 pounds a year. Which is insane.

UK Gov arbitrarily decides that tuition's going to triple...

photo of the shitstorm from Guardian.co.uk

...and then there's a riot!
Worse still, Monarchist Charles and his Steed were caught in the fray. Someone threw paint at their car.

A blow-by-blow liveblog coverage roundup can be found here, at the Guardian.uk's website. It's pretty intense, I recommend a reading.

To quote everyone's favourite internet philosopher: 'What does it mean?'

Well, it means that student debt in the UK is going to be so absurdly high it'll either systemically halve the populations of post-secondary students, or it'll crash the economy as people sell their kidneys to pay for their English Lit degrees.

It also means that the entire House of Lords and Commons looked the other way at weeks of student protest and begging from a powerful electorate body.

Hmm.