As Canadian post-secondary students continue to see tuition fees rise, voices of dissent ring louder. But the larger student unions want to take the idea further; forget fee reduction, they say, it’s time for free education.
All the major student unions and governments at U of T currently espouse free education policies. These include SAC (Students’ Administrative Council), APUS (Association of Part-Time Undergraduate Students), GSU (Graduate Students’ Union), and ASSU (Arts and Science Students’ Union). Now, led by representatives from each of these groups, students are working to establish a national act that will make free university education a right in Canada. They gathered last Thursday at a forum held to discuss the act.
The plan is to model this lobbying effort after that which created the Canada Health Act. While the fight for universal health care was not easy, Chris Ramsaroop, a part-time student and student governor, notes that it is now “a cherished value.” Indeed, health care is closely linked to education policy. “To have a healthier society, our society should have full [access to] education,” added Ramsaroop.
As with the Canadian health care example, demands for radical policy shifts are often dismissed in their early stages. But the GSU’s Elan Ohayon believes that “when they finally come through, they become some of the things that we value the most and defend the most.”
The meeting also included a discussion of the ongoing struggle for free post-secondary education in Canada. Early demands for increased access to education took flight after veterans returned to the country after World War Two. The mid-’90s saw other attempts to advance free education, often consisting of collaborations between faculty and students.
Free U of T, an initiative begun in 1999, is a novel approach to bringing free education to campus as well as an incubator for education policy activism. Another example of free education initiatives is This Way Please, an alternative, free orientation week introduced in the fall of 1999 that emphasized non-corporatism.
The student groups involved with this project hope to educate the U of T student body about the Free Education Movement. “We’re looking for new ideas and new strategies,” Ramsaroop said. According to Ohayon, discussion of free education rather than fee reduction “really shifts the entire dialogue.”
