Student debt is a reality in the realm of post-secondary education in Ontario and across Canada.

It is no surprise that students are responding to increased tuition pressures by creating coalitions, organizing within established student groups, supporting advocates, and congregating peacefully to share their perspective with government. The methods being used by the students to bring about change in public policy are fundamental constructs that have been shown effective time and again if one looks to historical political movements.

Thus, it was disheartening to read the description of student action expressed in the Feb. 9 article (Day of inaction) by Mr. Noel Semple-“demonstrations on the other hand, work by dumbing-down issues, demonizing opponents, and exploiting crowd psychology.” Not only does Mr. Semple trivialize a historically important aspect of democratic society as we have known it for the past forty years, but he also goes further to question the motives of the student activists as serving agendas other than the fact that we all pay much more tuition now than students in the past. Mr. Semple concludes: “students voluntarily go into debt to fund their generally-lucrative degrees.”

This somewhat tongue in cheek statement likely angered many readers because of its obvious fallacy-that no reasonable student would ever “voluntarily” pay thousands of dollars.

Why do we do we choose to pay so much tuition and make so many sacrifices, you may ask? The simple reason is that we want to learn.

There is no “pot of gold” at the end of the line luring us to pay thousands of dollars and eat innumerable macaroni dinners along the way. The recompense for the economic hardship that students decide to courageously confront is the knowledge and experience that we hope to gain from the academic opportunities and dedicated professors at our great university.

Students want to learn, but as tuition continues to rise the economic challenges are mounting. Yes, we need to build a stronger OSAP, create more opportunity for minority students, and develop programs to encourage talented students from underprivileged backgrounds to attend our university; but we must also not forget that to sustain student participation in post-secondary education tuition must be accessible across the board.

If students do not stand up to express their concerns about rising tuition, governments will continue to not take notice of the economic hardship faced by students at the post-secondary institutions across our nation. In such a scenario, the future of publicly funded post-secondary education is bleak. It is up to us to take initiative, to take control of the future of public funding of post-secondary education, and to do so by using the methods of public discourse that have served previous generations students well.