The Forum for Public Education (in Israel)
Preface (by O.G.)
According to the neo-liberal ideology,
any aspect of human life is subject to the rationale of capital-gain
and should be administered accordingly.
In my opinion, at best, this claim reflects
a reversing in the roles of goals and instruments:
the main aspects of human life (like education and culture)
are of intrinsic value that can not and should not be subjected
to the rationale of capital-gain, whereas subjecting them to this
rationale results in degenerated forms of human life.
Specifically, education and research can not and should not
be administered as production of goods and selling of merchandise.
One of the civil bodies trying to counter-act (in Israel) the application
of the aforementioned neo-liberal approach to education
is the Forum
for Public Education,
which places special emphasis on the state of higher education.
The concrete trigger to the creation of the forum was the
financial crisis of the higher education system in Israel,
intentionally caused by the government with the aim of forcing
this system to adapt to the rationale of capital-gain.
As an immediate response to this crisis, the forum demands
a drastic change in the governmental policies regarding the
funding of the higher education system and the reversing
of various harmful reactions that the system itself developed
in response to the decreased governmental funding.
The highlights are
- Increase the governmental funding of the higher education system
to a level significantly above the one before the budget cuts
of the last decade.
- Reduce the student tuition fees, rather than increase them
(as suggested by a recent ideology-biased governmental committee).
- Create a significant number of new positions to compensate for
those lost by the recent budget cuts and the increase in the number of
students.
- Re-evaluate all structural-academic decisions taken in the last
decade: In particular, stop the "outsourcing" of basic teaching,
the cuts in T.A. positions for graduate students, and the cuts
in investment in libraries and research equipment.
- Object the attempt to fractionalize the academic system by various
differntialization mechanisms, and regain academic control on all
decisions regarding academic matters.
Some (Hebrew) notices of the
Forum
for Public Education
are posted below.
[Last update: June 2008]
Back to Goldreich's homepage
or to Oded's personal web-page