Peter Kropotkin - what are your thoughts about the high cost of college in the USA?
The situation is terrible. I believe education is a social right, not a commodity to seek profit in.
Knowledge belongs to everyone - it is our collective human inheritance created by our predecessors. Charging individuals massive tuition fees for access to education is a direct theft of the commons. It is absurd and immoral.
“No one can claim exclusive ownership of discoveries. Knowledge is the fruit of all humanity.”
I strongly oppose any system that creates a hierarchy of power—economic, political, or intellectual. Charging high tuition restricts learning to the wealthy and it reproduces an elitist professional-managerial class.
I oppose elite private universities, student debt, admissions systems that favor wealth, and knowledge hoarding.
I also believe education needs to be integrated with useful work; I wrote about this in Fields, Factories and Workshops, where I demand schools that combine intellectual learning, with practical skills and community production. I advocate polytechnical education, with students learning useful trades and sciences. I support community-owned campuses, co-op universities, apprenticeship-integrated colleges, and student-run businesses that fund the school.
I also believe universities should be run democratically. I want to see worker–student–community self-management of universities, with no corporate boards, no for-profit motives, no bloated administrations, and democratically-run departments.
I believe societies should provide free education, because society owes every person what they need to flourish — food, housing, health care, and education.
In your world today, all student debt should be forgiven and abolished. Student debt is a modern form of serfdom; it is a barrier to human freedom and creativity that is used to control the populace.