Why State Funding For Education? Grants for first-degree students are now too low to sustain a student through a three-year degree course without covert top-ups from parents or other private means. So a student whose family is poor - however capable that student may be - cannot obtain a degree.

And now, as my own daughter has found, for master's degrees there is no longer State support at all. Though invited by her university to do a master's degree - and desiring to do so and become a lecturer herself - she simply could not proceed. She was forced by finances not only to forego the career for which she was undoubtedly best suited, but had to take the first job she could get as a filing clerk in a mental hospital. She could not even afford the time to look for a more suitable and fulfilling job, and being unavailable during working hours, she is cut off from the opportunity of embarking on a full-time systematic search for one.

Clearly, the capitalist State has only two uses for education. The first is to provide capitalist enterprises with oven-ready human resources with the right types of skill with the right levels of knowledge - and no more. The whole system of formal qualifications is designed specifically for capitalist employers to be able to grade and classify their cogs without having to know what they know. The second, of course, is to mould the opinions and consciences of the young to conform to those of the establishment.

Education is certainly not primarily for the edification and enlightenment of the individual. Nor is it for the general good and enhancement of society. The political establishment certainly do not want any of the academic elite to stem from the lower ranks of society. They wish to avoid unwittingly to give birth to a cauldron of intellectual Red Lefties who may ultimately orchestrate the collapse of capitalism.