We should ALL support free college, because a college education should be an EDUCATION. [View all]

[Ken Burch]

With massive tuition and student loan usury, college is no longer a place, for most young people to actually learn anything-in the sense of actually having their minds and souls open to the truths of the world.

Instead, the college experience is reduced, for the most part, to gaining white collar job skills. If you are struggling to pay for college, you have to get through as quickly as possible and learn nothing but what you need to memorize to pass the courses.

Students can no longer have the chance to explore ideas, learn critical thinking, examine the beliefs they were raised with, examine themselves and their own suppositions.

This means that college-as-education, college-as-soul-growth is no longer an option for the vast majority of young people going through our educational institutions.

As progressives, we have an obligation to challenge this state of affairs, to stand for access for knowledge for all and, if necessary, redistribution of knowledge from the few to the many.

We can only achieve that if we make university education accessible and affordable for all once again, as it was in the 1960's.

We owe it to all who will come after us to make this stand.