STUDENTS! Protest the cutbacks, defend your right to an education!

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Education-from kindergarten to university level—is facing serious cutbacks. The crisis has resulted in huge class sizes, courses dropped from the university programs, and laid-off teachers and other school workers. Eighty percent of public four-year colleges have raised their tuition during the last year.

In California, a typical four-year course of study at a state university now will take five years to complete because of the scarcity of required courses. Whole programs, staffed by part-time untenured faculty, are threatened. At San Francisco State University, programs facing complete demise include music and women's studies, to name just two.

California's state universities and two-year community colleges are implementing big fee hikes at the same time that courses and services are being cut back. The state university fees have risen 60 percent in two years, and another 40 percent increase is contemplated.

For the past several years, universities have changed their hiring policies so that a huge proportion of faculty members are hired year to year on a part-time, temporary basis. In other words, these faculty are easy for administrations to lay off.

Public elementary and secondary school administrations use this same policy of trying to operate schools using more substitute and temporary teachers hired with one-year contracts and fewer full time, permanent employees.

Some big urban school districts, such as Chicago and San Francisco, use teachers hired on such a tenuous basis especially in the ghetto schools, adding to the educational insecurity of poor children. (For more THE SOCIETY FOR LEGISLATION VANCING VOCATIONS FOR ECONOMICALLY REPRESSED YoUTH... •..IF YOUR BUSINESSWOULD LIKE TO CONTRIBUTE, SEND YOUR CHECK TO... information on the disastrous educational effects of such administrative "cost-cutting," see Jonathan Kozol's excellent book, "Savage Inequalities.")

Funds are wasted The United States is still the wealthiest country in the world. Billions are flushed into the military machine while social ser...IS LOBBYING HARD TO GET THE SUB-MINIMUM WAGI THROUGH CONGRESS... vices of actual use to people-like education and healthcare—are being slashed. The problem is that the capitalist system is in trouble, and in order to shore up their troubled system, the corporate bosses are trying to boost their profits at the direct expense of working people.

Thus, the poor are steadily assuming the entire tax burden while the wealthiest 30,000 Americans pay little or no taxes. The corporations' share of the tax burden has dropped from 50 percent in 1945 to 6.2 percent in 1983. At the same time, real wages have declined, and all social services have been cut or threatened with cuts.

For example, new welfare schemes that cut payments for families that have new children while on welfare or for families who remain on welfare over six months, are now in place or soon to be, in several states, including New Jersey and California. And this attack on welfare coincides with increasing unemployment.

The education cuts must be seen in the context of the general capitalist crisis. What kind of a social system puts development of weaponry ahead of the development of the mind? What kind of a social system permits 1 percent of the population to own over 80 percent of all wealth and property? Obviously, a system that must be replaced.

But in the meantime, isn't there some course of action that students can take to defend their education? We think the answer to this question is "yes."

Students made a difference During the Vietnam War, students across the United States, and indeed all around the world, played an enormous role in mobilizing the population to oppose the war and help bring it to an end. Students used the campus facilities to provide open educational forums on the war. These were the early teach-ins, where college professors debated representatives of the U.S. State department in front of huge audiences of students, many of whom participated in round-the-clock sessions.

Later, as the war escalated, the campuses became the organizing centers for whole communities. Campus facilities were used to produce banners, posters, and flyers to mobilize the community for anti-war action. Students were the vanguard of the movement which, in a brief time of five or six years, grew to encompass the entire population.

During the Gulf War, these organizing techniques were repeated, on a smaller scale, on many university and high school

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..S.L.A.V.E.R.Y., P.O.BOXI; WASHINGTON, D.C.