50 Reasons For Free University Education As We Bequeath The Young A Dying Planet

By Dr Gideon Polya

(Gideon Polya, "50 Reasons For Free University Education As We Bequeath The Young A Dying Planet", Countercurrents, 19 March 2017: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/03/19/50-reasons-for-free-university-education-as-we-bequeath-the-young-a-dying-planet/ ).

Education is a basic human right and all education should be free for all. However the commodification and corporatizing of higher education has meant that free university education presently only obtains in about 25 countries, and the young are brainwashed into acceptance of fee-charging higher education. The present ruling generations should grant free university education to the young who are inheriting a dying planet. Below are 50 reasons why we must have free university education now.

1. Education is a fundamental human right. Learning has been crucial in the evolution of the behaviour of man (Homo sapiens) whether through selection of genes (DNA) or of memes (socially selected ideas and behaviours). Education underpins science-based personal and societal changes to maximize personal and societal health, happiness, dignity and opportunity as espoused by social humanists (democratic socialists, socialists, ecosocialists) , and accordingly all education should be free, whether pre-school (kindergarten), primary education (elementary school), secondary education (high school), tertiary education (university, technical training) or life-long learning. Indeed all education can and should be free. Education is regarded as a basic human right, which is why all developed countries make basic primary and secondary education free (although Educational Apartheid in some countries determines differential access to good quality education depending upon parental wealth, race or home location) [1-7].

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children” [2].

Article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child states in part: “1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular: (a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all; (b) Encourage the development of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational education, make them available and accessible to every child, and take appropriate measures such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case of need; (c) Make higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means; (d) Make educational and vocational information and guidance available and accessible to all children” [3].

2. All education, including higher education, can and should be free for all. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights demands free education for children and states that : “Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit” [2]. Article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child demands free education for children and that “higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means”. Once literacy, numeracy and access to libraries (conventional or on-line) are established, there should be no impediment to all education being free for all. Unfortunately class-, race- , ideology- and wealth-based greed has intervened to pervert and deny the fundamental demand that “All education can and should be free for all.” As outlined below, higher education can be very low cost and hence can be free.

3. Society needs experts but why should impoverished young pay for them? All societies and nations need to have a complement of expert scholars and scientists for variety of economic, health, national security and national prestige reasons. However, one must ask why impoverished, circa 20 year old undergraduate students barely out of childhood should have to pay for this complement of experts that disproportionately and immediately benefits the society-dominating, mature adult population and the richer and older citizens in particular. I started 4 decades of teaching at an Australian university in 1972. The reformist Australian Labor Government led by Gough Whitlam abolished university fees in 1974 but was removed in a CIA-backed Coup in 1975. Fees were re-introduced in 1989 by the pro-US, neoliberal Hawke Labor Government, but with the sop of a Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) enabling students to repay their education debt in small instalments when able to do so through suitably rewarded future employment [8]. Students were brainwashed into accepting the HECS system and I used to ask HECS-supportive students “You are so nice being willing to pay for the university system . Why don’t you also pay for the health system and defence as well?” The present endlessly mendacious, reactionary, pro-One Percenter, neoliberal and ultra-conservative Australian Coalition Government would like to see university fees rise (the average HECS debt is currently about A$20,000) but the Labor Opposition fulminates against the prospect of “one hundred thousand dollar degrees”. The decent and humane Australian Greens want to abolish university fees as did Democrat socialist Bernie Sanders and as do the American Greens and the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

4. Universal free education and minimizing preventable death. Education correlates with increased life expectancy. Thus on a global comparative scale, avoidable deaths (avoidable mortality, excess death, excess mortality, untimely deaths) is the difference between actual deaths in a country and deaths expected for a peaceful country with the same demographics (birth rate and age distribution) [9]. High literacy correlates with low avoidable death and avoidable mortality is almost zero in these prosperous, high literacy countries of Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), Western Europe, North America, and East Asia. However zero avoidable mortality on this global comparative basis also occurs in the poor but high literacy countries of Cuba and China, despite these countries having annual per capita GDP values of only about $7,000 as compared to $53,000 for Australia [10].

However, within prosperous Western countries having zero avoidable deaths annually on this global comparative basis one can determine that there are numerous preventable deaths from all kinds of notionally preventable causes ranging from adverse hospital events, smoking, and obesity to guns, suicide and homicide. Thus in rich Australia, rich Canada, the rich UK and rich America, annual preventable deaths total about 85,000, 100,000, 150,000 , and 1.7 million, respectively, as assessed on this “rich country comparative” basis [11-15]. Professor Sir Michael Marmot, president of the World Medical Association and director of the UK Institute of Health Equity, gave a series of ABC Boyer Lectures addressing the relationship between morbidity, mortality and social deprivation and stated "The link between deprivation of social conditions, ill health and crime is all too obvious in Australia" [16]. Thus there is a circa 11 year life expectancy gap between the impoverished and relatively poorly educated Indigenous Australian population and White Australians. Indeed on a global comparative scale the avoidable Indigenous Australian death rate as a percentage of population per year is 0.6% as compared to 0.4% pa for impoverished South Asia and 1.0% for impoverished sub-Saharan Africa but occurring in one of the world’s richest countries (per capita GDP $53,000 per head per year) i.e. about 4,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably from deprivation every year as compared to zero (0) White Australians on this comparative basis [9, 17]. Education decreases untimely deaths and dishonestly charging people for educating themselves is an obscenity that contributes to preventable death within societies. A major argument for university fees is cost recovery for service provision but this argument is not applied to cost recovery for life-saving medical services in countries like Australia, Canada and the UK with substantial, taxpayer-funded universal health care.

5. Charging fees for life-time social advantage from education suggests fees for life-time advantages from rich parents, beauty, intelligence, ethnicity etc. A further major argument for charging university education fees is that university graduates have a life-time advantage of higher income due to their education. This argument is beginning to lose traction as a Law degree becomes the new Bachelor of Arts degree in Australia, and as plumbers and electricians prosper without a university degree. However applying a huge life-time debt burden on university graduates (and university drop-outs) for this arguable advantage suggests that such life-time taxation could be equitably applied to people with the life-time advantages of rich parents, beauty, intelligence, or ethnicity. Thus, for example, in America it really pays big-time to be White rather than Black - 27.4 percent of African Americans are living in poverty; there is a $34,598 median income for African Americans versus $55, 257 for Whites; 15.9% of African Americans lack health insurance versus 12.8% of Whites; $75,040 average home value for Black Americans versus $217,150 for Whites; $154,285 average household assets for Black Americans versus $783,224 for Whites; 2 times higher unemployment rate for African Americans than for Whites since 1963; and African Americans are 8 times more likely to murder and 6 times more likely to be murdered than Whites [18].

6. Obscenity of taxing learning while subsidizing physical, sexual and intellectual child abuse. In Trumpist Australia an estimated circa $30 billion per year (equivalent to the defence budget) continues to be given in tax breaks and schooling grants to religious organizations despite an ongoing $500 million Royal Commission finding massive child sexual abuse by members of religious and government organizations. However the charter for this judicial investigation excludes a vastly wider sexual abuse burden in which it is estimated that 4.4 million adults in Australia (population 24 million) have been sexually abused as children. In America 25% of females and 10% of males have experienced childhood sexual abuse as compared to 34% of females and 16% of males having experienced child sexual abuse in Australia. The Australian Institute of Criminology and other experts have determined that in Australia 1 in 3 females and 1 in 6 males will be sexually abused as children [19]. Despite the supposed separation of church and state in the US , Trump America wants to go the Trumpist Australian way and subsidize home and religion-based mal-education of children. Australia has an Educational Apartheid system in which the 2 out of 3 children who attend poorly-funded state schools are disproportionately excluded from a good education, access to university, access to top universities and access to top professional courses such as Law and Medicine. However the privileged 1 in 3 of children attending state-subsidized, religion-based private schools are subject to the intellectual child abuse of being brainwashed into variously accepting anti-science religious claptrap, miracles, virgin birth, transubstantiation, creationism, intelligent design, misogyny, homophobia, exceptionalism, sexism, sexual guilt and the genocidal racism of the asserted right to invade, occupy, devastate and ethnically cleanse other countries [20].

7. Obscenity of taxing learning means students are paying for war, deadly corporate greed, and climate criminality. The rich US Alliance Anglosphere countries (the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) charge students huge fees for university education while committing trillions of dollars to the cost of war, corporate tax evasion and terracidal climate crimes. Thus the US War on Terror (actually a genocidal US War on Muslims) has been associated with a long-term accrual cost of $6 trillion just for the Iraq War and Afghan War and 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 impoverished countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity [21, 22]. Rapacious capitalism means that millions of American workers live as the “working poor” in dire poverty and 1.7 million Americans die preventably each year [15]. The rich US Alliance Anglosphere countries are among the world leaders in income-weighted annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution [23]. Students’ university fees are inextricably part of the wealth pool paying for deadly war, deadly corporate greed, and deadly climate criminality.

8. Free education can help minimize existential nuclear, poverty and climate threats. The 3 key, existential threats to humanity are nuclear weapons (that could wipe out all of Humanity), poverty (that presently kills 17 million people annually) and man-made climate change (that unaddressed could wipe out all but 0.5 billion of Humanity [9, 24, 25]. The informed young and future generations will have to solve these problems and free university education will accordingly help Humanity find the solutions.

9. Free University Education is the least we can offer as we bequeath the young a dying planet. The 2015 Paris Climate Conference achieved a consensus that a maximum temperature rise limit relative to 1900 of 1.5 degrees Centigrade ( 1.5C) was most desirable and that a universally-agreed catastrophic plus 2C must be avoided. However the world got to +1.2C in 2016, +1.5C will now be reached in 4-10 years, and a catastrophic +2C temperature rise is now effectively unavoidable [26-28]. Presently about 7.5 million people die avoidably (prematurely) each year due to carbon fuel burning and climate change - from the consequent deadly effects of carbon burning pollutants (7.0 million) or of climate change (0.5 million). This latter estimate of presently about 0.5 million climate change-related deaths annually may be an under-estimate because presently 17 million people die avoidably (prematurely) each year (half of them children) due to poverty and deprivation in the Developing World (minus China), with these impoverished, tropical or sub-tropical Developing countries already being severely impacted by global warming [9]. The direst estimates are that the death toll due to climate change could rise to 100 million such deaths per year this century if man-made climate change is not requisitely addressed [25].

The young and future generations have a daunting task of achieving a required draw-down of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) back to the pre-Industrial Revolution level of circa 300 parts per million (300 ppm CO2) from the present damaging and dangerous record level of 405 ppm CO2 that is increasing at a record level of 3 ppm CO2 per year [29-31]. The inescapable obligation that has been imposed on future generations can be described as an inescapable Carbon Debt – while conventional debt can be evaded by default, bankruptcy or printing money, Carbon Debt is inescapable because, for example, sea walls will have to be built or coastal cites will flood and highly productive deltaic lands will be flooded and salinized. Dr. James Hansen and his NASA colleagues recently stated (2015): “There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m [metres], and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 °C warmer than today” [32]. The total Carbon Debt of the world from 1751-2016 is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2 and, assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent [33], this corresponds to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. The world’s GHG pollution is increasing at a recently re-calculated 64 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent per year i.e. the Carbon Debt in increasing at $12.8 trillion each year or at about one-sixth of world GDP annually [34]. One notes that science-trained, Green-Left Pope Francis (controversial as a defender of the unwanted unborn) demanded in his 2015 Encyclical Letter “Laudato si” that the environmental and human cost of deadly greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution be “fully borne” by the polluters (i.e. by a Carbon Price or Carbon Tax that are desperately resisted by the presently dominant neoliberal climate criminal governments) [35].

Dr. James Hansen: “If we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty” [36 ] – yet pro-fossil fuels neoliberal, climate change denier, climate criminal and war criminal Trump has already signed an executive order allowing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Canada to Texas ("game over for the climate" according to Dr Hansen). Free University Education is the least we can offer as we bequeath the young a dying planet that may well be doomed.

10. Reading-based free education, and Nobel Laureate Patrick White on reading and the life of the mind. A crucial element of free, off-campus university education (and indeed of higher education in general) is reading the prescribed books and texts. I am reminded of one of the last speeches of Australian Literature Nobel Laureate Patrick White at the time (1988) of the Australian bicentennial anniversary celebrations of British invasion in 1788. Patrick White declared (in my recollection): “They are flogging camels from East to West and West to East and running from City to Surf and Surf to City. Why don’t they just stay home, cook themselves a nice meal, and curl up with a good book”.

11. Democracy requires informed voters but why should young have to pay to join? Western democracies have been perverted into Kleptocracies, Plutocracies, Lobbyocracies, Corporatocracies and Dollarocracies in which Big Money purchases people, parties, policies, public perception of reality, more political power and more private profit. Only an informed and resolute public can resist this corporate perversion of democracy. If anything, democratic societies interested in the survival of genuine democracy should be paying the young to educate themselves rather than dishonestly imposing a huge financial penalty on education. .

12. Social humanism demands dignity and opportunity for all but why charge the young for their birthright? The world is presently dominated by a greed-driven neoliberal ideology that demands maximal freedom for the smart and advantaged to exploit the natural and human resources of the world for private profit. This perverse ideology already kills 17 million people annually and, unrestrained, is set to destroy most of Humanity and the Biosphere [26-28, 32, 36]. A humane alternative to the neoliberal perversion is social humanism (socialism, democratic socialism, ecosocialism, the welfare state, Green-Left sustainability) which aims to sustainably maximize the happiness, opportunity and dignity of everyone by evolving interpersonal, intra-national and international social contracts [37, 38]. Sustainably maximized happiness, opportunity and dignity surely constitute a birthright of all young people which is achieved by education and hard work. This birthright should not be constrained or removed by discouraging or exclusionary financial penalties. .

13. 25 variously rich and poor countries already have free university education. Many countries, both rich and poor, have made tertiary education free for their citizens (and in some cases also for non-citizens) , the list including (GDP per capita in US dollars in brackets; UN data, 2014-2015): Argentina ($12,645) , Barbados ($15,429), Brazil ($11,387), Chile ($14,528), China ($7,617), Cuba ($7,274), Czech Republic ($19,470), Denmark ($61,294), Ecuador ($6,346), Estonia ($20,122), Finland ($49,678), France ($42, 802), Germany ($47,966), Greece ($21,414), Iceland ($52,048), Libya ($6,602), Malta ($23,281), Mauritius ($9,945), Norway ($97,226), Scotland ($24,060), Slovenia ($23,954), Sweden ($58,856), Trinidad and Tobago ($20,452), Turkey ($9,126) and Uruguay ($15,574) but not the Anglosphere countries of Australia ($62,290), Canada ($50,169), Ireland ($53,648), New Zealand ($44,189), UK ($46,461) and the US ($54,306) [1, 39, 40].

In addition, Nigeria ($3,203), university education is free for Science, Education & Technology students [41]. Some further countries provide university education that is very cheap from a Western perspective, namely Austria ($44,118), Belgium ($40,278), India ($1,614), Italy ($30,426), Mexico ($8,981), Spain ($25,865), and Taiwan ($22,263) In some further countries free university education is available based on means or ability e.g. Canada ($43,206; means-based free places in Ontario) and Russia ( $9,243; competition-based free places) [42].

14. Free or trivial cost of accrediting existing linguistic, technical and other skills. The US Alliance Anglosphere countries were founded on genocidal invasion and subsequent immigration. Postwar migration to the US, Australia and Canada brought many skilled people to new lives. Unfortunately in many cases their prior medical, legal, engineering or other qualifications were denied formal accreditation. However non-professional linguistic, technical and other skills were also denied formal accreditation. Thus a fluent Italian speaking brick layer with a deep love and knowledge of Italian culture, literature, art, music and history would receive no formal accreditation for his proficiency, but a young person attending a top, fee-charging university could part with $100,000 to achieve accreditation for proficiency approaching that of the uncredentialled Italian worker. Implicit in the notion of free university education is fair accreditation of existing linguistic, technical and other skills.

15. Tertiary education provision is vastly cheaper off-campus than on-campus. Once the need for a complement of expert scholars, scientists and other experts is separated from the need for education (see point #3 above), one can readily see that tertiary education provision can be vastly cheaper off-campus than on-campus. Thus off-campus university education can be essentially free by simply involving reading and addressing teaching materials, with qualifications established by expert accrediting examination. In contrast, full-time, fee paying on-campus involves huge loss of income, huge support costs and huge fees. Indeed fee-demanding off-campus, on-line education dishonestly ignores the reality that off-campus university education can be essentially free (see #16 below).

16. On-campus educators charge for on-line courses that can and should be free and accessible to everyone. Universities put their copyrighted lecture notes and other teaching materials on the web for the convenience of full fee-paying students. However such material should be available to everyone for free in the public interest, the more so when the university teachers are taxpayer-supported. All those running lecture-based courses in state-subsidized universities should be required to place lectures notes, a book/chapter/page-based syllabus, simple answers to model exam questions and other teaching materials on the web for free access for all, and provide minimum cost accrediting examinations that anyone can sit for free or for a modest, real cost-based fee.

17. Criminal rip-off – university fees can charge 100 times the actual cost of provision. Current on-campus undergraduate education can be provided at 10% of the current cost using part-time academic teaching staff (e.g. from other institutions, industry or from early retirement). Current on-campus undergraduate education can be provided at 1% of the current cost simply through provision by experts from public or private universities of minimum-cost, accrediting examination of student understanding of the top quality courses (Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs) put on the web for free by top universities like 157-Nobel-Laureate Harvard and 85-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The present 10-100-fold cost mark-up of accreditable, tertiary educational material is criminal exploitation when one considers typical retail mark-ups of only circa 5%.

18. Criminality in collusive 10-100-fold over-charging by universities. The present 10-100-fold mark-up of accreditable, tertiary education courses is criminal exploitation when one considers typical retail mark-ups of circa 5%. Universities are engaging in collusive 10-100-fold over-charging that should attract criminal prosecution by regulatory agencies e.g. the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in Australia (by way of example, the late billionaire Richard Pratt and his companies were fined a record $36 million for colluding in a price fixing deal with their chief rival in Australia's cardboard industry).

19. All that students should conceivably pay for is the tiny cost of expert accrediting examinations. All the teaching materials (books, chapters, documents, syllabuses) from all tertiary education courses involving universities or technical training should be put on the web for free access for everyone. All that students should conceivably pay for is the tiny cost of expert accrediting examinations.

20. Free accrediting examination of top Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from top universities. Current on-campus undergraduate education can be provided at 1% of the current cost simply through provision by experts from public or private universities of minimum-cost, accrediting examination of student understanding of the top quality Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) put on the web for free by top universities like 157-Nobel-Laureate Harvard University and 85-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). How absurd that universities and colleges lacking Nobel Laureates or failing to measure up to Harvard or MIT in this respect, should be so precious in guarding the written materials of their vastly less well-credentialled courses.

21. Reading for degrees via Reading Only Tertiary Education (ROTE). For centuries students at the top UK universities of Oxford and Cambridge (institutions presently having 65 and 90 Nobel Prizes, respectively) would “read” their degrees e.g. go up to Oxford to “read philosophy”. Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) or Reading Only Tertiary Education (paradoxical acronym ROTE) permit a student to study all the free course material off-campus and then submit themselves for accrediting examination for a miniscule, cost-recovery fee [6, 7, 43-45 ]. Numerous Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) or Distance Learning (DL) systems exist around the world [44].

22. Reductio ad absurdum re educated workers denied accreditation. Not only does the corporatized, money-making tertiary education system deny free university education to students when the teaching and learning involved can actually be done at very little cost, it also refuses to grant accreditation to proficiencies in trade, technical and scholarly areas. A morally bankrupt profit motive in fee-charging universities and other fee-charging tertiary education bodies over-rides any possibility of decent accreditation of technical or scholarly proficiencies.

23. Reductio ad absurdum re the mobility challenged. Wealthy societies such as those of the Anglosphere variously go to great lengths to assist the mobility challenged e.g. with aides, ramps and lifts. However, when it comes to university education, Anglosphere universities reject the free university education of Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) that is ideal for the mobility challenged, but rather insists on the immense burden of daily physical attendance and charge the earth for the insult.

24. Reductio ad absurdum re the geographically isolated. Rural farmers and workers who are forced to live and work in relatively remote areas are excluded from expensive, fee-charging on-campus university education. They can access on-line off-campus higher education but are charged a fortune for what can and should be provided for free at very little cost to the provider. .

25. Reductio ad absurdum re denial of free university education to child-carers. Maternal child care is a vital occupation and a significant interruption to female earning and professional advance. However free university education based on Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) could actually turn the interruption due to maternal child care into an opportunity for further accredited learning and accomplishment. The on-campus, full-fee-charging, profiteering system allows for million dollar salaries to university bureaucrats (grossly overpaid refugees from scholarship) to the exclusion of readily achievable free university education for our iconic caring mothers (for huge 21st century icons to Mother and Child see my Madonna series of paintings [46]).

26. Reductio ad absurdum re workers. Universities began as religion-based centres of “knowledge as power” and evolved into poor- and women-excluding bastions of social privilege, women only finally making it to some American and British universities in the 19th century. The on-campus, full-fee-charging, profiteering university system significantly retains un-stated elements of academics as lackey mendicants, rich versus poor, and gentlemen versus workers. Free university education would smash the continuing reality of universities as bastions of obscene social privilege. Presently in One Percenter-dominated America the notion of a “living wage” has long gone out of the window and has been replaced by the large-scale reality of the barely surviving and utterly impoverished “working poor” who, lucky to be employed at less than $10 per hour, have barely enough time to sleep [47].

27. Reductio ad absurdum re the poor. Free and accredited life-long university or technical education is fundamental to the social humanist (socialist) credo of maximizing happiness, opportunity and dignity for everyone. Free university education is anathema to the neoliberal One Percenters because it has the potential to destroy the lying by omission of the present “knowledge is power” system.

28. Reductio ad absurdum re overseas students. In my experience (nearly 60 years variously associated with Australian universities) many overseas students studying at Anglosphere universities have good reading comprehension of English but have difficulty with spoken English, especially when regional accents are involved (e.g. broad Australian accents). For such students the textbooks, printed lecture notes and other printed teaching materials are vital. Science practical work aside (for which there are all kinds of free alternatives), such students are effectively doing Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) but are charged full fees for what can and should be provided for free. Charging full fees to overseas students for what can be readily provided for free represents a massive rip-off and massive dishonesty on the part of countries like Australia that have turned such dishonesty into a multi-billion-dollar “education export industry”.

29. Reductio ad absurdum re the blind. Decent people are solicitous to the blind. Australia’s celebrated socialist writer Frank Hardy (author of “Power Without Glory”, a novel formerly banned in Australia) excoriated the callous and mean-spirited as “people who wouldn’t show their blind grandmother the way to the dunny [toilet]”. Yet societal insistence on the present fee-charging, attendance-based, on-campus university education system excludes the blind in all kinds of obvious ways (attendance and access difficulties, can’t see the power point display, can’t see the blackboard or whiteboard etc) . In contrast, free Accredited Remote Learning(ARL) is ideal and empowering for the blind.

30. Reductio ad absurdum re the deaf. The present fee-charging, attendance-based, on-campus university education system excludes the deaf just as it excludes overseas students with poor aural comprehension of English (see #28 above). Free, Reading Only Tertiary Education (ROTE) and free Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) are ideal for deaf students.

31. Reductio ad absurdum re rich student paying huge amounts to acquire the same skills as a non-accredited poor worker. University students (who on average come from wealthier families) are able to pay for accredited proficiencies that will enhance future earning capacity, if only as “accredited gentlemen” or ” “accredited gentlewomen” . However there is no accrediting of the existing proficiencies of ordinary workers. Thus, for example, a rich young student can pay scores of thousands of dollars for accreditation from a top university for Spanish 101, 201, 301 and 401, whereas a fluent Spanish speaking worker immersed in Spanish culture is excluded from any such accreditation.

32. Charging fees for off-campus on-line education is dishonest charging for what can and should be free. On-line education is provided by many universities as a convenient option for students with full-time jobs but this involves 2 absurdities (dishonesties), specifically (a) accrediting examination of the understanding of written material should be essentially free , and (b) much full-fee on-campus education is effectively off-campus because most “formally on-campus” students simply download the lecture notes etc and don’t bother attending on-campus lectures (of course, overseas students could simply download in Asia and attend accrediting examinations at a local venue).

33. Societies pay for empowering the handicapped yet charge the philosophically or informationally handicapped young. Being philosophically or informationally deprived is a severe handicap but unfortunately a severe handicap that is not properly addressed by societies with fee-charging universities and technical training tertiary institutions. In contrast, decent societies quite properly spend billions on addressing what to many would be far less important disabilities. Indeed this dichotomy is recognized in prosperous societies such as those of the Anglosphere that properly provide very expensive nursing home care for people with confusion or dementia while the cognitively unimpaired can continue to live happily at home despite severe physical handicaps.

34. Professor Stephen Hawking and the life of the mind despite physical handicap. The absurdity, dishonesty and inequity of the present fee-charging, attendance-based, on-campus university education system provides huge physical and financial barriers to intellectual liberation of the physically handicapped and then obscenely charges the earth for the imposition. Yet transfer of facts, ideas, aesthetics and methodologies is readily achievable notwithstanding massive physical handicaps and should indeed be free for all. This is no better illustrated than by Professor Stephen Hawking, brilliant British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author of the immensely popular “A Brief History of Time” and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge, UK. Yet this brilliant, motorised wheel-chair-confined scientist suffers from an early-onset, slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that began to manifest itself when he was about 20. Free university education simply involves free information transfer with consequent intellectual transformation that can be ultimately accredited by expert examination at trivial cost (indeed the trivial cost of expert accreditation should surely be waived as a reward for hard work and commitment to intellectual advance).

35. Societies hugely subsidize sport and games but enforce huge fees for learning. As most obviously evidenced at the Olympic Games, societies spend huge amounts of money on sport mostly children’s games) and the higher the degree of physical attainment, the larger the financial investment. However in the pro-One Percenter, neoliberalism-dominated Anglosphere free university education is resolutely abjured – the students must pay for perceived fee-for-service despite the readily demonstrable reality that the so-called service can and should be provided for free. Conversely, sporting attainment is consonant with the neoliberal paradigm of individual attainment and demands generous societal subsidy, with huge payments for TV rights providing a further key utilitarian argument for such subsidy.

36. Mainstream non-discussion of free university education (except for the Socialists and Greens) is massive lying by omission. The ostensible surrender of political power to the masses in the 19th to 20th centuries was too easy – the powerful effectively retained power through huge, democracy-perverting wealth and control of public perception of reality by lying Mainstream journalist, politician and academic presstittutes. Mainstream media censorship and Mainstream media lying typically involve false propaganda [48, 49]. .Lying by omission is worse than lying by commission because at least the latter permits refutation and public debate [50]. Thus John Pilger (outstanding expatriate Australian UK writer and journalist) reviewing “The First Casualty” by Phillip Knightley (2003): “When I read the first edition of this remarkable book twenty-five years ago, I was struck by the following quotations. During the First World War, Prime Minister David Lloyd George told C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know" [49] [about 1 million British died due to WW1, 90% being military casualties]. John Pilger crucially quotes Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko: “When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie” [50]. Similarly, during WW2 the British with Australian complicity deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death in the 1942-1945 Bengali Holocaust (Bengal Famine) but this atrocity that was bigger than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead from violence or deprivation) has been overwhelmingly deleted from British historiography and hence from public perception [51, 52]. Similarly deleted from public perception is that in post-1950 US Asian Wars from Korea to the Yemen have been associated with 40 million Asian deaths from violence or deprivation [9]. Ignored by Mainstream media, in the 21st century there have so far been 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 impoverished countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity [21, 22], although the UN has recently reported in alarm that 20 million of people are now threatened by famine in a death zone including some of these countries. The American Greens want free college education but only gained 1% of the vote in the 2016 US presidential elections. The Australian Greens want free university education but only have 10% electoral support. UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn wants free university education but is opposed by most of the parliamentary Labour Party. Free university education is essentially off the table in the Anglosphere as far as public discussion is concerned.

37. Free university education empowerment of the disadvantaged threatens neoliberal exploitation of the disadvantaged. Free university education cuts through Mainstream journalist, politician and academic censorship and thus can empower the disadvantaged and threaten the neoliberal One Percenter-dominated capitalist system. Free university education potentially opens the floodgates against One Percenter control of information and hence of Anglosphere societies.

38. Empowerment of refugees. There are 60 million refugees in the world today with about half being Muslim refugees generated in conflicts involving the US and Apartheid Israel. Accredited free university education and free technical education can at least provide something useful for free that can benefit these desperate people who, while forced from their native land, can at least still live free in the “kingdom of the mind”.

39. Commodification of higher education endangers academic freedom. An insidious aspect of the commodification of higher education has been corporatizing of institutions, the corporate “branding” of universities, and university control over what academics can say. A “foot in the door” form of censorship is the institutional demand that academics restrict public comment to their narrow discipline, but this immediately establishes a threat leading to self-censorship. Academic censorship and self-censorship is now entrenched in Anglosphere universities [45, 53] leading to appalling situations in which, for example, a very famous anti-racist Jewish American scholar, Professor Norman Finkelstein, was forced out of De Paul University because of his objection to Apartheid Israeli human rights abuses [54] and the UK government recently sought, with some success, administration censorship of views critical of Israeli Apartheid at UK universities [55]. The universities-backed web magazine The Conversation – backed and/or funded by about 20 universities - has an appalling record of censoring and blocking academic opinion [56]. The Australia-United States Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty-related Defence Trade Controls Bill makes it an offence punishable by 10 years in prison for an academic without a permit to inform non-Australians (in conversation, tutorials, lectures, conference papers, scientific papers etc) about numerous technologies and thousands of chemicals and organisms listed in a presently 353-page Defence and Strategic Goods List [57].

40. Commodification of higher education and corporatizing of institutions means misleading and exploiting students. Bureaucratic bean counters have taken over fee-charging universities and this is appallingly apparent in Australian universities as set out in some recently published critiques [58-63]. Thus the book cover of Dr Richard Hil’s “Whackademia” puts the problem succinctly: “Despite the shiny rhetoric of excellence, quality, innovation and creativity, universities face criticism over declining standards, decreased funding, compromised assessment, overburdened academics and never-ending reviews and restructures” [58].

41. Commodification of higher education subverts truth and rational risk management. Commodification of education and corporatizing of universities has led to institutional “branding” (akin to the “branding” of cars or soft drinks) and consequent corporate-style codes of conduct restricting truth-telling [64], this involving censorship and self-censorship that is anathema to serious scholars. [53]. Rational risk management, that is crucial for societal safety, successively involves (a) accurate data, (b) scientific analysis, this involving the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses, and (c) informed systemic change to minimize risk. Unfortunately, this rational risk management protocol is typically perverted at the individual, family or local level, or at the level of the family of nations by (a) lying, self-deception, spin, obfuscation, intimidation and censorship, (b) anti-science spin, this involving the selective use of asserted facts to support a partisan position, and (c) blame and shame that is counterproductive because it blocks reportage crucial for rational risk management and in the worst cases leads to war [65].

42. Commodification of higher education helps subvert democracy. Democracy depends upon (a) an informed electorate and (b) an entrenched social empathy to prevent “takeover” by the rich. Commodification of higher education (a) subverts the truth that is vital for democracy, and (b) reinforces wealth-based class division (the rich can readily afford to pay for higher education but the poor are crippled with a higher education debt for life).

43. Commodification of higher education entrenches commercial propaganda and lying. As an Australian scholar I never cease to be amazed at second-class Australian universities that are barely known of within Australia claiming to be top universities on the world stage. However, lying by omission is far, far worse than lying by commission because the latter at least admits the possibilities of reasoned refutation and public debate. Further, history is written by the victors and is typically written by mendicant academics or by brainwashed university graduates. Thus for example, White Australia has a particularly horrible history of invasion, dispossession and mass murder that is largely ignored by Mainstream media, politician and academics, an obscene and racist tradition of academic lying by omission that derives from entrenched British academic lying over genocidal British colonialism [51]. Thus Australia has invaded 85 countries with 30 of these invasions involving genocide but these atrocities have been overwhelmingly ignored by Australian academic historians [9, 11, 51, 67-69] e.g. the ongoing Aboriginal Genocide (2 million Aboriginal deaths from violence, 0.1 million, or deprivation, 1.9 million, since 1788 and a continuing Aboriginal Ethnocide involving 150 languages or dialects surviving from an original 350-750 and all but 20 endangered) [17], the Australia-complicit WW2 Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death by the British in 1942-1945 while Australia sat on its huge wartime wheat stores) [51, 52, 69], the ongoing Muslim Genocide (32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or from imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity) [21, 22], the worsening Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust in impoverished countries (17 million avoidable deaths from deprivation annually on Spaceship Earth with the obscenely rich in charge of the flight deck) [9], and egregiously climate criminal Australia’s disproportionate involvement in the worsening Climate Genocide (7.5 million annual deaths from air pollution, 7 million, or climate change, 0.5 million, with 10 billion set to die this century in the absence of requisite action on man-made climate change) [23, 25].

44. Commodification of higher education entrenches argument by money and wealthy authority. Commodification of universities means that money-making utility trumps pure scholarship. Thousands of idealist academics who thought academic life was about critically pursuing truth and beauty have been dumped in favour of utilitarianism. University presidents on million dollar salaries chase full fee-paying students and corporate research funds and it is these grossly over-paid refugees from scholarship and their political and corporate associates , rather than the now largely silenced academic experts, who are the mouthpieces of academia and expertise. “Money talks” finds obscene expression today in the election of anti-science, climate change denying billionaire Donald Trump as president of the US. In his first formal Budget proposal Trump has taken an axe to federal funding of research from world-leading US biomedical research to critical and world-leading US climate change research [70].

45. Charging an entrance fee at 18 – why not at birth? The fee-charging Anglosphere countries have applied a huge entrance fee for adulthood on young people turning 18 and entering into university and technical tertiary education. However neoliberal Trumpists could well consider applying such massive debt at birth so that all but the children of the rich would become indentured labourers for life. Indeed one reads of children in India who are enslaved for life because their parents are indebted to landlords and land owners. The next step for obscene neoliberalism would be a debt scheme to pay for pre-school, elementary school and high school education.

46. Re-introduction and/or elevation of university fees in Australia and elsewhere was a selfish betrayal by those now in power who are rich or had free university education. It has been gross hypocrisy for Anglosphere politicians who had free university education or whose parents were wealthy (and hence for whom money was no impediment to university education) to impose fees or elevate fees for university education on subsequent generations. Naïve reason might suppose that these callous hypocrites would be punished at the ballot box but reality is otherwise in the Anglosphere corporatocracies. Thus Democrat socialist Bernie Sanders argued for free university education but was ditched as a presidential candidate by the manipulated Democrats in favour of pro-One Percenter war criminal Hillary Clinton. The anti-racist Jewish American Greens presidential candidate, Dr Jill Stein, stood for free college education but received only 1% of the vote. UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn wants free university education but is opposed by most of the Parliamentary Labour Party. In Australia, the Greens demand free university education but only secure about 10% of the vote. Young people only have themselves to blame if they permit the present rip-off to continue.

47. Corporatized learning reinforces One Percenter dominance. A corporatized, utilitarian learning environment seduces students to a misplaced pragmatism that accepts the obscene neoliberal One Percenter dominance as a fundamental economic given like the prevalence of drunkenness, drug-taking, dishonesty, sexism, racism and child abuse in Anglosphere societies. However prevalence and present dominance doesn’t make it right or good. The young must revolt and demand not only cessation of university fees but also abolition of all higher education and technical training debt. Such debt relief is hardly revolutionary in the neoliberal scheme of things that permits massive wealth transfer to the politically dominant One Percenters through government agreement to massive subsidies, massive tax reductions and massive tax evasion loopholes for the rich.

48. Huge university fees and Carbon Debt cripple students for life. It is now widely believed that the Baby Boomers born in the 1940s and possibly their children may be the last Anglosphere generations to be better off than their parents. In Australia even young professional couples now find home ownership an impossible dream in Sydney. In America the working poor can spend most of their paltry income on minimal housing rental. This is compounded by the imposition of huge tuition debt in the Anglosphere. However the real killer for the young is inescapable Carbon Debt. The damage-related cost of carbon pollution has been estimated by Dr Chris Hope (the Judge Business School of 90-Nobel-Laureate Cambridge University) at about $200 per tonne of CO2-equivalent (greenhouse gas pollution measured in terms of equivalently global warming masses of carbon dioxide). It can be readily estimated from historical greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution data that the total Carbon Debt of the world from 1751-2016 is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2 (1.85 trillion tonnes CO2) and, assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent, this corresponds to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. The world’s GHG pollution is increasing at a recently re-calculated 64 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent per year i.e. the Carbon Debt in increasing at $12.8 trillion each year or at about one-sixth of world GDP annually. Unlike conventional debt that can be simply wiped out by default, bankruptcy or printing money, this horrendous Carbon Debt for future generations is inescapable – future generations will have to act or die. Thus climate criminal Australia has a Carbon Debt (in US dollars) of $7.5 trillion that is increasing at $400 billion per year and at $40,000 per head per year for under-30 year old Australians, this Carbon Debt dwarfing the average Australian lifetime university tuition debt of circa $20,000 [34].

49. Good memes overcoming bad genes, bad memes and fee-based education. Man’s behaviour has evolved through selection of favourable genes (altered by mutation of DNA) that hard-wire reproduction-enhancing behaviour, and through societal selection of favourable memes (or ideas and behaviours) that also favour reproduction and survival of offspring [71]. Some of these evolved behaviours are contradictory. Thus greedy behaviour has been selected and has led to the dominance of the One Percenters who now own half the wealth of the world. However neoliberal greed is opposed by the meme of “love thy neighbour” from the wonderful Palestinian humanitarian Jesus. While the Ninety Nine Percent presently outnumber the One Percenters 99-fold, the worsening Climate Genocide may result in only 0.5 billion people surviving, and these survivors will be comprised of the more prosperous of Humanity [25]. As sentient creatures, humans can overcome bad genes and bad memes including user-pays, fee-charging higher education. The meme of educating the young as a fundamental and altruistic obligation will overcome the greed meme.

50. A new and decent social contract – socially-enriching humanism versus terracidal neoliberalism. The presently dominant neoliberal ideology demands maximal freedom for the smart and advantaged to exploit the natural and human resources of the world for private profit. This perverse ideology already kills 17 million people annually and, unrestrained, is set to destroy most of Humanity and the Biosphere as a blindly speciescidal, ecocidal, omnicidal and terracidal ideology [32, 36]. A humane alternative to the neoliberal perversion is social humanism (socialism, democratic socialism, ecosocialism, the welfare state, Green-Left sustainability) which aims to sustainably maximize the happiness, opportunity and dignity of everyone by evolving interpersonal, intra-national and international social contracts [37, 38]. It is natural for a mother to teach skills to her children and it would be absurd and obscene for mothers to hand a cost-recovery bill to their children when the kids turn 18. All education can and should be free and that includes free university education, free tertiary technical training and free life-long learning

Conclusions.

With the world now facing the inevitability of catastrophic global warming beyond a plus 2 degrees Centigrade temperature rise, the least our present ruling generations can do to the young (and unborn) that they have betrayed is to grant them free university education to empower them to help make the future “less bad”. Young people (born and unborn) face the daunting task of reversing several centuries of profligacy and returning the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) to a safe and sustainable circa 300 parts per million (ppm) CO2 (300 ppm CO2) from the present damaging, dangerous and coral-killing 405 ppm CO2 that is increasing at a record 3 ppm CO2 per year [30, 31].

We need a climate revolution now [72], and if the young cannot even secure free university education using the above arguments, what hope is there for a world needing a return to 300 ppm CO2 ASAP? The American Greens and the Australian Greens demand free university education and young people who are serious about saving what remains of their world must utterly reject the mendacious, endlessly greedy, speciescidal, ecocidal, omnicidal and terracidal neoliberal scum who have egregiously betrayed them, support the Greens and the like-minded Green-Left folk, socialists and ecocsocialists, and insist on free university education now that predicates by example, and will assist in substance, an informed climate revolution now.

The massive downsizing of academic staff in recent decades in the name of institutional profitability could notionally work to the benefit of free university education. It would be nice to see free Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) instituted globally, backed by the intellectual and professional credentials of existing, downsized or otherwise retired academics.

In American activist Michael Moore's recent movie “Where to invade next”, Moore invades 9 countries to steal their ideas in order to “make America great again”. In Slovenia Moore discovers that university education is free and that when the government proposed university fees, massive student protests stopped it and the government fell [73, 74]. Young people have the numbers and the energy, if not the money, and should be unstoppable globally in their demand for free university education.

References.

[1]. “Free University Education”: https://sites.google.com/site/freeuniversityeducation/home .

[2]. “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, United Nations: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ .

[3]. “Convention on the Rights of the Child”, United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx .

[4]. “Educational Apartheid”: https://sites.google.com/site/educationalapartheid/ .

[5]. Gideon Polya, “37 Ways Of Tackling Australian Educational Apartheid And Social Inequity”, Countercurrents, 22 May, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya220513.htm .

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[9]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country from Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the web : http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/ .

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[36]. James Hansen, “Storms About My Grandchildren”, Bloomsbury, 2009.

[37]. Brian Ellis, “Social Humanism. A New Metaphysics”, Routledge, UK, 2012.

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[52]. “Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Bengal Famine) writings of Gideon Polya”, Gideon Polya: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/bengali-holocaust .

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[54]. “Norman Finkelstein”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein .

[55]. Michael Deas, “Israeli Apartheid Week held ay 30 UK universities, despite repression”, Electronic Intifada, 10 March 2017: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-deas/israeli-apartheid-week-held-30-uk-universities-despite-repression .

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[57]. “Impact of the Defence Trade Controls Bill on academic freedom”, NTEU: 10 October 2012: http://www.nteu.org.au/article/Impact-of-the-Defence-Trade-Controls-Bill-on-academic-freedom-13461 .

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[59]. Gideon Polya, “Book Review: “Whackademia” Reveals Parlous State of Australia 's Censored, Under-funded & Dumbing-down Universities”, Countercurrents, 14 December, 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya141212.htm

[60]. Richard Hil, “Selling Students Short”.

[61]. Gideon Polya, “Book Review: “Selling Students Short” By Richard Hil – Neoliberal Corruption Of Corporatised Australian Universities”, Countercurrents, 29 May, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290515.htm .

[62]. Donald Meyers,“Australian universities. A Portrait of Decline” (AUPOD, 2012): http://www.australianuniversities.id.au/Australian_Universities-A_Portrait_of_Decline.pdf .

[63]. Gideon Polya, “Book Review: “Australian Universities. A Portrait Of Decline” By Donald Meyers”, Countercurrents, 4 February, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya040213.htm .

[64]. “Academic freedom”, ABC Radio National, Background Briefing, 6 December 1998: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/academic-freedom/3554266#transcript .

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[66]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “The Cambridge History Of Australia” Ignores Australian Involvement In 30 Genocides”, Countercurrents, 14 October, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya141013.htm .

[67]. Gideon Polya, “British Have Invaded 193 Countries: Make 26 January ( Australia Day, Invasion Day) British Invasion Day”, Countercurrents, 23 January, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230115.htm .

[68]. Gideon Polya, “As UK Lackeys Or US Lackeys Australians Have Invaded 85 Countries (British 193, French 80, US 70)”, Countercurrents, 9 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya090215.htm .

[69]. Gideon Polya, “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”, Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm .

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[72]. "Climate Revolution Now": https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/climate-revolution .

[73]. Michael Moore, “Where to invade next”.

[74]. Gideon Polya, “Movie Review: “Where To Invade Next” By Michael Moore – Hammer, Chisel, Down For Social Humanism”, Countercurrents, 23 April, 2016: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230416.htm .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/australian-complicity-in-iraq-mass-mortality/3369002#transcript

) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ; Gideon Polya: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/home ; Gideon Polya Writing: https://sites.google.com/site/gideonpolyawriting/ ; Gideon Polya, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_Polya ) . When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .