Like many final year students, I’ve been spending a lot of time this year thinking about what I’m going to do when I graduate. The job market doesn’t seem as bleak to me as many people would have us believe but, regardless, there’s a seemingly safe option that I keep coming back to: teaching. The world will always need teachers, I tell myself, and it’s a decent salary and the holidays are good and I would be doing something useful. I’ve had this conversation with a few friends who are thinking along similar lines and one of them said that she saw my point – as long as I didn’t end up having to teach at a state school.

My response was immediate and not at all thought out: I would never consider teaching at a private school – but I’ve been dwelling on the question since. I spent the first 14 years of my education in a standard village primary school and a slightly offbeat comprehensive; it genuinely never occurred to me that I might have received a better education anywhere else. I certainly never thought that I’d be finishing that description with “but honestly, it was all right” when people winced sympathetically - or, worse, gave me an impressed “and you made it anyway!” look - over conversations a few years later at university. Education had nothing to do with money in my mind.

This naivety has been replaced over the course of the last three years with a strong feeling that education should be available to everyone, regardless of background. This idea is easiest to discuss in the context of universities and their astronomical fees, but I’m deeply concerned that if the commoditisation of education becomes the norm, state schools will suffer enormously. How anyone can say they want to become a teacher - that is, say they want to inspire and encourage young people - but in the same breath say that they wouldn’t offer their abilities to a state school, is beyond me. Anyone who values education enough to want to be its purveyor should see that the restrictive costs of private schools - and, now, universities - are enormously damaging, and represent the complete antithesis of the values teachers should hold.

How, then, can I justify another career path that seems quite appealing: postgraduate study, eventually becoming an academic? How can I remain part of an organisation which, whether through its own choice or the government’s decisions (or both) is complicit in the commoditisation of learning? The idea of postgraduate study was somehow always slightly removed from the fees debate in my mind – further study and research seemed imbued with lofty aims and inherent value. As valuable as some postgraduate research undoubtedly is, however, I am finding it increasingly hard to reconcile my principles of free education with the idea of being involved in institutions which seek to legitimise prohibitive fees.

The debate on the privatisation of education was brought to the fore again with last Wednesday’s national demo and walkout. I went on the march in London, and, as impressive as it was it is very clear to me that this government won’t listen. Their actions make it obvious that, like those who would only teach in private schools, they simply do not understand the importance of, and principles behind, free education. But that doesn’t mean we should stop, far from it. It is more important than ever that we think, we talk, we write – and we teach. In doing so, we do our best to make our voices heard - clearly, and with intelligence - and we will prove to the government that our education was worthwhile, and that future generations need to have the right to it as well. But equally importantly, we will equip those future generations with the critical apparatus and quick wit to fix the mess that our current government have gotten us into – and, at this stage, I fear that is the best we can hope for.