About 40 years ago, when educational institutions were still allowed to be bold, creative and innovative, the Institute of Education started a course in Rights in Education. I was then a community worker for a maverick central London adult education centre, which saw non-formal education as the first step towards solving inequality and a lot of other social problems. I worked with members of tenants' associations, with local Bangladeshis, with travellers and with homeless people. I was desperate to do the Rights in Education course but I had no qualifications in education. So I went off and trained as an FE teacher and taught unemployed youngsters in Brixton. 

36 years ago I started the course and today I met up with four others who did it with me, as we do two or three times a year.

Back then education to degree level was free for anyone who wanted to go. For those constrained in one way or another, adult education was widely available and cheap, with on-site creches. And there was the Open University, also free. But there were also all sorts of things wrong with education - the curriculum was centred on white, privileged, male experience and for the most part it helped to ensure that white, privileged males stayed that way. 

Our little group all had plans to make education more relevant, more accessible, more inclusive, and better able to help the people on the margins use it to change their own lives.

Today, most of us out of the far end of our careers, we looked back at the small things we achieved and the huge amount we lost because it never for one moment occurred to us we would ever have to defend free education as a universal right and watch it turned into a commodity. 

While we waved our banners they simply blew up the ground we were standing on.

A lesson. Very relevant.