I am originally from a small provincial town in northern Italy, and one my generation’s last native speakers of a fast-disappearing language, Bresciano, a non-standard variety of Italo-Romance.

We all know that universities produce research like banks produce money. They hoard knowledge, turn it into the ignorance of the rest of society that they might better arbitrate from above. Organise it into disciplined shapes that do not touch for fear that the meeting of different types of knowledge might produce something new, uncategorisable, unassimilable to the corporate plot (‘A thought would be ignited.’).

Public schools rely on the unpaid overtime labour and emotional blackmail of teachers. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve challenged why we are expected to complete an arbitrary task in our own time only to be told ‘we don’t get into teaching for the money’ and ‘we go that step further because it’s what is best for the children’.

Even once you fix the technology and buy a sensible set of textbooks, it is easy for teachers, who are often in a state of high-alert for most of a lesson, to forget how the class is actually being seen by those in the hard plastic chairs.

In Australia, working- and middle-class students who cannot obtain financial familial support must both study and work a shitty part- or full-time job. Government youth allowance payments are deliberately difficult to obtain and excessively bureaucratic. Certainly, they are not provided on the presumption that to study is to perform valuable labour.

Context is everything, and schools are emblematic of the communities they exist in. They are each nested within broader circles of complexity. I was trained in Australia and I work in England. Each school I have worked in has been wildly different, but I never went to school to resist oppression. I never taught in an act to resist it either. My context is one of good fortune.

At the start of the 2013 school year I stood at the front of a school gymnasium and outed myself as transgender to 250 Year 10 students. I believed myself to be a pragmatist. I was about to commence a medical transition that would alter my voice and appearance. I had changed my name. Disclosing my transition to the students whom I saw every day was an inevitability.

Free or low-cost higher education is a reality in most European countries and in many others worldwide. It is not an unfeasible pipe dream, nor a gross mismanagement of taxpayers’ money. It’s something that developed countries should be able to provide for their citizens. Tertiary education should not just be a place to spit out a workforce as quickly and efficiently as possible, but a place for people to develop, to discover, and to grow into the best versions of themselves.

Speaking of poverty, hardly much has changed since 2013 when a Universities Australia report revealed that two thirds of students live below the poverty line. The Youth Allowance rate at the time was set to $407.50 per fortnight, or 42.3 per cent of the poverty line. Four years later, Youth Allowance has gone up 30 dollars per fortnight.

On 2 May, PR consultant Ben Grubb, along with a few celebrity signatories such as Troye Sivan and Missy Higgins, launched a public petition to get an ‘LGBTI focused anti-bullying program’ nationally funded by Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government. It was billed as ‘Safe Schools 2.0 – without the ideology’ and was from the outset a spectacular misfire that didn’t stir a single hair on a bigot’s head while managing to wound the very people it aimed to defend. The backlash was so swift that the organiser retracted it the very next day, issuing an apology.