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Karl Rove, president of the national College Republicans, in 1977.
A fifth grade class in Murfreesboro, TN learned about the civil rights movement this month by staging a protest march … against junk food.
Here’s the meat of the article:
After a two-week lesson on civil rights, the students picked their own issue, eating healthy and exercise, and marched in protest.
Parent Belinda Pate said she thought it was a good way to get the history lesson across, plus healthy eating a exercise are “what us parents are always trying to protest with our kids.”
The teachers also had the students wear different colored T-shirts – either red, green or blue – and treated the groups differently depending on what color they wore.
For example on the way to the protest, red-shirted students had to sit in the back of the bus, blue-shirts sat in the middle and weren’t allowed to talk, and green-shirts could sit in the front of the bus and talk all they wanted, student Asha Phillips explained.
The teachers also made different groups use different bathrooms at school.
This kind of thing leaves me deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it’s great to see kids learning about activism and organizing in school, and being encouraged to think of themselves as potential activists.
On the other hand…
If you think about what would have happened if the “protest” had been about a controversial subject — gay teachers, say, or prayer in the schools — you see just how problematic the exercise is. Because you really couldn’t do an event like that. Whatever position the class adopted would be offensive to somebody’s parent, and probably go against the values of at least a few of the kids. This “protest” was only possible because it wasn’t the contemporary equivalent of a civil rights march. And that’s not even getting into the whole t-shirt thing.
I don’t want to get off on too much of a rant here. I’m sure these teachers meant well, and I give them credit for trying to bring this particular moment in history alive. But teaching about social justice movements is hard. It’s challenging. If you make it easy, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Anyway, that’s my reaction. What’s yours?
“Autonomy is hard for some people to understand. It is only possible to understand when you don’t have it.”
–Anonymous UC Berkeley student, circa 1969. (Quoted in Right On: A Documentary of Student Protest, by Maryl Levine and John Naisbitt.)
“Biologists and anthropologists now agree that dividing humanity into different races is fabricated and fraudulent; racial categories are scientific fictions. Yet scientific fictions can become social facts with deadly consequences. Malcolm used to say that racism was like a Cadillac, they make a new model every year. Just as it is impossible to fix a 1990s Cadillac with a 1960s owner’s manual, we will not address the racism of the 1990s and beyond with a 1960s philosophy and approach. Our challenge is to develop a civil rights vision appropriate to our own time, to the challenges presented to us by the injustices inscribed in our everyday lives through racial inequality.”
— George Lipsitz, “Libraries and Memories: Beyond White Privilege 101.”
France was hit by its second general strike of 2009 today, with millions of French workers leaving work and hundreds of thousands taking to the streets. Many schools and universities closed as teachers and professors joined the strike.
Thousands of students marched through Paris on Tuesday night in the latest protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s economic policies and proposed changes to the country’s university system. Bottles were thrown, property was damaged, and four students were arrested, but there were no reports of violence. French universities have been wracked by demonstrations and occupations in recent months.
As the weather grows warmer, French leaders are said to fear the possibility of a repeat of the massive student-worker protests that toppled the French government in May 1968.
Update: Here’s a background article on the current situation in France’s universities.
Late Update: Here’s a slideshow of today’s protests.
studentactivism.net 
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