A powerful moment
(reminding us that it is possible to hold two ideas simultaneously)
For many many years now, I’ve shared this image with my students:
These wise words come from Assata Shakur and perfectly capture what I think about the US education system. Our current education system is so deeply mired in Capitalism, Militarism, and Violence that its primary function is to prepare students to serve as cogs in this dysfunctional machine, filling roles that maintain the violent status quo, convincing them that their lot in life is to work at a job (that they may hate) so they can buy useless things (oh, and yeah, important things like overpriced housing and health insurance) until they retire (which may never happen since some of our leaders think that we just need to work until we’re dead).
Our schools don’t teach real history, just a white-washed (barely) palatable “history of the victors”, actively removing root events (such as the genocide of Native Americans) and distorting early “Americans” (don’t get me started on “discoverers”) as heroes who “civilized” this land. No study of the real impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery. No study of the real horrors of transporting and enslaving humans through the colonial nightmare. No examination of US colonization around the world and active destabilizing of other nations for our own gain. Today, white people in power are so terrified of children learning the Real History of this nation that they ban books and redact curriculum. Fascism at its finest.
Let’s not forget too, that our government has annually invested 10-15x the funds into the military (to support our desired role as “the world’s police force”) than what we put into education. Oh, and, we care more about gun rights and “backing the blue” than dead children in classrooms. So, yeah, our education system serves to maintain our racist, white supremacist, caste-based status quo. And that is why people are losing their minds over the wave of campus protests.
What we are seeing on campuses today—Thank you, Young People for Standing Up for What is Right!—is what happens when students have developed critical consciousness. When they decide to use their education to become critical thinkers and agents for change. When students, who have been fed bags of bullshit for years, see truth. And suffering. And decide that enough is enough.
The draconian responses from campus leaders and overly militarized and aggressive police forces are EXACTLY what you would expect from a country that sees its education system as a method of controlling young people, molding them into sheep designed to serve as automatons in our militaristic greed-based capitalist machine. How dare you think? How dare you ACT upon thinking? How dare you hold us to standards that demand the Non-Killing of innocent people?
What we are seeing now from these young people is peace education in action.
The violent responses from university administrators and outside agitators are what you expect from folks inculcated into rigid “black and white” thinking. When you create an education system grounded in binary thinking and test children (relentlessly) on getting the One Right Answer, society and higher-ups can then use that rigid thinking as a way to dismiss anything that counters “Their Perception” (or perhaps, “Their Agenda”).
That rigidity—on top of unleashing unnecessary physical violence by thug cops—has a deeper impact: we lose the ability (or even the notion) that we can hold two ideas simultaneously. None of these young people are questioning Israel’s right to exist and these protests are not anti-Semitic. {Those arguments spring from the aforementioned binary thinking and/or a need to cling to donor funding and endowments, even though higher education should support young people's rights.} In reality, this protest movement is saying that all horrors of the past are valid AND all horrors of the present are valid too. And these young leaders are calling us to pay attention, they are ushering in a new way of being and living, and, they are reminding us of our common humanity.
Go support those young people on a college campus near you!
Hasta la victoria siempre! (to quote Che Guevara)