Raise Hell

Educational oppression is trickier to fight than racial oppression. If you're a black rebel, they can't exile you, they either have to intimidate you or kill you. But in high school or Varsity they can just bounce you out of the fold. And they do. Rebel students, renegade faculty members, get smothered or shot down with devastating accuracy. Others get tired of fighting and voluntarily leave the system. This may be a mistake though. Dropping out of Varsity for a rebel is like going north for a Negro. You can't really get away from it so you might as well stay and raise hell.

How do you raise hell? Thai's a whole other article. But, just for a start, why not stay with the anology? What have black people done? They have, first of all, faced the fact of their slavery. They've stopped kidding themselves about an eventual in the Great Watermelon Patch in the sky They've organised; they've decided to get freedom now, and they've started taking it. Students, like black people have immense unused power. They could, theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make academic freedom bilaterial. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love and admiration rather than fear and respect, and, lay down their weapons. Students could discover community. They could learn to dance by dancing on IBM cards. They could make colouring books out of calendars and they could put the grading system in a museum. They could raze one set of walls and let life come blowing into the classroom. They could turn the classroom into where it's at - a "field of action" as Peter Mann describes it. And believe it or not they could study eagerly and learn prodigiously for the best of all possible reasons - their own reasons.

They could. Theoretically. They have the power. But only in very few places, like Berkeley, have they even begun to think about using it. For students, as for black people, the hardest battle isn't with the system. It's with what the system has done to your mind.