As we go to press with this issue, student protesters at the University of Puerto Rico are standing their ground despite excessive force and abuse by police riot squads. The administration claims to be "keeping order" following a creative and peaceful action by students challenging a burdensome new fee, in addition to already climbing tuition. The clampdown--on a student movement that a Puerto Rico Daily Sun editorial writer calls "Puerto Rico’s most successful social project since its foundation in 1903"--has prompted staff and faculty to call a strike, effectively shutting down the institution. This total support both feeds and reflects a growing global sentiment of solidarity with young people who are emerging from classrooms ready to take to the streets.
Throughout this issue of WIN, you’ll read about educators and students connecting the classroom and the world. While the Zinn Education Project produces and shares teaching materials that allow participants to identify with past social justice "heroes," Brooklyn students involved in the Palestine Education Project build solidarity with prisoners in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Rethinkers are designing their own programs and literal landscapes for their New Orleans schools, presenting their proposals to administrators and parents in a language as creative and unique as their solutions.
From local victories like the Urban Youth Collective’s securing public transportation to and from school to the call by the young people of Vamos Unidos for national legislation to decriminalize without militarizing them, students are learning how to build a campaign while teaching others how to be activists. In the case of Vamos Unidos, those most directly affected by the DREAM Act are in the forefront of the critical analysis of and opposition to it. They see through the false promise of documents in exchange for military service and defy expectations that they pursue an unaffordable education.
As Matt Meyer explains in "The End of Public Education," the phenomenon of "failing" public schools and the demonization of teachers’ unions is simply a move toward privatization of education, which is being achieved one charter school at a time. Schools’ direct pipeline to prisons are the other side of the capitalist coin, a repository for workers who didn’t make the grade. Capital also drives apparel companies to hide worker exploitation in a shell game of "corporate responsibility," a slight of hand that didn’t fool United Students Against Sweatshops, Jeff Ballinger tells us.
Of the Rethinkers’ outdoor restorative justice circle, one of its young designers explains, "We drew one path in and a different one out. That symbolizes coming in one way and leaving out on a different path." Far from the factory model of education under the capitalist system, students enter their school buildings not to be molded and spit out into the workforce but to change the very structures they inhabit.
Students are not waiting for a path to peace. Young people are organizing themselves and others from the grassroots, seeking ways out of violence and building roads to revolution where they see the need. They are leading struggles for immigration rights, worker justice, fair food, and many more issues that concern nonviolent activists. They are transforming their schools and communities with their words, songs, videos, and murals, with their outrage and their loudest, surest voices.
