Students Want Power, Not Worksheets. Schools Must Teach Them to Organize.

Over the past two years, I have noticed that when I teach students about any issue in the U.S. or around the world, they express noticeable apathy and disinterest. When our current president was elected, I asked a Latina student how she felt, and she said she likes him because he will “teach her how to make money.” When I pushed back on this and brought up undocumented immigrants, she responded by saying, “Hold up. I’m a citizen, that’s not my problem.”

Recently, a similar problem came up with another student who is Black; he responded to our discussion on genocide by saying he “doesn’t care” and “only wants to make money.”

I care deeply about my students. For me, the apathy and individualism I’m seeing from them are legitimate and concerning. In their eyes, the only things that make life easier are money and power. I feel for them, but what breaks my heart is that this money and power are not, and historically have never been, in the hands of people like my students. Historically, opportunities for marginalized folks have come from working together as a community to fight for the lives and resources we need.

But as of late, I don’t believe our schools are structured to facilitate meaningful opportunities for our students to organize and build community. I am grateful that I was trained to be a content expert in English Language Arts using the most recent research, such as grading for equity, culturally responsive teaching and universal design for learning (UDL). From a curricular standpoint, the practices each of these frameworks offers have helped me create some memorable moments of enduring understanding. Still, these extreme times necessitate more than thoughtful rubrics, scaffolded assignments and culturally representative instruction. I worry that no amount of revelatory critical theory will galvanize my students, most of whom are working-class, to see the value of intellectual rigor.

As the years go on, and our political climate becomes more polarized, I, too, am breaking down. I am increasingly focusing on myself just to survive. If this is my story, with the opportunities I’ve been given and the books I’ve read, then my students are definitely experiencing this tenfold. And on top of that, they come to school to shuffle around between classes, sit down at desks, and learn information that we tell them will free their minds, but then they leave and the conditions don’t change.

The traditional factory schooling model is no longer holding up, and I believe it will one day collapse under the weight of its own obsolescence. When that happens, how do we create an educational experience that centers empathy and galvanizes action? While I don’t necessarily have an answer to this question, I think it’s worth exploring some ideas.

Bringing in Community-Based Organizations

Community-based organizations that support students after school in learning how to organize should be empowered to come to the classroom and lead workshops regularly. The end goal should be students leaving the building on several guided field trips to demonstrate, protest and volunteer.

The challenge with this approach is that I believe it should be done weekly during school hours. If working-class students can’t organize or volunteer due to the innumerable responsibilities they face once they leave our school building, then the only time we have with them to get involved will be during school hours. Therefore, it is our responsibility to create opportunities for community engagement.

Organizing as Project-Based Learning

While project-based learning is an exceptional approach to producing work, what would it be like for students to organize? They pick an issue, and we teach them how to rally for that cause by canvassing, visiting people affected by it or conducting interviews. The goal here is to produce an organizing plan for a cause that interests them. The grade comes from the success of the process, but the work is geared toward addressing social issues in real ways and not just reading about them.

School-Wide Practices

What if, every year, students were expected to organize in some capacity and produce reflections that explicitly ask them to explain how their empathy has increased through their organizing? The only way I see schools continuing is if they are transformed into sites of resistance — thinking hubs for revolutionary action — that takes place during school hours. We cannot, under these current conditions, presume that our students have the time, energy and resources to think about anything we teach them once the bell rings for dismissal.

Teacher Preparation

Teacher education programs would have to be transformed so that, in addition to content mastery, we are trained on how to organize and teach organizing. If schools do not become sites of resistance, I don’t see a future in which our young people will think of school as anything other than a chore they must take on to survive in a world built to keep them feeling small. Unless we teach them their power through collective action, they will grow to facilitate the same dangers that led to their individualism.

I often think about Gil Scott-Heron’s words, “The revolution will not be televised.” When asked what this meant, he responded, “The revolution has to happen here,” pointing to his head. The most valuable learning happens when no one is watching.

Personally, one of my greatest achievements in life has been learning to love myself as I am. But it took years of reading books that explained to me how and why the world was set up to make me hate myself. I came out the other end feeling better about myself — all because of reading and writing. But at the end of the day, I am bound up in the same system of exploitation and poverty that makes my students focus exclusively on themselves. Books freed my mind, but they did not free me from my conditions.

Our ancestors taught us that the structures in place were not built for our most marginalized. As a result, they organized. They saw each other as the resources needed to be free, and more often than not, they did it outside the classroom.

I am increasingly disillusioned by the concept and reality of a classroom as a site of transgression, when the structure of school itself ensures that any transgression can only exist in the mind and not manifest in the real world. The only way to transgress within this schooling system is to create structured, meaningful opportunities to step outside the four walls of our classrooms. We cannot simply read about revolutionary action; we must become it.