Civil disobedience and education

Hello everyone,

Civil disobedience is a cherished American tradition. Indeed, it is embedded in our very consciousness, and is regarded as an important method of self-governance. The Declaration of Independence teaches us that we have a duty to rebel against oppressive government; the Constitution enshrines the freedoms of speech and assembly; the American Revolution, the Civil War, and centuries of struggle on behalf of religions, gender, and ethnicities have outlined our rights to foment social change through civil disobedience.

Henry David Thoreau defined civil disobedience as an open defiance of an unjust law, but the idea spreads to our concepts of protest, activism, and labor-organized job actions.

Civil disobedience is at once an American's most powerful tool for change, and a dangerous Pandora's Box of insurrection and anarchy.

We see that dichotomy most clearly in the classroom.

I grew up in the '60s and '70s, when teachers commonly kept posters on the wall quoting Thoreau, and when protesting was felt to be an obligation encumbent on all students who wished to be cool. We barely understood the forces we unleashed when we protested, but we enjoyed the heady fun of having classes cancelled and school officials nervous. We had been taught to protest, but not to think our way clearly through what we were protesting and what we hoped to accomplish by way of the protest. (After Vietnam, civil rights, and gender equality, what was left? The right to disco?)

When teachers engage in civil disobedience--or any kind of protest--they are wielding a sharp, two-edged sword, and it is impossible to predict exactly where the sword will cut.

I knew a teacher some years ago who constantly taught his students that they must question all authority, and that it was important for them to rebel against "the man." He got very upset, however, when his students rebelled against him. What he had meant to teach was, "You should think of me as cool and open-minded; you should consider me to be one who is not duped by the system; you should follow my instructions and nobody else's." What the students understood was, "We should rebel. This teacher is a fool to think that he is one of us, but his ideas give us authority to rise up against him and all others." The students were right.

I don't know if it's possible to teach students that rebellion is good, and that they must rebel--only that they should rebel against somebody else but us. Such teaching is bound to backfire.

However, we can teach them that there are always consequences to rebellion, to civil disobedience, to job actions. We can teach them that we cannot always predict what the consequences may be, and that they may sometimes be extreme--that people sometimes die as a result of rebellion. We can teach them to carefully think through rebellion, and that it is usually better to tolerate current ills than to unleash the violent forces that accompany open disobedience to established norms.

Our students must realize that whoever protests must be willing to accept the full range of consequences that may arise. I have had students in the past who walked out, then were angry when they were given truancies. They clearly had not thought through the consequences of their protest, and they may even have been improperly taught by teachers who romanticized protest to the point of making the protesters believe that they would automatically be rewarded, not punished, for their protest.

Teachers must also teach students that any sort of protest, including civil disobedience, must be understood and practiced on an individual level. When someone joins in a protest because there is pressure to do so, then it is no longer a protest but a mob. The fine line between the sort of rebellion enjoined in the Declaration of Independence and the sort of behavior that a mob engages in is crossed whenever coercion or unjust dominion occurs in any degree. There is, after all, no power of true change that can be derived from the forcing of conscience.

If you got caught up this morning in the heady excitement of joining with your colleagues in a large act of defiant theatricality, you must pause before your students and carefully help them know as many facets of the double blade you were figuratively swinging. They must know that for some of you the decision involved considering the agonizing uncertainty of whether or not you would face firing; for all it means loss of income and retirement; there have been threats (not widely believed) of loss of benefits; the entire protest may have been for naught, and we may still feel the draconian cuts planned by the state; and there may be short and long term consequences that we cannot predict. The excitement of rebellion must be weighed with the price of rebellion, and the decision to rebel must never be made while ignoring the responsibility of rebellion.

This is very nuanced thinking, and teenagers especially need to be guided through it.

Jeff Combe