American students: why not strike?

Thousands of students from Boston Public Schools (BPS) left school on March 7 to protest proposed budget cuts in what has been called “one of the largest demonstrations of young people the city has ever seen.” By one estimate, 3,650 students participated in protests and demonstrations around downtown Boston.

The concern with the proposed budget is that it would remove funding for several programs within BPS. Some were afraid that languages such as Arabic would no longer be taught, while others were concerned about no longer being able to obtain a free student MBTA pass and thus having to pay for transportation to school everyday, a cost many would struggle to cover. Several were worried about teaching jobs being cut.

The students who walked out of class that morning to participate in the strike should be commended for their bravery and boldness in standing up for their own futures. It is rare to see such a large group of young students in the United States to be politically active, fight for policy changes and yield the desirable result. Only four days after the protests took place, Mayor Marty Walsh announced that he would not be making the controversial cuts to BPS. The efficiency of strike in this case is a remarkable show of democracy and the U.S. government at work. However, if these students achieved their goal with such efficiency, it begs the question: why do American students use strikes so infrequently as a form of protest?

In other nations, the student strike is a much more common protest tactic. For example, in 2012, Canadian students organized a nationwide strike that involved around 250,000 people. Although the United States has seen small scale student boycotts, there hasn’t been a large scale national strike or boycott for the past 40 years. This is not to say that American students do not protest. American students protest by occupying, marching and sitting-in. However, the fact that American students do not boycott class or strike often suggests an interesting effect of academic culture. The lack of strikes is even more significant among college students, who have more flexible class schedules and a better ability to mobilize large amounts of students through campus efforts.

Some have accounted for this lack of organized strike in universities with student debt. So many American students are in debt that they would not risk missing class out of fear of potentially falling behind a semester, which could be economically devastating. Others blame this lack of resistance on a much less quantitative factor: the authoritarian culture in American classrooms that starts in elementary school. Those who oppose No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top claim that these programs make learning achievement-oriented rather than prioritize the ideas of intellectual and character development or education for active citizenship. This, in turn, makes students passive to their education.

Regardless of whether or not these arguments are correct, it is clear that what the students of BPS achieved is remarkable, especially in light of American students’ reluctance to strike. Not only have these students advocated for their futures and obtained what they wanted, but they have also served to teach all of those watching that different tactics of protest can work and prove to be very efficient.