Public school officials across B.C. this week sent home letters to parents urging them to have a “conversation” with their youngsters about a planned, province-wide student walkout organized on Facebook for Wednesday (June 4). While it’s difficult to argue with the rationale behind school officials’ pleas, you’d have to be blind not to see the irony in the position being taken by educators.
Equipping youngsters to be active, knowledgeable, vocal members of a democratic society is, after all, one of the three main reasons behind the education system — the other two, according to philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler, being self-actualization and preparation for work. Clearly, in taking real, on-the-ground action to show their dissatisfaction with the B.C. Teachers’ Federation/B.C. Public School Employers’ Association labour dispute, the students are showing they have at least a working knowledge of the duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship. Shouldn’t that be encouraged?
Well, sure, if you’re not the people running the schools and having to explain why it’s OK for teachers to stage “rotating” strike action and for the government to lock them out of certain extracurricular activities, but it’s not OK for students to wave a flag and say, “Hey, we’re the ones caught in the middle”?
Victoria Barker, the Grade 12 Surrey student who spearheaded the initiative by launching the Facebook page called B.C. Student Walkout for Students, told the Globe and Mail, “We’re not taking sides. We just want to say that we’re tired of being stuck in the middle… and we’d really like them to come together and reach an agreement sooner rather than later.”
This writer fully understands the need for school administrators to encourage calm, rational action from young people as a way to discourage actions that might put them in harm’s way. They’re the ones looking after youngsters’ safety and well being in the school setting, after all. And you don’t want grade-school students essentially walking out of school for any length of time unless they’re supervised.
On another level, though, perhaps students demonstrating for a short time outside B.C. high schools on the 25th anniversary of one of the seminal moments of the global democratic movement — the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre — will be enough to shake up the two sides in this ugly, interminable and counterproductive dispute and nudge them toward a settlement that’s in the best interest of all British Columbians.
— David Burke
