Perhaps the most militant outpouring of public anger during the Great Rail Strike, the St. Louis General Strike called for (at the time) radical reforms like an eight-hour workday and abolition of child labor. When a black steamboat worker asked an assembled crowd “Will you stand to us regardless of color?” the crowd uniformly responded, “We will!” Without bloodshed, the strikers took over transportation and other industries.
From Karl Fisch:
That instead of blaming “the system,” we should realize that we are the system, and we should advocate for our students when we see things that we don’t believe are in their best interests. And that we, just like the protesters in the middle east, and just like the #occupywallstreet folks, have access to tools that Clay Shirky has shown us make it much easier to not only organize, but to actually effect change. That, really, this thing we call school doesn’t happen without us.
From Outside The Cave:
Teachers should be occupying the education system. We should be occupying Tweed Courthouse and other Boards of Education. We should be occupying the test producers and textbook publishers. We should be occupying Arne Duncan’s front yard and office. But at the same time, perhaps our students should be occupying our classrooms? I think we, the teachers, have to bare some blame for setting the conditions that led to the Occupy movement. Too many of us (and as radical as I try to be in the classroom, I fall far short of where I need to be) are the gatekeepers of knowledge, the sole determiners of success and failure, and hold monopolies on the administration of justice. In our classrooms, far too many of us are the 1%.
From GOOD.is:
Teachers hold our nation’s future right in front of them, as they serve 30—or at the high school level, 150—students per day. We teach academic subjects and implicitly share values and beliefs. Yet, society still devalues our importance in the development of children—paying us with lip service, handshakes, and thank-a-teacher projects, while simultaneously slipping us pink pieces of paper by the thousands. Add in the continued narrowing of our curricula, and we have a dangerous recipe that’s educating children to believe learning is only necessary for commerce.
Many teachers are protesting the direction education is heading, but we need a broader Occupy the Classroom movement to help us become the true leaders of our profession. Teachers as a whole don’t occupy—they are preoccupied. In English, that means “busy with other things often at the exclusion of other things.” In Spanish, a more apt translation is “worried.”
From the blog:
Before teacher-bashers filled the coffers of national education committees, people stood boldly in the classroom and decided upon pedagogy for all. With the introduction of the Common Core State Standards, some reformers have found a way to inject themselves into the pedagogical side of teaching. They’ve made a lasting impact on policy via No Child Left Behind / Race To The Top and these pieces have cemented a corporatist view upon all educators’ jobs. All the while, by recent research, nine out of 10 teachers across the nation have been rated satisfactory. Akin to the #OccupyWallStreet movement, this movement makes us the 90%, doesn’t it?
