In my education class we were reading an excerpt from David Cohen's book “Teaching and Its Predicaments”. I disagree with some stuff he says and agree with other stuff. I found a quote that I found to be really intellectually stimulating.

“A carpenter can produce results if he has the skills and knowledge of the trade, the will to work, and good materials, but all of a teacher's art and craft will be useless unless students embrace the purposes of instruction as their own and seek them with their own art and craft. This is one reason that students' resistance to teachers' direction can be a potent source of students' influence; it can be threatening not simply because students defy authority but also because they deny teachers success.” (emphasis added)

And that got me thinking about building organized student power.

I'm writing a script on book bans that I think you'll find interesting. It's specifically about the teacher-parent dialectic, or more accurately, the school-parent and administration-teacher dialectics. Dialectic is a fancy word for relationship; struggle; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It's a term used a lot in Marx, and I think his analysis of class conflict is useful in analyzing school power. But a main conclusion I draw in the video is that students need to create their own power separate from teachers, for multiple reasons that I won't go into here. I'll take it for granted that you think that's a good thing.

But one of the reasons was that teacher and student interests will naturally diverge, because they are two separate parties. I find this quote then to provide a possible framework for student resistance: striking. I mean if striking without faculty, it would have to occur when the issue is that faculty interests do not align with student interests.

But while talking with a friend from high school, she mentioned how such a thing would be especially impractical at our school, where students really care about the possible consequences of striking — that is, a failing grade. Failing a class can be life-ruining. A possible consequence of striking in traditional labor without proper legal frameworks is losing wages or getting fired. But strikes did happen, though they were brutal. I would imagine then that the leverage of striking is this very twin fate of students and faculty. Although a strike might mean just a vacation for them.

Say instead that students striked a standardized test. That would mean real consequences for schools in funding, namely. Standardized tests typically have little to no consequences for students. Strikes could obviously backfire by inspiring the state or the school to make consequences for students, but assuming that is not true, it could be a useful strategy.

I think that establishing a real student movement would require an examination of early labor relations. How did strikes happen with no legal protections for workers? I don't know and I'm gonna find out.