The Potential For Student Power.
One of the many reasons for the quickness with which the state moves to reduce the funding of its schools is an awareness of students’ passive–even ignorant–attitudes toward their collective social status as students. It is sometimes said that students cannot form a class because of the temporal nature of their situation. Students are always looking forward, identifying pro actively with what they hope to become, and as a result neglect their current status. Often, they hold no jobs, and those who do hate their jobs, dreading the wasted hours behind a cash register, for example, but seeing it as a necessary evil.
An awareness of this can guide our efforts. If students identify as future journalists, artists, teachers, researchers, etc., we should start by appealing to them as such. Show what awaits. This is not an economic conflict, where wage earners fight their bosses for better pay and better conditions. The fact that tuition may go up $600 dollars is largely met with indifference. Instead, the conflict is almost entirely social. What is needed now is to unmask the social conditions that await by revealing the obsolescence of deeply entrenched attitudes about education, attitudes that come mainly from the working class of previous generations who saw a college education as a ticket to the middle class.
How many English majors are out there, for example, with the illusion that they might one day get paid to immerse themselves in reading and writing? How many business majors are living in denial about their prospects? Even the grad student’s hope of making it into academe, to live the “Life of the Mind” is now just an hallucination. A recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education describes one student’s struggle:
She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.
Students in California are putting the emphasis on the fact that we’ve become “damaged goods,” thrown into a hopeless job market where delayed periods of unemployment are thought by employers to be corrupting. This is probably the right first step. Shatter the illusion. Another recent article by Don Peck in the Atlantic, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” gives an analysis of the effect recessions have on youth entering the workforce:
[A] whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale, has studied the impact of recessions on the lifetime earnings of young workers. In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who merged into the teeth of the 1981-82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.
But what’s truly remarkable is the persistence of the earnings gap. Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.
It’s difficult–maybe impossible–to see anything promising in the present or the future. Shit is fucked up. As students from Boston have put it, “The only assurance we have in the present future is uncertainty. The uncertainty of whether we are able to complete college. The uncertainty of getting a job after graduating. The uncertainty of having enough food to feed ourselves. The uncertainty of living life. Only these uncertainties are for certain.”
But in unmasking this reality, we create new possibilities for the future. Our vacant futures can unite us. In shattering our dreams, the present conditions force us to see ourselves not pro actively, taking on the identity of what we hope to be, but actively, as what we are: students who share a common struggle.
Occupations and walk-outs become meaningless without this context. The attack on public education depends in the first place on student identity, or student consciousness. So also does the fight against it.
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