Thursday, March 15, 2018

What Will The Nationwide School Walkouts Accomplish?"

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   There's little reason to think that kids have any particular insight into this problem--other than the kids who were actually at Parkland. It seems like that would give you an important perspective. Though it's also likely to rob you of your objectivity. My general inclination is to take the testimony of people with direct experience of such things very seriously...but not to accept their conclusions uncritically.
   Even the people involved in these walkouts seem to think it merely aims to "sustain outrage." It doesn't do anything to advance the arguments of the pro-more-gun-control side. It's really just a kind of theater. Here's one sentence on schools "collaborating" with students on walkouts...and almost a whole paragraph about schools working to thwart them:
Some schools collaborated with the students on actions, moments of silence, or programming with guest speakers. But other schools have forbidden students from participating in the walk-out, with some even threatening suspension. Some superintendents cited safety concerns for these restrictions, arguing that they didn’t have enough staff to protect students from potential violence while they were outside of classrooms. But other schools explicitly objected to students’ political activism: One middle school in Fresno, California, allowed students to walk out, but strongly discouraged them from speaking about gun policy, noting that some students wanted to make a statement of solidarity rather than engage in an act of political protest.
Obviously a lot of teachers and schools will be doing more than "collaborating," given the general political orientation of the education establishment. There can't be any real doubt that many teachers and schools will be encouraging the walkouts. Reports are already rolling in about students being pressured to participate--as well as reports of students being prevented from doing so. Our main goal right now, obviously, has to be to protect student's First Amendment rights. And that's got nothing to do with which side of the issue they're on (needless to say).
   I'm not a protesty guy anyway. And mobilizing the least-knowledgeable and least-mature segment of the population to do your bidding seems beyond lame to me. OTOH, I do think that youth can have a certain perspective on things. OTOOH, I doubt there's much more thought behind all this than there is behind any other teen fad. 


5 Comments:

Blogger Dark Avenger said...

“And mobilizing the least-knowledgeable and least-mature segment of the population to do your bidding seems beyond lame to me.”

Are we talking about the protestors or the late, unlamented Tea Party movement?

10:19 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Your fallacy is: tu quoque

10:58 AM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

Agreed. The Tea Party protestors didn’t have the factors you mentioned of inexperience, immaturity, and they certainly were less informed than the average high school student in this country.

12:01 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

If the question is really "who's less informed, the average high schooler or the average Tea Partier," I'm going to fall back on the principle of indifference.

Actually, IMO the Tea Party was a good idea...it just didn't work out. It seems to have actually ended up being a bunch of fundamentalist religious types--or so some evidence suggests, anyway.

12:31 PM  
Blogger Aa said...

In a recent "discussion" about protests someone indicated to me they didn't think they did any good. My response was "Then it's much like religion...absolutely no evidence that it's even close to the truth or makes a difference, but it makes people feel better and like they're doing something worthwhile". roughly paraphrased.

They had no real answer to that but their grin was rather admiring (the person in question is religious).

7:47 PM  

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