Young people's protests are easy to mock. But ...

[struggle4progress]

... ignore them at your peril

Forget nostalgia for 1968 - youth activists today have real political savvy, and they are making their governments listen

Gary Younge
Monday June 12, 2006
The Guardian

On Wednesday March 29, as Hispanics throughout the US took to the streets to protest punitive immigration legislation, the Spanish teacher Hilda Sotelo was called into the principal's office at Austin high school, in El Paso. Austin is the "Home of the Fighting Panthers", but this was one fight the principal, Angelo Pokluda, did not want his students getting involved in. Pokluda (who did not respond to requests for an interview) told Sotelo not to talk to her class about immigration. When she told him she was on chapter three of Spanish for Native Speakers, which deals with discrimination towards immigrants, he told her to teach something else ...

The last few weeks saw more than 600,000 school students skip classes in Chile to demand free public transport, lower fees for college entrance exams and greater participation in government. On all three counts they were at least partly successful. The recently elected socialist president, Michelle Bachelet, offered an extra £104m for transport, some free lunches, mostly free entrance exams and the renovation of dilapidated buildings. She also set aside 12 of 74 seats on an advisory panel on education. After initially rejecting the offer, the students accepted the deal on Friday.

Meanwhile in France, over the past six months, two episodes of revolt - one of minority youth in the inner cities and the other of students and youth in the city centres - produced concrete results. After the former, last November, the government unveiled a raft of measures to tackle inner-city deprivation. During the latter, which saw two-thirds of universities occupied, blockaded or closed, hundreds of schools taken over and between one million and 3 million people in the streets, the government retracted an unpopular employment law ...

The people involved in the demonstrations today are in general younger, poorer and darker than those of 40 years ago. Young women are more likely to take a leadership role; their parents are more likely to support them. These are not middle-class students seeking an alliance with the workers; they are working-class students seeking passage to the middle class. In Chile, 87% of the public supported them. "These are not crazy revolutionaries," wrote Patricio Fernandez, an influential columnist in the Clinic newspaper. "Their parents support them. Their cousins, their neighbours, their old aunts. They are bored that the wealthy schools educate those who will be boss while their school trains them to be workers. More than combating Chilean authorities, they are convincing them." ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1795433,00.html