First, I work at a public school (6-12) as the computer guy. Not only is the staff mostly openly anti-war, but the 350 African American working class kids from the west side of Chicago are also mostly anti-war, and open about it. But then again, the most common logic with the kids seems to be "So many of us are dying here, on the west side, why are we being sent ti kill more people somewhere else?"
Secondly, my friend Nick De Genova, who is under attack at Columbia U. in New York has already been blessed with demonstrations from students at Columbia defending him.
I think that it is too easy to overestimate how conservative and conservatizing college often is. By 1968, polls showed that people without college educations were substantially more likely to be anti-war than college educated or attending people.
At the same time, college is not what it was in the 1930's. College has gone from being more or less a training ground for the elites and their minions to a means of educating skilled labor, ie lots of college is actually unwaged labor in preparation for becoming waged labor, albeit generally fairly highly skilled.
It is no accident that apprenticing just isn't what it used to be. Outside of the traditional skilled trades, skilled workers more often than not go to colleges of some sort to learn a trade. This has a benefit for capital in so far as education is standardized to some degree and also because one is less likely to get radicals out of a college setting where a lot of focussed, non-job related ideology, aka what is often passed off as history, political science, etc. is shoved on students. This does not mean I am against learning about history or against so-called Liberal Arts, but that the stuff taught is often little more than puerile nonsense, with some exceptions (such as anthro, for example, which does tend to harbor more radicals.)
College training is a safer and more systematic way to get both "higher quality" labor in certain fields, and also a safer way to take new workers to be out of the direct flow of the class struggle.
The result, IMO, is to import the class struggle into academia, however. The resolution is itself only going to generate a greater contradiction which will blow up on capital, and in fact seems to be now, as student radicalism is much higher now than comparable to the first 2 months of the Vietnam War.
Cheers, Chris
On Sat, 2003-04-05 at 13:13, Kelley wrote:
> At 03:21 PM 4/5/03 +0000, Carl Remick wrote:
>
> >[Disgusting. From the NY Times:]
>
>
> This article has the stench of Rightnut Press Release as the basis for a
> story idea all over it.
>
> my very brave son has been contending with some incredible Huzzah attitudes
> among his classmates. I was pretty shocked to read the results of his
> survey. All of them (95% of what turned out to be a sample of 200
> highschool students) supported the war. Most did so strongly, about 35%
> somewhat strongly. My son gets only few words of encouragement for his
> positions in classrooms, though there is a strong vocal minority of
> students opposed to the war. He mentioned the lies exposed in the Pentagon
> Papers, as well as the lies about GW 1. The best his teacher could do was
> wink at him and tell him he was right after class.
>
> One teacher caught him with a print out from the web, of the site that
> compares Shurb photos with monkeys, apes, chimps, and orangutans. She
> confiscated it and told him that it was wrong to make fun of the president.
> He went back the next day and recited a few historical factoids for her
> about a long standing tradition of mocking presidents throughout US history.
>
> I think I must have seethed for about three hours the afternoon he came
> home and told me about that one. I had to laugh when a friend of a friend
> refused to do the survey b/c he thought he was a subject matter chosen by
> my son's teacher. It was not, it was my son's. However, this person was
> sure that the only reason it was being done was because most high school
> teachers are liberal propagandists and useful idiots. Riiiiiiiiiiiight.
>
> Cursed be, but my kide's going to be going to an academically oriented,
> mostly white high school next year because they unified the school
> district. I can only imagine it's going to get worse. If the mostly
> black/Latino/immigrant high school he now attends is conservative... WTF is
> going on at a mostly white school? Will higher academic standards make a
> difference?
>
> Otherwise, Carl, I think you are glorifying the past. The campuses didn't
> radicalize right away during the Viet Nam war, either. Compared to that
> stage of the war, today's campuses are pretty radical.
>
>
>
>
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