A Manifesto for Students of Any Age

Exactly two years ago today, I felt compelled to write the following piece as a Facebook post, written for my students. It was during a time when I felt that academia was being assailed by ‘greater’ powers and that intellectualism was under attack by populist demagoguery. I feel the same today, even while the gap of the last two years has been filled by one of the most challenging disruptions to education in recent history. I still feel that students need to reassess the value of their education, take ownership of it, and fight for it without taking it for granted. So I’m reposting the message here on my blog, with a few minor revisions. Hopefully some of you may find something of value in it.

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The Urgency and Power of a Good Education

This is a message to my students – past, present, and future – wherever I may have taught you, in whatever capacity. Some of you may remember my saying to you (quite often) that as teachers, we’re not really training you for a career – we’re training you for a life – teaching you how to be a responsible, compassionate, contributive, and free-thinking member of your community.

Now, more than ever, it’s important to realize the importance of that last quality… the ability to think freely. And it’s important to realize how much that quality is now in jeopardy. And not just now… this has always been so. The indisputable truth is that through the vast timeline of human history and within almost all cultures of the world, the structures of power have feared the individual, independent, educated person. To put it bluntly, it’s not in the interest of those in power to equip you with the education that will question them or their policies. So while they give lip service to the importance of education, look behind the curtain and realize that most of them are working to limit the influence and scope of your educational ambitions if it doesn’t align with their own agenda.

That’s not to say that all governments or government agencies are out to suppress you. There are indeed some power structures and individuals in the world that are truly seeking to empower more people by giving them the freedom to be educated and to educate others.

The Agenda of Power Structures

One need only look at the budgets of most governments of any scale to see what they prioritize over education – usually it’s War or Political Aggression, disguised as ‘Defense’. Next in priority is usually commerce, but that too is largely designed to profit only the bigger financial players. Despite all the speeches you hear claiming otherwise, the common man is rarely the prime beneficiary of governmental economic policy, and even so it’s most often in the form of welfare, which is only helpful after the fact. It’s what you’re offered when all other systems have failed you.

This brings me to corporations, who are often the second tier of power structures that academics seek out for help and opportunity (and in some cases, the hidden first tier). Indeed, a huge amount of money and influence is poured into academia by corporations, as well as by individually affluent corporate tycoons. Indeed, a lot of this comes in the form of individual scholarships, which is nothing to scoff at. But it’s never enough to fulfill the actual demand. And by the way, don’t be fooled by the apparent generosity of such grant-awarding corporations. Very few of them are willing to give full autonomy to the academy or student to pursue educational aims that will further the recipient’s own personal agenda. Corporations are more likely to cultivate the seeds of their own agendas. They seek either to sow the small crop of a new elite governing class to propagate their own narrow financial goals, or to make potential worker drones just educated enough to be trained to work within the company’s own proprietary limits – automatons who are programmed to primarily fuel the company’s own unchecked growth and influence. They’re investing in you so that you become good, loyal, unquestioning employees.

The fact is (and this has been proven time and again) that if you go through the motions of your education as narrowly defined only by the curriculum structure or whatever technical skills you’re taught, then you will forever be an unwary tool of some power structure or another that defined those skills in the first place. Which is why we as teachers implore you to take your education seriously and openly. To learn how to think independently and critically. To avoid becoming clones of us. To find ways to supplement what we teach you with your own learning, so that you foster your own individual growth as well as that of your family, community, society, nation, or world. This is why it hurts us when you miss our classes, harmless as it may seem. This is why it hurts us when you don’t live up to your own academic potential and become a victim of distraction, laziness, mediocrity, or ambivalence.

Education for a Life

I admit that I’m not the best example of a person who followed this advice. I struggled deeply as a student in my early years, and it was only when I saw education not as something to get me the career that I wanted, but to get me the life that I wanted, in which my work could actively and physically contribute towards the well-being of the world around me. That was when I started to take my education seriously and to enjoy it and succeed in it.

I’m lucky to have taught students who are now literally spread out all over the world, and wherever you all are, I’m sure you’re not so sheltered that you can’t bear witness to what is happening around you. Academics and scholars are being ridiculed as being elitist and out-of-touch. Intellectualism and critical thinking are being devalued in favor of operational and technical skills. Students are being demonized as brainless cattle when they speak their own minds. The academy, meant to be the institution in which we invest our highest trust, is in turn becoming mistrusted and its freedoms are being curtailed.

I don’t particularly care where in the political spectrum your beliefs lie. I simply implore you to treat your education as a very precious gift – and not one to be passively served to you on silver platter, but an empowering tool with which you work actively and tirelessly. And you must realize that what we teach you as part of a formal education is only the beginning of the process that crystallizes your identity and personality; the process continues informally long after you leave our classrooms and studios.

Therefore, I say again that you must treat your education as a precious gift, because there will always be someone who wants to devalue it, to demonize it, to take it away, or even to use it against you. Don’t take your education for granted either, because I guarantee that for every one of you happily being taught, there are a hundred others in the world who would literally give up everything to be in your place. This isn’t just about making you a productive professional, but a responsible and independent academic activist for your own personal agenda. And in such academic activism, you will always encounter resistance. Hopefully, we teachers have some part in teaching you how to RESIST BACK.