I work with schools and teachers all the time, and I can guarantee you that this was not some plot by the school administration or teachers. Maybe you don’t realize that these eighth graders have had very powerful computers in their hands for the last several years, and some of them for seven or eight years, and they pay attention to what’s going on. They read. They watch social media videos. They share colossal amounts of information with each other.
They are the most progressive and connected and diverse and tolerant generation of Americans, by far. Every single political and cultural poll that you find confirms this.
What they don’t trust are schools who have been forced to be silent about actual American history, the systemic racism embedded into our legal system and economy, or schools that are forced to teach creationism which is a myth alongside evolution, which is no longer considered a theory and hasn’t been for a century because of the evidence being incontrovertible and overwhelming, or religious schools controlled by paranoid white Karens, or schools that are controlled by religious ideologies, which refused to recognize the reality that some people are just born different, because they are gay or they are transgender or nonbinary, or in this case, kids don’t trust schools that try to make them believe that girls and women don’t have control over their own bodies and cannot make decisions about their own sexual behavior.
I can guarantee you that the students organized this on their own.
Students don’t trust imposed authority anymore. Schools, even here in Iowa city, struggle to keep kids in line whether it’s for a negative behavior issues like acting out, or positive behavior issues, like walking out of classrooms to protest in support of the environment or anti-racism or personal health issues.
This forum is mostly full of old men who are very disconnected from younger generations. All these efforts to control how kids think are going to blow up in old peoples faces.
One political party thinks it can control people with propaganda and handmaid‘s tale legal efforts and on and on, but they can’t keep a lid on the truth, And they might be able to fool kids for a certain amount of time, but they will figure it out, and they will pick up the pieces of the distruction that the current Republican Party especially, and the corporate controlled wing of the democrat party, are leaving them as a legacy.
“ lies get halfway around the world before the truth gets his boots on”
- mark Twain