Student Thought: Our role as students

Posted by Seth Pearce at 10:17 PM

What is our role, the students' role, in our society?

As it stands now we are the constant object of the education discussion sentence. My English teacher told me (and mind you, this was last year... in my junior year of high school) that a simple sentence contains three parts: the subject or actor, the verb or action, and the object or that which is acted upon.

As in: "The Department of Education (that's the subject) puts (the verb) children (the object) first (I guess that's an adjective)."

In the American education debate, we are acted upon by many subjects: The Department of Education, which treats us like products, numbers that need to be manipulated so that it can look good; the city, which treats us as criminals who need to be babysat by the NYPD for a couple of hours a day; and our teachers, whom people assume can snap their fingers and turn us into brilliant astrophysicists ready to herald in a new age of American economic glory.

In debates about the issues, class size for example, we always hear about how current conditions make teaching impossible. What about learning? Do you think it's any easier to learn in a class of 34 than it is to teach? Since when has learning become a passive action? Just because it contains no plosive sounds and seems to flow off the tongue a bit easier doesn't mean it's any smoother of a process. Learning is not an exact science. It takes hard work, intense concentration and in today's schools, quite a bit of luck.

If our education systems are truly trying to put "Children First," then it is time for us to become the subject of our education. People like Joel Klein need to stop asking, "Are our teachers teaching?" and instead ask, in the words of the Bard, "Is our children learning?"

To refocus this picture, we students need to take a more active role in our schools. That is the key mission of the New York City Student Union, a citywide, student-founded, student-run organization. Since its creation in 2006, the union's goals have been to act as a powerful collective voice for New York City's students, to give students a say in the decisions made about them, and to provide communication between students from all over the City.

Each Monday, these students from small schools, impact schools, specialized schools and others, meet to examine the problems in our city's schools and come up with student-generated solutions to them. For example, we've advocated the need for smaller classes to the governor and other state officials. We testified before the New York City Council against the cell phone ban, and most recently we've lobbied the Department of Education on improving its new progress reports and student surveys.

Additionally we work on student empowerment projects such as our Student Government Project, in which we are researching the state of student governments around the city and look to develop an effective student government model so that students can have a greater say in their individual schools, and the NYC Students Blog, the first-ever student-run blog about the NYC education system, which features the voices of seven student bloggers, representing every borough, giving their take on education issues.

I believe that the only way to make students the subject of the education debate is for us to take a more active role in larger education politics and the goings on of our own schools. We must remember that we are the learners. That is an honorable position to be in. We are not products or tools or criminals. We are potential incarnate.

Cross-posted on the NYC Students Blog

Student Thought: Real student representation

Posted by Seth Pearce at 8:04 AM

Just a (sort of) quick note from Wednesday's MSNBC Democratic presidential debate. About an hour and a half into the debate Rep. Dennis Kucinich said that he believed 16 year olds should be allowed to vote.

While this idea sounds radical, it should really be considered, especially on a municipal level. In the spring of 2006, the New York City Youth Congress proposed that New York City's voting age should be lowered to 16. Following this, the Future Voters of America Party lobbied the City Council on lowering the voting age and Councilwoman Gale Brewer introduced a bill that would do just that. I failed to find any news on how that's doing.

When one of my friends who was active in Future Voters told me about the issue, I was a little unsure about it. Now I believe that lowering the voting age to 16 could be a very important step for NYC and it would have the greatest impact in education, since around one third of high school students would be able to vote for the politicians who they felt best represented their concerns in improving their education system.

Students are clamoring for a voice in the decisions made on their education. That desire is one of the reasons for the founding the NYC Student Union and why last year he New York City Youth Congress voted for a resolution calling for the creation of a Student Senate whose opinions would have a weighted effect on DOE decisions.

Generally, simpler is better. It seems to me that the simplest way to give students a voice in their education is to give 16 year olds the right to vote. This will let the people in charge know how students feel, giving them a more clear and informed view of how our schools are run and more insight into the city's educational successes and failures. It also might serve to get more students interested in how city decisions affect them and give them some reason to believe that their schools are really serving the students.