Student movement needed

Student empowerment can bridge the divide between knowledge and education

by Peter Verin

Historically, students have been marginalized and patronized. Similarly, education has been mystified, thus alienating from the general population. Knowledge should not be a commodity.

To overcome this reality, students need to grasp the concept of empowerment and apply it to their lives. Empowerment is very distinct from power. Power usually involves a few people who are consumed with self-interest, while empowerment consists of students acting together, as an identity group, for the common good. Empowerment can serve to liberate students from oppression.

The anti-globalization demonstrations in recent years have reinforced the idea that it is essential for people to do the right thing for the right reason. The operative question that student demonstrators should ask themselves is what they could do differently under the same oppressive circumstances.

This applies to demonstrators who protest the cost of higher education. Practically speaking, they have agreed that they are unable to raise the bar. They need to first acknowledge the intrinsic value of education and then promote its seamless integration into their lives: adventure, wonder and endless potential accompany doing so.

Students, first, need to give themselves choices, rather than wait for choices to, inevitably, be imposed upon them: administrators get paid for dictating to students how to live their lives. Students, on the other hand, pay to be dictated to . . . go figure.

Secondly, people who claim they represent students need to stop scapegoating and dividing their own kind.

The greatest identity that students have is the fact that they are students. Students should identify with other students because of this marker and embrace the idea that all knowledge is relational; it is a qualitative phenomenon and experience. In doing so, it’ll speed up communication between generations and the transfer of knowledge between teacher and student.

Presently, education reduces knowledge to isolated “what” questions when, optimally, it’s able to generate knowledge to chain reactions through “how” questions. Instead of limiting students to cogs in academia, students can actively and transparently inform how the university is run and/or ruined. Contrary to popular thought, students have minimal influence. Universities are hubs to which people keep coming, for their own reasons. These reasons don’t include critical questioning, examining authority or questioning the corporate spin.

Student empowerment rejects fear-based university politics. Universities aren’t repositories of truth when they’re founded on a conflicted model. Tear down the barricades.