Is it bad behavior or is it calling out injustice?

If the rules are unjust, isn't it our job to rebel? Let's follow that thread all the way back home.

You have probably heard about the student protests that are developing around the country by now, demanding their universities divest from the war on Gaza.

Some of the reactions from the grown-ups have been truly enlightening, and a confirmation of the way adult supremacy is alive and well. I threw out a quick instagram post about it, but I wanted to write more.

Photo by Jakob Rubner on Unsplash

What I’m seeing is basically adultism in plain sight.

Protestors have been generally condemned, and some have been suspended by their colleges and arrested by the police.

Adultism is one of the lesser known -isms, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Adultism is the systemic and structural discrimination of young people based on their age and status as children/young people.

What is happening here is adult society turning against its younger members because they are “behaving badly” - and this is a direct expression of our deep-seated hatred of children and young people, and our routine dehumanisation of them.

What is interesting, from a youth autonomy and liberation perspective, is that often it is adults, not young people, who get to be the arbiters of whether something is bad behavior, or legitimate dissent.

It begs the question, would the reaction have been so extreme had it been full-blown adults protesting in front of their workplace or other building?

And sure, most college students are adults. But they are brand new adults, and they are still young people. Claiming that there is a consistent, significant difference between 18 year olds and a 16 year olds is problematic in many ways, and only serves to reinforce the child/adult binary, with children somehow being less deserving, less human.

We are witnessing the dehumanisation of student protestors and this is nothing new. I’ve written before about our long history of youth resistance, and how young people often find themselves on the front lines of liberation struggles, and of limiting adult exxpectations.

We have always, routinely dismissed, dehumanized, and condemned the rebellion of children and young people.

We can get away with this because the truth is, that is how we raise children. We raise them to believe that we, the adults, are the arbiters of what is good behaviour and what is bad behaviour, what is right and what is wrong, what is appropriate and inappropriate.

Eating what you’re served? Good behaviour.

Refusing to go to school? Bad behaviour verging on pathology.

Doing your coursework and going to classes? Good behaviour.

Refusing to carry on as normal during genocide? Bad behaviour.

mattxiv

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The bottom line is, we have normalised the dehumanisation and control of young people, and when they rebel we are no longer able to see it as legitimate dissent due to injustice or actual grievances. Instead, we see it as out of control, bad, threatening, uncivilised - grounds for punishment, basically.

And that, too, is not new: we have a whole box of tools of control in punishment, manipulation, rewards and bribes.

Punishment is how we keep our young children doing what we want them to do, punishment is the way adults exert their power over young people and force them to comply - and so it’s no surprise that punishment continues to be the main deterrent for bad behavviour (whether it’s actually criminal behaviour or legitimate dissent), even when our children “become adults” and enroll in college - still, we send the police in, we suspend, we threaten consequences.

We continue to use the same parenting tools we’ve been using all along, and nobody bats an eye because it is apparently okay and normal. We have made it so.

What if children’s bad behaviour was actually ALWAYS resistance to adult power?

What would we do with our parenting advice, rewards and punishments then?

If you live under oppression, isn’t resistance justified? How else are you going to get free?

And this brings me to the fine line between resistance and breaking the rules.

Who gets to decide what is protest and what is a punishable offence? Who gets to decide wha is violence and what is legitimate rebellion, what is cheating and what is resistance to oppression?

Do the adults in charge get to decide? And if yes, is that a bit like an oppressive government deciding whether to indulge its people’s call for freedom?

In other words, can we draw a thread between children doing what we’ve always labelled as ‘being naughty’, to the student resistance we are seeing on university campuses now?

Can we legitimately claim that a toddler tantruming and a student protesting are both, in their own ways, rebelling against adult domination and its colonising force?

(And if you feel that equating student protesters to toddlers is somehow demeaning, I will ask you to check your adultism here - why does it feel dehumanizing to be compared to a baby or toddler or child? Aren’t we all equally human?)

Some time ago I came across this piece and it made me think hard about everything I had ever known and assumed. It is titled Cheating is a Moral Imperative, and it argues that “students placed in school against their will and routinely disrespected have no obligation to adhere to the ethical codes of their oppressors.”

In other words, if you are living under a situation that is not of your own chosing, that is not co-created in any way, and that is fundamentally autocratic - you have the right, even the duty, to break all and any rules as an act of resistance.

The author applies this to cheating in schools, and makes the case that while cheating is morally wrong in principle, in the case of school (specifically a school setting you are being forced to attend) cheating is absolutely okay and even necessary.

You are not obliged to abide by the social contract if you never agreed to it in the first place, and especially since there is very little recourse to justice when we live under an oppressive regime (which some children and young people see school as). Wouldn’t you do what you could just to get through schooling, if this was the case for you?

This is a really similar argument to what we are seeing play out in college campuses now: students are doing what they need to do to get their voices heard.

Their acts of brave resistance are not only okay, but a moral imperative to existing under the kind of silencing and repression that many colleges have been enacting.

And sure, they chose to be there - so in that sense it’s different. But being a willing participant in a community also means you get a say in how it is run; you get a say in the sorts of entities your college is investing in, and the moral stands it is taking as a result. Without students, there would be no colleges, and so surely they deserve a voice.

badschoolbadschool

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Okay, but back to children living under parenthood. I don’t mean to cast all parents as dictators and autocrats. We are not. For the most part, we love our children and want the best for them.

But I suppose some of the same questions are valid: our children are born under our authority and control, for better of worse, and they get very little say in our little familial social contract.

I remember feeling utterly unfree in my home. And that’s not because my parents were particularly authoritarian, but more likely because of the very nature of being a child in a family.

Unless we work hard on seeing interrogating our adultism, on listening to children and young people, on collaborating and partnering with them rather than threatening, manipulating and punishing them, we are no better than an oppressive institution.

And our tools of control will carry through childhood, and into adulthood: normalising the reactions we are seeing from universities across the US.

Perhaps it’s time universities started looking deeper at the systems that uphold them.