"Protesting" as a student

is perhaps a rite of passage. "Everyone does it" I am told. 

I thought back to my time in post-secondary education. Yes, we protested. It was the Vietnam war era. We opposed conscription as well as the war. 

My generation marched in protest. Some of them sprayed anti-war slogans. They set up camp and talked to people in the streets. Brother Cat was one of those who led a march on his motor bike. There is a photograph of him in the archives of this nation doing just that. We had a brick thrown through the front window of the house because someone took exception to our opposition to the war. We still went out and sang "Give peace a chance". The media reported all this - which is how the photograph happens to be in the ASIO archives as well as the newspaper morgue. 

We went on with our studies at the same time. Brother Cat and I were both training to be teachers and that meant we had to "sign on" for every lecture, every seminar, every tutorial. There were essays and other assignments which still had to be handed in.There was no choice about this. Students did as they were told. In all my time in post-secondary education I asked for one extension - an overnight extension. The reason for it had nothing to do with protesting. I had simply taken over my mother's class when she had three days of "compassionate" leave to go to the city to deal with the death of her mother. I was granted that extension grudgingly, indeed had to show that I had actually written the essay but not typed it. 

I was trying to explain this to one of the current student protestors. She is not "camping out" like many of her fellow students but she still appears to be passionate about the cause...except that she does not seem to be too clear about what the cause is. It would seem from her comments that a good many of her fellow protestors are not too clear either. I explained what we had been protesting about - when we had time. She was amazed that we continued to go on studying and that those teaching us had gone on teaching.  Oh yes, we had some radicals among the staff but there were still expectations which had to be met. 

We did not have social media of course. We did have newspapers and the radio. There were people who spoke at rallies too and they were sometimes well educated people who understood the issues - even if they sometimes espoused a point of view with which others disagreed. You stood there and listened - and nobody had a mobile phone. You discussed things over college canteen tea and instant coffee.

"I don't know how you ever got a message across," I was told, "You couldn't have been much good at it." 

Actually I think we were quite good at it. Many of us ended up as articulate and active adults who still take an interest in what is going on. The student generation now has easy access to vast amounts of information but I am not sure they are any better informed than we were.