School strike

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School demonstration (2009)

A school strike is the refusal to attend school by students. These are usually combined with demonstrations during class time to achieve political goals ( student demonstration ). In some cases, the school buildings are occupied ( school occupation ).

School strike

A school strike is colloquially a refusal to attend school by pupils , usually combined with demonstrations during class time to achieve political goals. Since students are not doing any work that they could withhold, it is not a strike. Since the school or its sponsors are not excluded from business dealings, there is no boycott . Nevertheless, the term school strike has established itself. Occasions for school strikes can range from individual administrative decisions to major political disputes, for example the anti- apartheid movement in South Africa and, most recently, Fridays for Future .

Legal situation in Germany: underlying legal problems

Several interests collide during the school strikes:

On the one hand, there is the state educational mandate in accordance with the school laws of the federal states, which provide for compulsory education . The constitutional basis for this is Article 7 (1) of the Basic Law . To enforce compulsory schooling, the schools can take regulatory measures such as entering absenteeism in the certificate, discussions, admonitions, references, exclusion from classes or compulsory transfer. Furthermore, they can initiate administrative offense proceedings or set up retreats during the demonstrations. The North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Schools refers the schools to certain regulatory measures in response to the Fridays for Future demonstrations from 2018.

This is offset by the rights of parents and children. Parents have a right of upbringing , under which they can also decide whether a child will take part in a demonstration. The children themselves also have a right of assembly under Article 8 (1) of the Basic Law . For underage children, this is not dependent on fixed age limits. The will of the child is decisive, provided that it is formed autonomously. This is especially true "when children have different opinions than the generation of their parents and teachers on promising socio-political issues such as climate protection , global justice or digitization ".

This is not a matter of the right to strike, as we know it from labor law, because a strike is a means of industrial action that is used to advocate a change in working conditions. Administrative lawyer Norbert Niehues therefore said: The boycott of lessons is therefore "under no circumstances a permissible means of asserting the interests of students in conflict situations". Accordingly, section 1.2 of the circular of the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Schools and Further Education of May 29, 2015 states: "A school strike or a school strike initiated by the parents are not permitted."

In 1973, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs gave compulsory schooling priority over the freedom of the pupils to demonstrate: “Participation in demonstrations does not justify absenteeism or any other impairment of class. The right to demonstrate can be exercised during the non-teaching period ”. This was contradicted by the Hanover Administrative Court in 1991: In the event of a collision between the obligation to attend classes and the freedom of assembly, one position cannot be given priority. Therefore, legal interests must be weighed up in each individual case.

In the case of “spontaneous meetings that cannot be postponed” that “would come too late after class”, priority should be given to freedom of demonstration. Conversely, according to a decision by the Hamburg Administrative Court, compulsory schooling would have to be given priority if the demonstration issue could be “pursued just as well and sustainably outside of school hours”. However, according to the administrative lawyer Tristan Barczak , one could take into account that the state educational mandate and the demonstration concern “have a future reference ”. In this respect, the argument “We cannot learn for the future if we don't have one” could be legally significant.

School Strikes in History

As a result of corporal punishment, there were spontaneous confrontations at individual French (1633–1672) and English (1756–1851) schools: “The riots did not always lead to armed uprising; they sometimes took the form of an occupation strike. "

From around the turn of the 20th century, there were also waves of school strikes, for example in Great Britain (1889, 1911). The Wreschen school strike of 1901, in which Polish-speaking schoolchildren revolted against German-language religious instruction that the Prussian government had decreed, achieved some notoriety . The movement of schoolchildren exposed to corporal punishment, led by the majority of schoolgirls, ended after the “general school strike” of 1906 with the threat of separation of parents and children in 1907.

In the context of the German November Revolution, student councils as well as workers 'and soldiers' councils were established in many cities. The Berlin student councils at the vocational schools organized a strike lasting several weeks in the summer of 1919, in which around 30,000 students took part. They demanded - sometimes with success - the abolition of corporal punishment and better learning conditions.

In Franken Holzer school strike of 1937 school children and parents protested against the hanging of Hitler - portraits in place of crucifixes .

Between 1966 and 1976 there was an increasing number of movements by striking school children around the world. In the USA by black school children especially from 1966, by Chicano school children from 1968, or after the Kent State massacre in 1970. From 1967 school strikes broke out in schools in Turin, which in the following years resulted in strikes by students and the Unite the workforce of the FIAT plants to form Autonomia .

Starting with the uprising in Soweto on June 16, 1976, there was a wave of school strikes in South Africa and South West Africa until 1977 , during which the apartheid regime murdered hundreds of children and young people and imprisoned tens of thousands. Black students responded spontaneously by burning down schools, demonstrations and barricades in townships , and destroying government facilities and liquor stores. In August and September 1976, students around Johannesburg and Cape Town called for a general strike and blocked traffic routes for the working population.

Demonstration of the school strike in the autumn of 1977 in Kassel on the way to the city center
A strike call at the window of the student self-administration of the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Kassel

In the autumn of 1977 pupils in many schools in Kassel, North Hesse, went on strike for more teachers and against what they saw as an educational misery.

There were also school strikes in the context of the peace movement, which in 1983 had the aim of preventing the ratification of the NATO double resolution in the German Bundestag. Since the 1980s / 90s at the latest, school strikes initiated by students have been documented globally, for North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania.

During the school and student protests in Greece in 1990 against a “neoliberal package of measures” in the education sector and the welfare state, universities and schools were occupied. In December 1990 there were at least 2,000 schools occupied, which corresponds to around 60 to 70% of all schools in Greece.

School occupations had already taken place in Greece in 1979/80 and have since been part of the regularly used methods of protest in Greece. Further school occupations took place in 1998, 2008 , 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2014.

Younger school strikes

Even today, schoolchildren go on strikes to draw attention to their specific problems, but also to take a position in general, as was the case with the school strikes on the occasion of the Iraq war in 2003 . The abolition of the freedom to learn aids , the introduction of central exams and the shortening of secondary school time to twelve years led to student protests in the federal states. So far, however, the German movement has not reached the level of recent student protests in other countries, for example in 2006 in Chile, 2008 in France and Italy. Groups worked towards a nationwide school strike on November 12, 2008. Around 100,000 students took part in this school strike.

Another Germany-wide school strike took place from June 15 to 20, 2009 as part of the 2009 national education strike . The highlight of the campaign was a nationwide boycott of lessons on June 17, in which, according to the organizers, almost 270,000 schoolchildren and students took part.

In Austria, school strikes were called on April 20, 2009 and April 24, 2009. On April 24th, there were around 25,000 students in Vienna. A total of around 60,000 schoolchildren struck across Austria. The reason for the protests was, from the point of view of the pupils, senseless and contradicting resolutions of the Minister for Education, Art and Culture Claudia Schmied , which had previously been implemented through the proposal for free overtime for teachers as well as the abolition of the school-autonomous days in the Hit the headlines. Furthermore, the Austrian students wanted to have more say in school policy.

In 2012, the Global Education Strikes in Germany called for decentralized school strike campaigns to be organized. School groups in several German cities (including Bremen and Marburg ) announced that they would take part in the strike.

On January 14, 2015, a nationwide school strike against the school trip boycott took place in Lower Saxony with several thousand demonstrators. The alliance Pro Klassenfahrt ( State School Council Lower Saxony , all youth organizations and many other organizations) called for this. There was a demonstration against the boycott of class trips, which was caused by the Lower Saxony state government increasing the teaching obligation of grammar school teachers ; instead it was demanded that the politicians and the high school teachers in Lower Saxony find a compromise together. A central rally in Hanover under the direction of the Deputy Chairman of the Lower Saxony State School Council, Tjark Melchert, took place. A similar demonstration was carried out at the same time by the student representatives of the Athenaeum grammar school in Stade in cooperation with other schools in the region, with around 2000 demonstrators taking part. In the district of Lüneburg on January 28 and 29, 2015, up to 3,500 students protested by refusing to attend classes.

1000 students did not go to school in Kassel on December 11, 2017. They wanted to draw attention to the deteriorating condition of their schools. Also in Kassel, about 800 students went on strike on December 11, 2018 to draw attention to the underfunding of the Kassel schools.

Fridays for Future

15-year-old Greta Thunberg, August 27, 2018

From August 20, Greta Thunberg protested for three weeks with an individual school strike in front of the Swedish Reichstag building. In September 2018, schoolchildren and students around the world joined her (in Germany every Friday) to demonstrate against climate change . More than 10,000 demonstrators gathered in Berlin on January 25, 2019; the day before, more than 35,000 mostly young people had demonstrated in front of the European Parliament in Brussels .

swell

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See also

Web links