Forms of direct action: Teach-ins

What's a teach-in? A sit-in with speakers!

Obviously that's an oversimplification, but there is some overlap.

First of all, one thing to remember with organizing any type of direct action is that it requires planning. If you are there peacefully and the police declare a riot, that's highly hypothetical but what do you do? 

If "The Man" is not directly interfering, so you have time, what do you do to keep people focused and interested?

Ideally, those answers will all work toward the initial goal.

Perhaps not surprisingly, teach-ins developed through professor action. Faculty at Ann Arbor were planning to strike to oppose the war in Vietnam and there was opposition to the strike.

Isn't there always?

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins was thinking about alternatives. I love this quote regarding his though process:

"They say we're neglecting our responsibilities as teachers. Let's show them how responsible we feel. Instead of teaching out, we'll teach in—all night." 

I think that particular idea was especially appropriate for the times. For your white middle class and upwardly mobile working class -- so the people most likely to be sending their children to the University of Michigan -- I believe there was this sense of homogeneity, where we are all kind of thinking and believing the same way.

I specify race and class because if you were actually poor, or you were not white and especially if you were Black or Indigenous, there were things that you couldn't ignore that didn't get seen on Leave it to Beaver.

That is a show for which my family has a lot of affection, but we are also aware of its limitations. It ran from 1957 to 1963. For context, the murder of Emmett Till and the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott are 1953. The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, which was also the year of the 16th Street Street Baptist Church bombing.

There were cracks appearing, but there had been a long period where the underlying problems were easy to ignore. Beyond that, without context it would be more comfortable to continue ignoring those problems. 

They should just be patient. It's always been that way.

Teaching can provide that context. Understanding why colonialism put us on the side that we took in Vietnam, and why Black people were not being allowed to vote even though they'd had the vote during Reconstruction, and all of those things that led to white supremacy and patriarchy and about the Military-industrial complex -- a term first used in 1961, but increasingly relevant -- were all things that teaching could help with.

So it made sense that the first teach-ins were anti-war, but it also makes sense to have teach-ins about civil rights and white supremacy and capitalism. Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and environmental groups have all found uses for them. There are so many things that are poorly understood and important that teach-ins can fill a genuine need.

Of course, you will notice that those topics count as "woke", so there will be people against the concept. However, they would also be against run-of-the-mill protests; here there is more of an option for learning.

That can be worth something.