On 24 April, 5.000 school students in Berlin didn’t go to class – they went out onto the street to protest against the catastrophic state of the education system.

Schools in the German capital have overfilled classrooms, a lack of teachers and facilities that are falling apart. After school is over, students face an even worse situation: not even half of the people who want an apprenticeship can get one, and the looming introduction of university fees is blocking the road to the university for many young people.

Education systems all over the world are under attack. In rich countries, education is still considered a basic right, but it’s increasingly being transformed into an “investment in one’s own future.” Only the elite are to have access to good educational institutions. At the same time, teaching plans are adopted to the needs of corporations: courses of study like literature and history don’t get enough financing, while private schools of management are supported with state funds.

But there is also resistance to these attacks around the world: in Greece students occupied 300 universities for months to block a law that would privatize higher education. In Chile hundreds of thousands of school students went out onto the streets to topple a law that favored private schools. Even in Germany there was a whole wave of school student strikes in the last six months.

Even without these constant attacks, our schools are anything but ideal. The curriculum is determined by the state and the teachers, and students have no influence over it. We don’t receive knowledge, abilities or a love of learning, just fairly pointless facts that we forget again soon anyway. School students are supposed to get used to competition, pressure to perform and obedience to authority – all the things they need to one day become docile workers.

Education protests can politicize whole layers of youth. But we can’t limit ourselves to protesting once every few months. We need to organize permanently at school, so we can establish our own control.

Youth protests can be successful – but the condition is that we link up with the workers so we can organize real strikes. Under capitalism, education is meant to bring up robots who are loyal to the system. That’s another good reason to smash capitalism!

by Wladek from Berlin-Kreuzberg, www.revolution.de.com