The Student Resistance Handbook

by Cevin Soling

Overview

The Student Resistance Handbook provides children with information on how they can effectively fight back against their school and work towards abolishing this abusive and oppressive institution. Legal non-violent tactics are presented that are designed to: disrupt the operation of school, substantially increase the costs involved in its operation, and make those who work for and support schools as miserable as they make the students who are forced to attend. The text was conceived to empower youth to struggle against the helplessness, passivity, and despair that schools were designed to instill. John F. Kennedy accurately claimed that “learning without liberty is always in vain.” This Handbook provides students with tools to fight for their liberty in order to attain a real education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780990939917
Publisher:	Spectacle Films, Inc.
Publication date:	10/31/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	100
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Cevin Soling has graduate degrees from Harvard in English and Education. In 2009, he produced directed the film The War on Kids, which shows how American public schools have become modeled after prisons in response to fear and a burgeoning intolerance of youth. This was the first theatrically released documentary on education. The film was the winner of the best educational documentary award at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival. The film ran at the Quad Cinema in New York City and screened at Harvard University as well as other major universities. It has received accolades from The New York Times, Variety, and The Huffington Post. Soling was a guest on numerous radio shows including The Lionel Show on Air America, The Joey Reynolds Show on WOR, and The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC. In addition, he was on The Dr. Nancy Show on MSNBC, as well as on RT Television, and as a featured guest on The Colbert Report. His films have been broadcast domestically and internationally on numerous major outlets.

Table of Contents

Introduction 7

What Are Your Demands? 11

The Mission 15

Why resist? 19

Who is the Enemy? 25

The Hierarchy of School Power 26

Bad Arguments in Defense of Schooling 29

School is good for you 29

Literacy cannot be taught any other way 29

What do you propose instead? 30

Suffering builds character 30

Tactics 33

The Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion 33

Public Statements 37

Means to Express Dissent in a Clear and Direct Way to an Audience 37

Where to Display Your Dissent 43

Symbolic Displays 47

You Are Under Constant Surveillance 47

Systemic Disruption 53

Foment Dissent within Faculty Ranks 53

Resistance and Non-Cooperation 57

Boycotts 57

Renounce Honors 57

Do Not Participate 58

State-Mandated Testing 58

Slow Down the Machine 59

Apathy 59

Lawsuits 60

Locker Searches 61

Overload the System 63

Disabilities 63

Religious Accommodations 65

FOIA 66

Anti-Bully Laws 67

City Inspectors 68

Other Mandated Requirements 68

Lunch 69

Form a Club 70

Zero Tolerance for the Staff 70

Targeting Individuals 73

Public Information 73

Social Media and Dating Sites 74

FOIA 74

Formal Complaints 74

Boycott 75

Handling Punishment 77

Record Conversations and Take Notes 77

What to Say When Questioned 78

Strip Searches 79

Spanking, Paddling, and Corporal Punishment 79

Quit School 81

CIA Strategies 83

Tools and Resources 87

Resources 87

Legal And and Legal Information 87

Books 88

Internet Resources 88

Appendix A 91

Drug Testing and Zero Tolerance 91

How to Meet with a School Board 92

If the Board Says "No" 93

Random Drug Testing 95

Zero Tolerance 97

Appendix B 99

Miranda Rights 99

Editorial Reviews

2024-09-10
Author, filmmaker, and musician Soling presents a manifesto for empowering students in a system of mandatory education.

The author states his case in blunt terms, addressing high-school-aged readers directly and informing them that schools are places of humiliation by design: “By being deprived of free speech and free assembly, you are literally held captive,” he writes. “By being forced to sit in an uncomfortable chair all day long and listen to someone you did not choose to listen to, and read texts you do not want to read, your most basic democratic rights are violated.” In these pages, Soling outlines what he sees as the evils of the educational system, from locker searches to corporal punishment (which is legal in 19 states, and which he rightly calls “sickening”). He also describes the many things students can do to fight such evils, from organizing protests to filing police reports. Although many of the actions that he advocates in this slim work may have significant consequences for students, including poor grades, he repeatedly stresses that they shouldn’t commit illegal acts while disrupting the formal structure of their education. Because the book is polemical in nature, it’s unsurprising that it includes a chapter titled “Bad Arguments in Defense of Schooling”; the author ably short-circuits notions that it teaches interpersonal skills or acclimates students to authority structures they’ll encounter in adult life. For Soling, school is nothing more than “an institution that selectively dispenses information in an incoherent manner within an oppressive construct that interferes with learning,” and he effectively offers no compromise on this point. Indeed, his prose is electric in its passion and anger; even readers who are unconvinced by his case are likely to find themselves rethinking old certainties about a pillar of American life.

A fierce and thought-provoking condemnation of the American school system.

Kirkus Reviews