Spoiled students

There is something jarring about the enthusiastic demonstrations led by 12th graders protesting the loss of informal school activities because of their teachers sanctions. Even those who are not sympathetic to the teachers' methods cannot treat them with contempt - these are working people, breadwinners for families. Their sanctions are meant as a protest against the damage being done to their pensions and against education budget cuts that have led to teachers being fired.

It should have been expected - as has happened in the past - that the students, and perhaps their parents too, would support the teachers in their struggle, or at least hold a lively debate with them. Instead, the pupils, who at best are apathetic during most of the year toward anything not concerned with satisfying their immediate gratifications, chose to rudely circumvent their teachers.

Their demonstrations are almost entirely about one issue, their end of year school trips. There was maybe another issue - in Petah Tikva, some students burned tires to protest at the lack of air conditioning in their schools. The argument they are using - that this is their last school trip before they go to the army and they don't want to miss it - sounds at best childish and immature, a protest of the spoiled. Seen in its worst light, it is evidence of the students utter indifference for the cause of the striking teachers in particular, and for the realities of Israel in general. That is an indifference that is both regrettable and worrying.

It is difficult to understand why these energetic youngsters are not channeling their passions into demonstrations against social injustice, government corruption, or the occupation, for example. All the important political movements around the world were based on boys and girls the same age as these 12th graders, along with their older siblings and friends in universities and other young people, who under the influence of the writings of revolutionaries, felt the need to change the society in which they lived.

And these lucky youngsters, who have been granted an education with very little effort on their part, live in a young country with a difficult, charged political and economic situation. Yet they take to the streets to demonstrate only because they suffer a temporary, negligible, and essentially meaningless personal discomfort.

The students are not the only ones to blame. Their parents, who envelop them with over-protective spoiling, are no less responsible for the national indifference and apathy to larger issues. While the teachers try to reach some form of dialogue with the student council, and some groups of pupils are seeking other ways to express righteous indignation about their canceled field trips, the parents rush to quell the disappointment of their children. They pay from their own pockets for private guards for field trips organized by private organizations, thus crudely bypassing the teachers.

Because of the special circumstances, the students promised they would not allow any wild behavior. But the message from their parents is, in effect, that wild behavior toward teachers is indeed permissible. By encouraging self-satisfied demonstrations and private initiatives that marginalize teachers, the parents are undermining the schools, which have already suffered plenty of far-reaching shocks in recent years. Pupils who study under weak and frightened teachers might gain a little more knowledge as clever consumers, but they can only grow up into self centered citizens.