A F E D E R A L R I G H T T O E D U C A T I O N
How do we get it?
How do we get a federal right to education?
How do we get a federal right to education?
To do the near impossible, Americans must, together, across party lines, become zealous supporters of education. History proves that civil disobedience is best at rousing our conscience and exposing our hypocrisies. Well-planned and executed campaigns of civil disobedience are of the most powerful forces on earth.
Two Paths
There are multiple paths to obtain a federal right to education. Two are viable. But only one has any true staying power and is the recommendation of this advocacy.
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Federal/Supreme Court Ruling
Americans may obtain a federal right to education through the judicial branch with a favorable federal or Supreme Court ruling.
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However, as we have seen in recent years, federal rights that have been granted through the courts (right to abortion, gay rights) are vulnerable to be rescinded by the courts. If Americans were win a right to education through a favorable federal court ruling, the victory may prove to be short-lived, as a pendulous Supreme Court may soon rule in its reversal.
This advocacy, wishes for 21st century America to be built on a more stable foundation. It needs a constitutional amendment as solid as the Reconstruction Amendments that built a freer 19th century and the 19th Amendment that built a fairer 20th century.
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Constitutional Amendment
Americans may obtain a federal right to education though the legislative branch with an amendment to the United States Constitution.
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This path produces a more indelible right. The only way a right to education amendment can be repealed is through the passing of another amendment. This advocacy endorses a federal right to education as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as the foundation on which the American 21st century is built.
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An Amendment
If you recall from civics class, the requirements to amend the Constitution are set fairly high. The previous Articles of Confederation needed unanimous approval of the states to be amended. Too strict. But the bar could not be set too low resulting in the Constitution amended with each change of the political winds. Our founders needed something in between. They agreed that to amend the Constitution, approval must be gained from:
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Two-thirds of both U.S. Senate and House of Representatives,
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and then,​
Three-fourths of state legislatures.
U.S. Senate
67 of 100 members
U.S. House of Representatives
290 of 435 members
2/3
2/3
3/4
"It guards equally against that extreme facility which would render the Constitution too mutable; and that extreme difficulty which might perpetuate its discovered faults."
FEDERALIST NO. 43
U.S. State Legislatures
38 of 50 states
How then can support be gained?
Coalition building
The success of a movement is found in the breath and depth of its coalition. Coalitions are when two or more groups work together to achieve a common goal. The main incentive in forming coalitions is that the involved parties are able to achieve goals in which they were unable to attain on their own.
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A federal right to education will benefit nearly every facet of American society. It may prove to be the best action to combat systemic racism, authoritarianism, and climate change. This makes a federal right to education attractive to organizations fighting those causes as it proves to be an effective means to attain their goals. Groups and organizations working together to attain like goals has been the formula of all successful political and social movements.
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Women's suffrage finds a friend
No matter how just a cause may be, success requires more than righteousness. It requires political power. For much of its struggle, the American women's suffrage movement lacked political power and made little progress. For over 80 years, women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton failed to gain the power necessary to amend the U.S. Constitution to grant women the right to vote. Stalled and frustrated, the suffragists reached out to the powerful temperance movement for help. Their pitch to the teatollaters: if women obtain the right to vote, the temperance movement (supported largely by women), will gain more political power and can vote for prohibition. They agreed to join forces. The alliance proved successful--the 19th Amendment was soon passed.
Civil Disobedience
What is civil disobedience?
The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy defines civil disobedience as "a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies." The term is synonymous with the names Gandhi and King, but its philosophies and methods have been used by millions to advance social causes around the world. Perhaps the clearest expression of civil disobedience and its aims can be found in Martin Luther King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail." King says:
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored...
We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with...
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
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History/Activists/Works
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)
One of the first written statements of civil disobedience comes from Shelley's 1819 poem, "The Mask of Anarchy." The poem has been a rallying cry for both protestors and parliamentarians. Its lines were shouted by students in the Tiananmen Square protests and in the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring uprising. The poem ends:
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Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!
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Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
The world knows him for his insights on nature and society made while living in the woods by Walden Pond. For two years, two weeks, and two days he lived alone in his cabin. However, he spent one of those nights in the Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican War. From that experience, Thoreau wrote the essay "Civil Disobedience," outlining his philosophy on a citizen's responsibility to resist a displeasing government. Since published in 1849, it has proved to be one of the most impactful statements in human history.
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Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)
Tolstoy cited Thoreau as influencing his philosophies and works on nonviolent civil disobedience. His book, The Kingdom of God is Within You, was read by a young Hindu lawyer jailed in South Africa. The lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, wrote to Tolstoy and the two began a correspondence that lasted until Tolstoy's death. Gandhi would describe Tolstoy as "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced."
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Mohandas Gandhi (1869 - 1948)
Having read Thoreau and Tolstoy in jail in South Africa, Gandhi struck out to end oppression in South Africa and then in his home of India. He developed his philosophy satyagraha (truth firmness) and for decades applied its peaceful methods. He showed the world that in a blood-soaked 20th century, that nonviolent civil disobedience is as powerful as any bomb or army.
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Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968)
King read Thoreau as a student and said he was "fascinated" and "deeply moved" and he "became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good." From his own jail cell, King would write a work that rivals Thoreau's. King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail" is a masterwork of moral philosophy and now sits among the pages of our American Canon.
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Gene Sharp (1928 - 2018)
Standing on the shoulders of giants, Sharp took to systematically detailing how to organize successful campaigns of civil disobedience. His book From Dictatorship to Democracy, is seen as a global handbook on how to undermine unmoving power. It has been translated into more than 30 languages, and is banned in dozens of countries. The book was instrumental in the 2000 ouster of Serbia's dictator, Slobodan Milošević, "The Butcher of the Balkans." A peaceful overthrow without a single drop of blood spilled.
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Erica Chenoweth (b. 1980)
Today, Chenoweth is a leading scholar on civil disobedience. Through statistical analysis, they have shown that nonviolent civil disobedience is more successful than armed conflict. Chenoweth has been lauded "for proving Gandhi right." Their work, Why Civil Resistance Works, has shown that not only is nonviolence the morally right solution, but it is also the most effective.
Audrius Butkevicius, Lithuanian Minister of Defense, said of one of Gene Sharp's books, “I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb.”
Steps in Action
The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.
ALBERT CAMUS
So how do you wield the most powerful force on earth? Sarah Schulman, activist of ACTUP, an AIDS awareness and gay rights group that began in the late 1980s, has distilled steps on how to take effective action. In her book, Let the Record Show, a chronicle of ACTUP described as "a tactician's bible," she offers these steps:
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1. Educate
"Become the expert on your subject."
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The most significant act in life is… simply to observe accurately the world around you.
Collecting the facts is a revolutionary act. [It] is perhaps the most subversive action possible.
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GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
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2. Design the solution
"Instead of acting in an infantilized relationship to those in power, begging them to solve problems, use your acquired and innate expertise to design reasonable, doable, and winnable solutions."
And when power refuses to listen…
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3. Civil disobedience
Get in good trouble.
JOHN LEWIS
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A campaign of civil disobedience is not merely a series of protest marches. Loosely planned, one or two-dimensional campaigns are doomed to fail. Gene Sharp lobbied that nonviolent movements need to be as meticulously planned, strategized, and executed as armed operations. His longtime assistant and successor to the head of the Albert Einstein Institution, Jamilia Raqib, echoes his sentiment:
Activists around the world are doing better at grabbing headlines, but do very little if they are not apart of a larger strategy. A general would not march his troops into battle, unless he had a plan to win the war—yet this is how most of the world’s non-violent movements operate. Non-violent struggle is just as complex as military warfare—if not more. Its participants must be well-trained and have clear objectives, and its leaders must have a strategy of how to achieve those objectives.
This advocacy seeks to educate Americans on how to construct effective campaigns of civil disobedience. We aim to not reinvent the wheel, but use the numerous proven blueprints and playbooks available to us. An overall strategy with intermediary objectives set towards small, winnable goals.
Small, winnable goals better assure a campaign of victories, which build morale and the visible success is effective at recruiting sympathizers on the sideline who will want to be a part of the next triumph. With this patient approach and the application of incessant pressure, larger goals—in this case, a federal right to education and a more equal and just America—inevitably come into reach.
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For starters, here is Gene Sharp's famed list of 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action. He says of these methods:
The use of a considerable number of these methods—carefully chosen, applied persistently and on a large scale, wielded in the contest of a wise strategy and appropriate tactics, by trained civilians—is likely to cause any [adversary] severe problems.
Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
YEHUDA BAUER
There is no civil disobedience possible, until the crowds behave like disciplined soldiers.
MOHANDAS GANDHI
I think it is wicked in a way to be a victim. It is wickeder to be a predator, but it is wicked to be a victim, and allow it.
JANE JACOBS
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
MARGARET MEAD
If you are going to break the law, do it with 2,000 other people...and Mozart.
HOWARD ZINN
Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks.
MARTIN LUTHER KING
198 Methods of Nonviolent Action
The methods of
NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION
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FORMAL STATEMENTS
1. Public Speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
3. Declarations by organizations and institutions
4. Signed public statements
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
6. Group or mass petitions
COMMUNICATIONS WITH A WIDER AUDIENCE
7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
12. Skywriting and earthwriting
GROUP REPRESENTATIONS
13. Deputations
14. Mock awards
15. Group lobbying
16. Picketing
17. Mock elections
SYMBOLIC PUBLIC ACTS
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
20. Prayer and worship
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
24. Symbolic lights
25. Displays of portraits
26. Paint as protest
27. New signs and names
28. Symbolic sounds
29. Symbolic reclamations
30. Rude gestures
PRESSURE ON INDIVIDUALS
31. “Haunting” officials
32. Taunting officials
33. Fraternization
34. Vigils
DRAMA & MUSIC
35. Humorous skits and pranks
36. Performances of plays and music
37. Singing
PROCESSIONS
38. Marches
39. Parades
40. Religious processions
41. Pilgrimages
42. Motorcades
HONORING THE DEAD
43. Political mourning
44. Mock funerals
45. Demonstrative funerals
46. Homage at burial places
PUBLIC ASSEMBLIES
47. Assemblies of protest or support
48. Protest meetings
49. Camouflaged meetings of protest
50. Teach-ins
WITHDRAWAL AND RENUNCIATION
51. Walk-outs
52. Silence
53. Renouncing honor
54. Turning one’s back
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The methods of SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION
OSTRACISM OF PERSONS
55. Social boycott
56. Selective social boycott
57. Lysistratic nonaction
58. Excommunication
59. Interdict
NONCOOPERATION WITH SOCIAL EVENTS, CUSTOMS & INSTITUTIONS
60. Suspension of social and sports activities
61. Boycott of social affairs
62. Student strike
63. Social disobedience
64. Withdrawal from social institutions
WITHDRAWAL FROM THE SOCIAL SYSTEM
65. Stay-at-home
66. Total personal noncooperation
67. “Flight” of workers
68. Sanctuary
69. Collective disappearance
70. Protest emigration (hijrat)
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The methods of
ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS
ACTION BY CONSUMERS
71. Consumers’ boycott
72. Nonconsumption of boycotted goods
73. Policy of austerity
74. Rent withholding
75. Refusal to rent
76. National consumers’ boycott
77. International consumers’ boycott
ACTION BY WORKERS & PRODUCERS
78. Workmen’s boycott
79. Producers’ boycott
ACTION BY MIDDLEMEN
80. Suppliers’ and handlers’ boycott
ACTION BY OWNERS & MANAGEMENT
81. Traders’ boycott
82. Refusal to let or sell property
83. Lockout
84. Refusal of industrial assistance
85. Merchants’ “general strike”
ACTION BY HOLDERS OF FINANCIAL RESOURCES
86. Withdrawal of bank deposits
87. Refusal to pay fees, dues, and assessments
88. Refusal to pay debts or interest
89. Severance of funds and credit
90. Revenue refusal
91. Refusal of a government’s money
ACTION BY GOVERNMENTS
92. Domestic embargo
93. Blacklisting of traders
94. International sellers’ embargo
95. International buyers’ embargo
96. International trade embargo
The methods of
ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: THE STRIKE
SYMBOLIC STRIKES
97. Protest strike
98. Quickie walkout (lightning strike)
AGRICULTURAL STRIKES
99. Peasant strike
100. Farm Workers’ strike
STRIKES BY SPECIAL GROUPS
101. Refusal of impressed labor
102. Prisoners’ strike
103. Craft strike
104. Professional strike
ORDINARY INDUSTRIAL STRIKES
105. Establishment strike
106. Industry strike
107. Sympathetic strike
RESTRICTED STRIKES
108. Detailed strike
109. Bumper strike
110. Slowdown strike
111. Working-to-rule strike
112. Reporting “sick” (sick-in)
113. Strike by resignation
114. Limited strike
115. Selective strike
MULTI-INDUSTRY STRIKES
116. Generalized strike
117. General strike
COMBINATION OF STRIKES & ECONOMIC CLOSURES
118. Hartal
119. Economic shutdown
The methods of POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION
REJECTION OF AUTHORITY
120. Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance
121. Refusal of public support
122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance
CITIZENS’ NONCOOPERATION WITH GOVERNMENT
123. Boycott of legislative bodies
124. Boycott of elections
125. Boycott of government employment and positions
126. Boycott of government depts., agencies, and other bodies
127. Withdrawal from government educational institutions
128. Boycott of government-supported organizations
129. Refusal of assistance to enforcement agents
130. Removal of own signs and placemarks
131. Refusal to accept appointed officials
132. Refusal to dissolve existing institutions
CITIZENS’ ALTERNATIVES TO OBEDIENCE
133. Reluctant and slow compliance
134. Nonobedience in absence of direct supervision
135. Popular nonobedience
136. Disguised disobedience
137. Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse
138. Sitdown
139. Noncooperation with conscription and deportation
140. Hiding, escape, and false identities
141. Civil disobedience of “illegitimate” laws
ACTION BY GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL
142. Selective refusal of assistance by government aides
143. Blocking of lines of command and information
144. Stalling and obstruction
145. General administrative noncooperation
146. Judicial noncooperation
147. Deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents
148. Mutiny
DOMESTIC GOVERNMENTAL ACTION
149. Quasi-legal evasions and delays
150. Noncooperation by constituent governmental units
INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENTAL ACTION
151. Changes in diplomatic and other representations
152. Delay and cancellation of diplomatic events
153. Withholding of diplomatic recognition
154. Severance of diplomatic relations
155. Withdrawal from international organizations
156. Refusal of membership in international bodies
157. Expulsion from international organizations
The methods of NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION
PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION
158. Self-exposure to the elements
159. The fast
a) Fast of moral pressure
b) Hunger strike
c) Satyagrahic fast
160. Reverse trial
161. Nonviolent harassment
PHYSICAL INTERVENTION
162. Sit-in
163. Stand-in
164. Ride-in
165. Wade-in
166. Mill-in
167. Pray-in
168. Nonviolent raids
169. Nonviolent air raids
170. Nonviolent invasion
171. Nonviolent interjection
172. Nonviolent obstruction
173. Nonviolent occupation
SOCIAL INTERVENTION
174. Establishing new social patterns
175. Overloading of facilities
176. Stall-in
177. Speak-in
178. Guerrilla theater
179. Alternative social institutions
180. Alternative communication system
ECONOMIC INTERVENTION
181. Reverse strike
182. Stay-in strike
183. Nonviolent land seizure
184. Defiance of blockades
185. Politically motivated counterfeiting
186. Preclusive purchasing
187. Seizure of assets
188. Dumping
189. Selective patronage
190. Alternative markets
191. Alternative transportation systems
192. Alternative economic institutions
POLITICAL INTERVENTION
193. Overloading of administrative systems
194. Disclosing identities of secret agents
195. Seeking imprisonment
196. Civil disobedience of “neutral” laws
197. Work-on without collaboration
198. Dual sovereignty and parallel government