Why Punishments and Fines Help Protesters
During the climate protests, some schools were quick to threaten parents with fines for failing to prevent their children from taking part in the demonstrations. Although they sympathized with the cause, they said, the de facto suspension of compulsory education on Friday mornings could not be tolerated. If pupils wanted to protest, they should do so out of school hours.
In taking this line, school managers overlooked that the success of the climate protests was connected to the fact that they took place during school time, as strikes. Only by selectively ignoring the legal requirement to attend school did they manage to attract public attention. This gave them the opportunity to practise a form of protest that was not available to the university students who supported the demonstrations, for in the end no one is really bothered about whether students attend their classes on a Friday morning.
The pupils cleverly exploited the fact that they belong to one of the few groups that are still compelled to be members of an organization. The fact that compulsory education was originally introduced not because pupils were averse to learning but because parents would rather send them to work makes no difference: that they are compelled to attend school provided them with an exceptionally efficient lever for attracting attention.
After schools initially more or less ignored the protests, head teachers and the senior management teams of schools became increasingly worried. It was clear, however, that the punishments handed out were never about the classes that had been missed. It is a fantasy that missing two hours of maths, biology, or geography will prevent a pupil from becoming an engineer specializing in alternative drive technology or a meteorologist specializing in climate change. If anything, the opposite is true.
It is well known that being active in protest movements is a motivational force when it comes to choosing a profession – even very good teachers find it difficult to match that force. We need only look at those lawyers whose entry into the profession was sparked by experiences of police violence during peace demonstrations, engineers who grew up in environmental movements and now develop alternative textile dyeing methods, or authors and politicians who see their profession as a way of making use of their experiences within nationalist movements.
The reason schools, and also politicians, were so provoked by the climate protests was a different one. The flat refusal to obey the principle of compulsory education was perceived as a challenge to the very formal order of the school. Organizations are generally not relaxed about members openly refusing to follow instructions, rules, or requests. According to the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, someone who ‘on principle refuses to accept just one provision’ rebels not only against that provision but ‘against all formal expectations’ of the organization.
The vehemence of the reaction to individual cases of refusal may be observed most clearly in armies made up of conscripts. A soldier who states that he is not prepared to sweep the courtyard or take part in a drill causes significant organizational irritation not because a clean courtyard is a necessary condition for success in warfare but because disobeying even this trivial instruction must be seen as a rebellion against all the formalized expectations of the organization. It thus reduces the army’s capacity to wage war.
Organizations with compulsory membership therefore spend a lot of time thinking about how to deal with violations of their rules. Responsibility for dealing with such cases is not concentrated in central headquarters but handed to the immediate superiors. They can decide whether they want to look the other way, accept some flimsy excuse, or impose an official punishment, which will in all likelihood not have much effect.
It was therefore probably wise of education ministers not to order schools to throw the book at truant pupils but to leave the response to individual schools. For very good reasons, most schools chose not to make use of punishment, but they still upheld the general principle of compulsory education. Truancy was not officially allowed but tacitly tolerated: missed classes could be compensated for by participating in discussions about climate protection, or schools would issue warnings and at the same time make clear that there would be no real consequences.
We know that protest movements collapse after a while – just think of the peace movement, the women’s movement, or nationalist movements. The result of protest movements is the formation of professionally organized lobbying organizations and political parties, which advance the cause within legislatures. But it seems to be almost an iron law that the protest movements themselves gradually become less important and at some point cease to be able to mobilize significant numbers to attend protests.
Authorities that crack down on protest movements, however, breathe fresh life into them. The politicians who demanded tough punishments for the climate protesters and the school leaders who used every legal means to protect the rule of compulsory education thereby contributed substantially to the comparatively long-lasting success of the protest movement. The greatest favour they could have done the pupils would have been to escalate the punitive measures. The protesters should have longed for large numbers of pupil expulsions and heavy fines for their parents, or for politicians to seek the coercive detention of pupils and parents. Only a few politicians and school heads were kind enough to do the pupils this favour, however, and the protests, as was to be expected, quickly died down.
