I think I might have been born in the wrong decade. Perhaps I should've been born thirty years earlier so that I could have been part of all the activism going on in the late 60s and early 70s. I've been reading about the student strike in the late 60s at San Francisco State. It's fascinating to me how student of different ethnicities got together to form the Third World Liberation Front and call for open admissions, ethnic students and a more relevant education among other things.

At that time the California higher education system was changing. The Master Plan was written in the 1960s and restricted access to the Cal State schools and the University of California schools. It also set up the system in a hierarchy. Basically, the community colleges would accept all high school graduates, the CSU's would accept the top 33% and the UC's would accept the top 12.5%. The Master Plan was supposed to serve the needs of "society" but if you read the critiques, it was really serving the needs of the private sector. The men who wrote it weren't even representative of "society" unless I'm mistaken and "society" is composed solely of middle aged white male intellectuals.

The students at SF State weren't just against the Master Plan, but they also wanted to change the way people saw education. Their education was supposed to be used as a tool for the improvement of their communities not for the corporate sector where they'd go and exploit their people.

Student movements are hella interesting to me, I guess since I've seen them from the inside.

You know, I don't know if I really would have liked to have been born 30 years ago. I might have just become a disillusioned old activist especially as I see that (a) things haven't changed, (b) the current government is undoing the changes - or trying to - we once made (ie affirmative action), and (c) somethings might have gotten worse.

I think I'll just stick to being a child of the 80s and an activist of the late 90s and 00s.

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M�s reciente:
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the big move - 07.29.05
mother and daughter: a comparative analysis - 07.28.05
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tough question - 07.25.05

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