By Sigrid Lauenborg Dahl & Mads Philipsen
“Timid little country! Show us what you can do! Open your doors to the world!” The voices sound from the spectators’ gallery of Parliament, and for a time, the first reading of the Thorning-Schmidt government’s bill to tighten restrictions on asylum-seekers is interrupted.
Activists had stood up and were singing in protest against the proposed bill, while Parliament’s deputy speaker called for order and summoned the guards. Seven of the activists were students on the course called The World is Burning at Krogerup Folk High School. As part of their course, they had designed a campaign against a proposed clampdown in the asylum area, and they had chosen to use civil disobedience in the fight for acceptable treatment of refugees in Denmark.
This incident raises some interesting questions. Are there limits to the process of democratic edification? And what is the teacher’s role, if the students’ involvement brings them to the margins of legality?
Activism and the folk high school
The World is Burning is a course about active citizenship where students have to take issue with the global challenges that confront us. At the end of the course, therefore, they have to select a case to work on, after which they have two months to develop their own political campaign whose aim is to create real change in society.
In the autumn of 2014, the students on the World is Burning course chose to set up a campaign against the Thorning-Schmidt government’s proposed bill to tighten rules on family reunification for refugees. They called the campaign “Unloose the Asylum Knot – Tightening the knot is not the way”. The campaign had two aims. Firstly, they wanted to resist the proposed tightening of rules for asylum seekers. Secondly, they wanted to influence the discourse used in the refugee debate by maintaining a focus on the people hidden away behind figures and statistics.
The struggle to bend the ear of politicians
The students made posters and handed out flyers informing people about the new clampdown. They entered into a dialogue with people on the street and distributed Christmas biscuits and coffee to show that people in Denmark are warm-hearted and welcoming, while at the same time inviting passers-by to join them in formulating alternative ways of dealing with the refugee problem. Alongside other organisations and groups resisting the government’s proposals, they worked to collect signatures for a petition. They sent their official response to the politicians and took part in the consultative meeting with the parliamentary Committee for Immigration and Integration Policy to influence the decision-makers.
Despite these efforts, the proposal to tighten conditions for asylum seekers was not withdrawn, and the politicians prepared to fast-track the process to push a new bill through parliament. The students had built a good working partnership with other initiatives. One of these had decided that they would sing in Parliament as a way of disrupting the first reading of the bill, and they invited “Unloose the Asylum Knot” to join them.
When you choose to break the law
In class we had previously discussed the use of civil disobedience as a form of action. As a rule, this is a method that divides opinion, and therefore it is interesting to discuss when it might be legitimate to break the law in the struggle for a political issue. The dilemma lies in the question of whether, in a democracy, we can permit ourselves to break a law that has been democratically approved, or whether ethics and morality are elevated above the will of the majority. As Thomas Jefferson, co-author of USA’s Declaration of Independence and later president, said: “If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.”
Civil disobedience is a political tool which historically has brought about large-scale and important changes to society, such as when Rosa Parks contravened the law of segregation in the struggle for equal rights for US citizens. It is important to stress, however, that civil disobedience is often only brought into play as a final resort, once all other attempts have been made to generate support for a cause. In addition, certain rules of thumb apply. The breach of the law must be non-violent and should be proportionate to the issue in question; the aim must not be personal advantage; and the perpetrator must stand up and accept the punishment meted out. When the students were invited to take part in the action in Parliament, these dilemmas were among their discussions when they held a meeting the evening before it took place.
The meeting in the Yellow Room
All 18 students came to the meeting in the ‘Yellow Room’ to discuss how they should respond to the invitation. Yaffah, who chose to take part in the action, remembers what happened:
“We discussed whether we should take part as a campaign or as individuals. Not all of us were in agreement that we should do something that was illegal. It ended with something of a compromise. The campaign supported the action, but it should be clear there were only some of those in the campaign who had chosen to join in the action.”
Adi, who also took part, remembers the strategic considerations about when it might be acceptable to use civil disobedience:
“There was a lot of discussion about what was the most effective strategy. Some of them said that no one is listened to if they don’t obey the law. But when you aren’t heard after using signatures, making contributions of debates, submitting official responses and a load of other methods, then we were forced to do something more radical in order to be heard. When injustice becomes the law, resistance become a duty.”
The students’ compromise ended up being that the seven who wanted to take part were able to use the name of the campaign, but it was fine that the others did not wish to join them. The case attracted quite a bit of media attention, and the fast-tracking of the proposed bill was particularly heavily debated. The students published a text on Facebook explaining why they had decided to disrupt the debate in parliament:
“Some of our members today made use of civil disobedience in the form of a peaceful protest song, because we believe that the consultation process is going far too fast. This is about human lives that Denmark is responsible for, and the government intends to introduce a severe clampdown within a very short time. Most of all, we believe that the proposal separates families from each other and that this is in breach of Denmark’s international responsibilities and contravenes the right to family life.”
The seven students were subsequently each fined DKK 10,000 but they chose to take the case to court, after which the fine was reduced to DKK 1,500.
Teaching out of control
This campaign went counter to the pedagogical space that we had set up. We had facilitated their choice of topic and provided guidance about communication, events, design, and expression, but suddenly the students seized control of the campaign. Now, we were only invited to join certain parts of their meeting in the Yellow Room to provide advice on the principles behind civil disobedience and what the consequences might be for the students.
We had to ask ourselves, “What responsibility do we carry as folk high school teachers, when adults wish to break the law in prolongation of a course we have started?” Forbidding them to undertake acts of civil disobedience would be to disenfranchise them (and we had no argument to justify such a ban anyway), but we could not make the action part of the course either, since this would force some students to do something that was against their principles. They had, therefore, to make their own decision as to how they would respond to the invitation.
We made it clear to them that if they chose to break the law in fighting for their case, they would themselves be responsible for their actions, after which we informed them that they could run the risk of being arrested and fined.
Impossible to be neutral
Do we have an influence on our students’ choice? Yes, without a doubt. If we had not discussed civil disobedience in class, met political activists, and confronted students with fundamental injustices in society, then it is by no means certain that they would have chosen to sing in Parliament. And in not demonstrating our indignation or distancing ourselves from the idea, we were also influencing the students. Yaffah explains:
“At any rate, the fact that you, as teachers, weren’t negative towards it meant something. You didn’t say that we shouldn’t do it. If you had said that we shouldn’t do it, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”
For a folk high school teacher, then, there is no neutral position.
The students are adults and responsible people who have to make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, and here we run the risk of them choosing to break the law in their activism. This is precisely the ‘risk’ we run in aiming to help students develop into active citizens on the World is Burning course and at Krogerup Folk High School. If we take this task seriously, we have to show that we trust our students when, as a result of their stay at folk high school, they wish to involve themselves in society as responsible citizens.
Teaching is not something we play at; on the contrary, it is an important space for learning, in which students are encouraged to participate in the society around them. Of course, we have to challenge the students’ attitudes and choices, but if we suddenly act as guardians and forbid certain actions, then we contravene our own democratic principles, which would be against our purpose and ethical upbringing. Our wish is to meet our students in a relationship built on equality and respect, in which they have a sense of their freedom and feel a commitment – and where they take responsibility for their actions. Herein lies the duality of democracy, which Hal Koch, the founder and principal of Krogerup Folk High School, writes about:
“This duality is part and parcel of human life – on the one side hand, an absolute commitment to justice, to what is right – and on the other, an absolute liberation from all forms of dogmatism that would claim to know where justice lies … – that would not in each new encounter start from scratch in a Socratic unknowing, and is therefore obliged to find a way forward through dialogue. When this duality disappears, sooner or later we end up destroying life.”
In the final analysis, then, it is not our standpoint that is the crucial factor but the students’. Students must never become instruments of our political ideas. It is we, as teachers, who have to be instruments to help them to unpack, to read, and to challenge their own political compass.