Anglophones, francophones, allophones, young, old, professors and students and staff from colleges and universities across Quebec staged a four-hour long peaceful demonstration today against the rise of tuition fees. There were over 200,000 of us, and the crowd stretched over kilometres, with the front of the crowd often two full neighbourhoods ahead of the back. If you were standing on a corner watching, it took 2 hours and 15 minutes to pass you.
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The people of Montreal waved red flags from their balconies and offered us their sons and their daughters in marriage. The young women blew kisses at the police, who smiled. People held hands and sang songs and you believed change was coming, a better world; you believed anything was possible.
3 comments:
No one even got pepper sprayed?! That IS uplifting! Vive l'education!
=P
no pepper spray, no arrests, and apparently not one single incident of violence, property damage, etc, reported by police.
"The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change."
-- James Baldwin, in "A talk to teachers" (1963).
This is inspiring.
Education should be free.
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