Is protesting an integral part of the student experience?

Student protests in London last year

The protesting student has become part of popular culture, fuelled by a certain element of 1960s nostalgia. The current student generation, however, has been decidedly apathetic, preferring to lounge on the sofa watching the X-Factor with a can of beer rather than being out on the streets defending the values we believe in. A lecturer lamented last year that we were the most “unstudenty” students she had ever seen.

The financial crisis and general social turmoil seem to have jolted the stagnating student body back to life. The resurgence in student protests over the past year has fuelled colourful commentary presaging a return to the golden days of 1968; all this seems a bit excessive, however it is endearing to see that the student conscience has not been stifled by a razor-sharp cynicism befitting a disgruntled middle-aged adult more than anything. One need not be a bleeding heart liberal to protest in the name of a cause, nor are student protests all about getting high and engaging in social disobedience under the guise of some left-leaning political slogan.

The student experience is a wonderfully vague, all-encompassing concept which has been packaged neatly and marketed like a commodity across university prospectuses. This might smack of a left-wing political platitude, but there is no denying that the “student experience” has come to denote a certain standardised way of life which we are supposed to adhere to. Thus universities have been voted number one for “student experience”, when this is something that is intrinsically personal and cannot be crudely ranked. The student experience is fundamentally a learning experience, and learning is not something we can ever hope to achieve in the lecture room alone. Poring endlessly through books only serves to further entrench apathy; it is too easy to absorb ideas from books without having them challenged and moulding them to make them our own. Protesting is a way of asserting one’s opinions, engaging with peers and perhaps, at the end of it all, to emerge with a fundamentally different view. Education is more than a streamlined process of classroom learning, it is about building one’s opinions and sense of direction. To believe that student protesting will change the world is self-indulgent, however that is no reason to adopt a defeatist approach towards asserting one’s beliefs outside the classroom and in a community of peers.