About 8,000 school students left their classes on May 22 and demonstrated through the center of Berlin to the school administration building. The protest was directed against classes being cancelled, the lack of teachers, and also against Germany’s three-tiered school system which discriminates against the poor and immigrants. The strike, the third in the last two years, had been organized by the school students’ initiative “Tear down the blockades in education!” and supported by a number of left-wing groups, including the independent youth organization REVOLUTION.
The Berlin government, made up of the SPD and the Left Party, is supposed to be the most left-wing state government in Germany, but it is at the forefront of cuts in education. For the last few years, Berlin’s school students have had to pay up to 100 euros for school books. The Left Party is not a party that supports young peoples’ struggles – rather, young people struggle against it!
The speakers at the demonstration expressed solidarity with public sector workers in the German capital (subway drivers, daycare workers, teachers, nurses, etc.) who in the previous days and weeks had carried out a number of strikes to press for higher wages. At least three different banners called for not only “class struggle” in schools but also “class struggle” in general. (That play on words works the same in German as in English.)
In a number of districts there were spontaneous demonstrations in the morning to pick up school students for the strike. At the “Sophie Scholl” school it even came to pushing and shoving as more than 100 school students tried to leave the building during the morning break and were blocked by several teachers. Some of them had to climb over the fence behind the school before they could join the protests.
At the end of the demonstration there were fights with the police after they blocked the road to the school administration building. The police detained at least four young people and injured more with punches and kicks. The school students defended themselves with a sit-down protest in front of the police chain. An activist explained in front of this mass with a megaphone: “We need to go back to our schools and universities and organize, so next time we’ll be ten times more demonstrators here. We’ll see if they can stop us then!”
by Wladek, Revo Berlin, May 28, 2008
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