13.03.2003

School's out

Over 500 students of schools from the Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells area staged a peaceful protest in the heart of Tunbridge Wells on Friday March 7, leaving their lessons to protest against the US-led war on Iraq. While some school authorities apparently turned a blind eye to the strike, others were less lenient. My own school, The Judd School in Tonbridge, issued a threatening notice with the morning's register, informing students that the leaflets advertising the strike had been produced by "an anticapitalist group" (such fraud! To think that capitalism and war are somehow linked!) and ordering them to remain in school. With no specific threat of punishment, many were forced to assume that suspension was on the cards and just twenty students on my school joined the strike in the end, leaving school at 11am. Nevertheless, the strike achieved more than the numbers tell. It achieved the politicisation, en masse and in the space of two days, of the school student community - even in a school where hundreds of students are members of the Combined Cadet Force, an MoD-sponsored induction into militarism. Now it has been shocked into life, anti-war feeling continues to pulsate within the student body. For those who seek less controversial ways to protest, a petition has been organised to be sent to the local Conservative MP, and plans are being made for further protests on this Saturday, and on Day X . Tom Cutterham