Can Student Activism Break Free from Facebook?

A group calling itself “Passive Activism” claims on Facebook [2] that it’s dedicated to “spreading awareness about people who spread awareness, rather than actually do something for people who actually do things.” I admit, I laughed. But it’s really not funny.

Social media has been a double-edged sword for student activists. It provides a quick means of connecting with other like-minded youth, but it also creates a false sense of action. This combination undermines the potential of young activists.

Not all students are fooled by the recent surge of “passive activism,” though. Anna Robinson Sweet [3], a senior at New York’s LaGuardia High School, is reaching out to her fellow students. Her message: “We are a critical and large mass that can change the world, and we need to become aware of our own potential. Because if our apathy continues we will find ourselves completely silenced.”

Anna’s message is one being taken up by high school students and the organizations that support them across the country. The Out & Allied Project [4], a program of Add Verb Productions [5], uses theater pieces written and performed by LGBT youth to promote social change in schools. SoundOut [6] supports meaningful student involvement. At the individual school level, students are organizing themselves, with and without social media, to take on issues ranging from human trafficking to discriminatory school funding. 

Educators can empower students to make the leap from updating a Facebook status to taking real action in their schools and communities. Guide your students to activism resources, like our how-to guide for starting an activist club at school [7] or this article [8] (and its portfolio resources [9]) in the latest issue of Teaching Tolerance. Also look over SoundOut’s Guide to Students as Partners in School Change. [10] Today’s students have the potential to be powerful agents of change. A single spark—from a teacher, from a peer, from a parent—is all it takes to kindle the activists inside them.