Students Need to Question Authority — All Authorities, like they did in the Sixties

Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties

Many books have been written about the political and social movements of the sixties. One movement is like a half-buried skeleton of some farm animal on the side of the road. There’s not enough there to merit an archeologist’s investigation or barely enough to catch a passerby’s attention. Those bones would belong to the student power movement.

However, that movement was much like a plow animal that tilled the ground to allow the crop seeds to grow: the seeds which fed the archeologist and the passerby. The sixties’ student movement sowed the ideas that helped the much larger movements, like the civil rights and anti-war movements, to ultimately transform national policies and culture.

Student Power, Democracy, and Revolution in the Sixties, which I authored, looks at that movement from a grassroots perspective. Its extensive 18-page index is available here. Paul Loeb, the author of Soul of a Citizen, said, “studies of sixties student activism tend to focus on the marquee schools, but most students went to schools far more like Ohio’s Bowling Green State [BG], where Licata attended.”