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The Great 'Rethinkers': New Orleans Teens Rethink Schools and Shrimping
I’ve just read an inspiring and instructive story about how a few dozen middle schoolers in post-Katrina New Orleans began rethinking their schools and found themselves helping to reconstruct their local economy.
It started with their concern about the lack of toilet paper and doors on bathroom stalls in the flood-damaged Sherwood Forest Elementary School. This led to questions about the food served in the school cafeteria, and from there, to the local shrimping industry, which is central to the food culture of New Orleans.
Making contact with local shrimpers, the middle schoolers discovered that under the impact of globalization and mass production for Walmart-type restaurants like Red Lobster, New Orleans shrimp farms have become so industrialized that they are like feedlots, the aquatic equivalent of the factory farms herding hogs, poultry and cattle on floors covered with feces. Discussing this unhealthy situation with the local shrimpers, the teens helped the shrimpers recognize the need to restructure the shrimp industry, not only in order to heal the local economy and culture but for their own health and humanity.
Local journalist and activist Jane Wholey played an important role in this teen journey. A media consultant with experience in helping young people voice their ideas to the public, she encouraged the youngsters to name themselves the Rethinkers. The name gave the teens an enlarged view of themselves and their mission.
As word of the Rethinker spread, the teens were invited to tell their story to many different audiences, not only in New Orleans but in other venues, e.g. at the Fourth National Farm to Cafeteria conference in Portland, Oregon.
This teen saga is an example of how, in our exquisitely interconnected world, small changes can lead to much bigger ones. When school kids involved in a struggle to bring about real change in one small part of their environment are encouraged to think more grandly about themselves, they will naturally and organically begin thinking about changes needed in other parts of their environment. These other changes can bring them into contact with surrounding communities so that they become catalysts in bringing about the many changes urgently needed in our communities and workplaces.
All over the country, from neighborhoods to the White House, people are wondering how our schools can be transformed so that they energize our kids instead of being pipelines to prison. We don’t have to wait for Superman. By making a paradigm shift in how we think about young people and young people think about themselves, and by viewing all of us as actors in the challenging drama of changing education, we can empower our school children to become change agents in their schools and in their communities.
At this time, when so many of our institutions have become dysfunctional, we especially need the participation and creative energies of young people to redefine and respirit them.
You can read the Rethinkers story in Food Justice, MIT Press 2010, a fascinating book about the movement to establish justice and health at every stage in the food chain, from farm or garden to table. Food Justice tells us how this movement is emerging in cities all over the country, including Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and the mostly Puerto Rican city of Holyoke in western Massachusetts.
The book’s co-authors are Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi. Gottlieb is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Environmental Studies at Occidental College in Southern California and author of Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change and Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City. Joshi is co-director of National Farm to School Network and is based at the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College.
6 Comments so far
Show Allthank you for the inspiring story, Ms. Boggs.
the radical nature of this food-justice movement is exactly why washington and wall street want to illegalize such organic activities.
all the more reason to push ahead with it.
A great story that shows people with marginal power can make a big change, simply by raising their voices, and exposing people to reason.
If these middle school children can make an impact, what else is just waiting to be spoken up about?
"This teen saga is an example of how, in our exquisitely interconnected world, small changes can lead to much bigger ones"
Indeed. Speak Up and Speak Out Progressives!
ps This story reminds me of how Temple Grandin, a marginalized and unconventional voice in her own right, came to change and improve the beef industry's cattle processing methods (making it far more efficient), while at the same time improving quality of life for uncounted animals and people. There is still a very long way to go, but these are the kinds of steps that get us moving in the right direction, imho.
GLB is right (as in correct).
The future does lie in the hands of those who will live in it - the kids, the young people, those whose vision and perceptions have not yet been clouded by what passes for "reality", who don't know what "capitalism" or "socialism" is and who don't speak the language of the social, political, historical or economic "experts" and analysts. They approach these problems unburdened by all this "analysis" paralysis that infects, divides and, ultimately, enervates their elders.
They can be and are "targeted" by commercial interests because these interests understand how powerful they are in shaping adult behavior. Our problem is that we have failed to nurture those "rethinking" abilities that kids can use with much more facility than their elders, in ways that reinforce the natural ability kids have to understand on a basic fundamental level why "it doesn't make sense" to treat shrimp as if they were marbles, e,g., they obviously aren't so why would you treat them that way? I suspect that it is not the kids who are doing the rethinking - they are the ones who, through programs such as this, are probably more effectively than anyone else, convincing their elders to "rethink".
The right wing understands much better than the left that if you have the kids, you have the future. While we are expounding on Marx and Smith, "markets" and "class", the right is sticking to the "basics" as they see them. I suspect that may be because the left has either expunged the concept of spirituality from its midst or has turned it into another "discipline". The wonder of, delight in, and curiosity about the natural world and the belief in "magic" that is so spontaneous with kids and that has nothing to do with "reason" or "logic" is killed by the left and perverted by the right. The kids understood the issue on an instinctive level - the way that we all used to be able to until we were "socialized" - and hence were motivated to, as she says, convince the shrimpers to listen "not only in order to heal the local economy and culture but for their own health and humanity."
We have to talk to, and listen to, more kids if we want a future at all ....
Thanx, Grace, keep speaking from your wisdom of years. It has long been my belief that the circle of life, not only on a cosmic, but on an individual level brings one around again to where one began - the old and the young often see the same - the young because they have just sprung from, and the old because they are re-entering, that great ground of being that is the essence of us all ...
That Eliot quote about the end of all our journeys seems appropriate here ....
Thank you Grace Lee Boggs. These teens need to be heard across our country. They are courageous and have an important message for all of us.
4 responses.
Thank you Grace Lee Boggs. You are a personification of the Statue of Liberty.
I want to know more about Jane Wholey and her role in this story.
Think globally, act locally.
I would love to see a panel consisting of Grace Lee Boggs, Vandana Shiva, Amy Goodman, and Eve Ensler discussing whatever they wanted to discuss.
You noticed the paucity of responses as well ....
Actually, I'd like to see a panel consisting of these kids ....