Upon National Field Coordinator Stephen Jones’s trip to the University of Michigan – Dearborn’s campus, students welcomed the free speech wall with open thoughts. As it is known, free speech is rapidly going extinct on many college campuses around the world. Since capitalistic ideas about solving environmental issues are very much at odds with those of current mainstream educational thought, free speech is very important to get these ideas across.
Settings such as classrooms may be a bit restrictive to students where they feel professors might dock them points for not espousing the proper ideas but when among other students their opinions can be less obstructive. The free speech wall helped alleviate that tension. Since free speech represents the unrestrictive, students wrote down anything that may have been on their minds. Lots of it was comical and entertaining and helped keep brevity to their interactions.
Despite some of their goofy and trivial remarks, it gave CFACT a perfect chance to help inform them about the ideas that are heavily dependent on the principles of unfettered thought. In Dearborn, the issue at hand was creating awareness about fracking (i.e., the process of drilling deep into shale rock in order to release oil and gas). Students were very interested as a lot were unaware of the issue.
“The free speech wall is one of my favorites because you never know what scattered thoughts college students will put down”, Jones reflected. Hopefully, engaging activities like this one will help spread knowledge about these issues.
