One Hundred Years of High School Student Organizing

On Monday, September 28, Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian will be in conversation with historians Aaron G. Fountain Jr. and Jon N. Hale about student organizing and state repression. Fountain is the author of High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America and Hale wrote A New Kind of Youth: Historically Black High Schools and Southern Student Activism, 1920–1975.

Aaron G. Fountain Jr. is a historian and public scholar. His book High School Students Unite! was a finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. His articles have been published in Time, Smithsonian Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Hill, and more. He has begun work on his second book, which is a cultural and political history of teenagers and the Vietnam War in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

Jon N. Hale is professor and associate head of education policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to A New Kind of Youth, Hale is also the author of The Choice We Face: How Segregation, Race, and Power Have Shaped America’s Most Controversial Education Reform Movement and The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, and co-editor of Schooling the Movement: The Activism of Southern Black Educators from Reconstruction Through the Civil Rights Era and To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools.

ASL interpretation provided.

Professional development credit certificate provided upon request for attendees.

These online classes with people’s historians are held at least once a month (generally on Mondays) at 4:00 pm PT / 7:00 pm ET for 75 minutes. In each session, the historian is interviewed by a teacher and breakout rooms allow participants to meet each other in small groups, discuss the content, and share teaching ideas. We designed the sessions for teachers and other school staff. Parents, students, and others are also welcome to participate.