 Media Credit: Niki Hyde Drew Nelles: one of the many smiling faces of McGill student radicalism.
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If the official SSMU handbook, with its corporate-subsidized tabs for easy browsing and cover chock-full of tacky McGill memorabilia really sticks in your radical craw, then chin up, comrade, for there's another type of student handbook on the bloc(k).
Published by the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at McGill, School Schmool, the self-lauded "agenda with an agenda," provides an alternative guide to McGill and its surrounding metropolis, aimed at those with a little less starch in their collars. "Historically it was an activist's guide to McGill," explains Drew Nelles who, along with fellow McGill undergrad Kate Saunders-Hasting, coordinated the production of the handbook. It wasn't until last year, however, that School Schmool assumed its present form.
While maintaining the impetus towards social activism and its noble, if lofty, aim of "connecting our campus struggles to those beyond the Roddick Gates" (a goal delineated in the publication's preamble), School Schmool now comes part and parcel with a daily planner, perfect for the radical activist on the go. "Resurrecting School Schmool as an agenda," says Nelles, "makes it more useful, so that students can engage with the content throughout the year."
Indeed, the design of School Schmool invites an interaction with various streams of radical politics. Each date in the planner, for example, is peppered with daily trivia pertinent to those invested left-leaning politics, which range from the sincere, Feb. 20 note remembering the day when Norwegian teachers held a nonviolent strike against the Nazification of schools to the more dubious Dec. 5 note commemorating the day anarchist Daniel Stilson invented the first pipe bomb.
Besides being essentially an almanac for the timeless art of sedition-within its pages you'll find guides to squatting, planning direct action and a how-to manual for dismantling those precarious Zoom media bathroom ads which bear like a stone on the conscience of the student neo-lib-School Schmool also offers insight into some of the arts and culture outlets in Montreal whose mandate may run contrary to the "hegemonic status quo."
Apart from pieces covering more radical publications and media outlets on campus-such as the Praxis Journal which "publishes independently written student essays that are invested in, critical of, or relevant to radical politics" and McGill's CKUT community radio station-School Schmool, in keeping with its "outside the gates" mandate, promotes other progressive media outlets which exist off-campus.
For example, Siafu Magazine, an independent news rag with a focus on Montreal, offers students and budding journalists a chance to express opinions that may be ignored in the mainstream press while CITIZENShift offers blogs, podcasts and other media opportunities-although, as Nelles is quick to note it "is a stretch to call [CITIZENShift] independent media as it's a project of the National Film Board." Nelles also mentions The Hour, The Link (for students taking classes at Concordia) and the Canada-wide publication Dominion as viable outlets.
While covering a surfeit of material, arts-related and otherwise, School Schmool serves as a handy guide to issues, outlets and ideas for radically-minded students. As far as the potential for a publication like School Schmool to widen the already seemingly irreconcilable gap between well-disposed bleeding hearts and their staunchly conservative adversaries who, well, run the show both on campus and elsewhere, Nelles remains optimistic.
"I see McGill as encompassing the whole of the student community," he said, and certainly School Schmool, if anything, gives a sense of inclusion to students who may feel disenfranchised by the ever financially-minded frivolities of the larger corporate/academic apparatus.
Copies of School Schmool are available at QPIRG-McGill's base of operations, 3647 University.
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