Student power beyond councils
We have to start re-imagining student power beyond student council elections and the usual forms attached to it. But before that, we have to re-imagine what student politics even is. Because student politics does not only exist when students vote. It already exists even when they do not participate in elections.
For instance, when students contest school authorities, when they challenge administrative norms, when they report or confront professors, when they walkout of their classes—those are already political acts. Those are moments where students act as agents. They are directly confronting authority and negotiating power in their everyday conditions.
So the problem is not simply that students are inactive. The problem is that there is a gap between how student politics is formally defined and how it is actually practiced. Student councils have been, since post-pandemic, unable to take up that antagonistic role. Instead of sharpening and deepening these forms of struggle, they tend to contain them, to translate them into something procedural and manageable within the system.
Because of that, student councils begin to function as part of the same structure that constrains student politics. And this is where alienation comes in. The student body experiences agitation, frustration, and resistance, but these do not get articulated or carried by the council that claims to represent them. So the issue is not apathy. It is that students do not see themselves in the structures that are supposed to represent their political life.
This is coming from the standpoint of someone who has been inside student organizing for a time and also inside a student council itself. I am not saying all student councils function the same way, but there is a recurring discourse that keeps collapsing into moral blame. It keeps pointing at the student electorate, or the student body, as the reason why elections feel empty, why participation is low, why student politics seems weak.
But that move misses the more important question. It avoids asking what conditions produce that withdrawal in the first place, what kinds of structures, routines, and everyday experiences shape how students relate to elections at all. Instead of analyzing that, it turns quickly into moral explanation. It says students are apathetic, students are disengaged, students are the problem. And then it follows with another fear, often unspoken but always present, that if students do not vote for student council, then power will simply be taken over by the administration. So participation becomes something demanded through threat rather than understood through context.
The problem is that this kind of framing limits what we even imagine student power to be. It narrows student politics into something that only exists at the level of elections and representation, while ignoring the deeper conditions that shape why those forms feel distant or ineffective in the first place. This becomes a wider issue not only for student councils, but also for youth organizations and activists who reproduce the same logic of blaming and moralizing instead of analysis.
Yes, there are structural problems on the side of administrators, that is already given, they are positioned to protect institutional stability. But if we stop there, or if we only repeat that, we also fail to explain why student political life takes the form that it does. The task is not to assign blame in a circular way, but to actually locate and name the conditions that produce these patterns in the first place.
TL;DR
Students are not apathetic! Vote, abstain, boycott, all of those are valid choices. Don’t allow them to take away your agency!