I’LL ALWAYS contend that during my three years at university, I learned more outside the classroom than in it. We had the waning years of the Vietnam war, the Greek colonels, apartheid South Africa, the coup in Chile and, on a more mundane and domestic level, an occupation of our senate house over rent, part of a national strike.

I enjoyed studying Shakespeare and DH Lawrence and Dino Buzzati, but what deepened my knowledge far more and shaped me as a person was learning how to organise, protest, pamphleteer, and work in solidarity for justice.

We didn’t have climate change to worry about then — although arguably we should have been anticipating it — but we still had the threat of nuclear war. Today’s students have both and so much more.

Last month, as the authoritarian crackdown sharpened in my now (sometimes unhappily) adopted country of the not-so-United States, we had “Free America Walkout” day, to mark one year since Trump returned to power. He was indeed inaugurated as US president, but he seems to believe he was crowned as king, or worse, installed as dictator.

Hundreds of protests were organised across the country, including one by a small group of middle school students — typically aged between 12 and 14 — in my Washington, DC bedroom community of Takoma Park, Maryland.

When I say “organised,” I use the term loosely. There were no leaders, no route and no real plan. “We just spontaneously left,” said one. “I’m just following everyone else,” said another. No-one knew where they were headed but they knew exactly why they were marching.

Protests have been occurring with regularity across the US since Trump returned to power and in now rapidly increasing numbers as the reality that we are in the midst of a (so far) tankless fascist coup starts belatedly to sink in.

While the main focus has been on vehement opposition to the Gestapo-style tactics of Trump’s immigration enforcement goons, known as Ice, other protests have centered around the genocide in Gaza and more recently the attack on Venezuela and Trump’s threats to grab Greenland by force.

The Takoma Park kids poured out of school around 2pm, a rather rowdy and scattered mass as befits their age and energy. They carried signs and chanted their favourite expletives directed toward Trump and Ice as they made their way toward city hall.

“Why are you out here?” I asked them. “We just had to do it,” one replied as others nodded.

Takoma Park is famous for being left-leaning. It has been a nuclear-free zone since 1983 when it had a socialist mayor and became a sanctuary city almost 38 years ago. This means its city government and police force will not co-operate with immigration officials in the investigation or arrest of anyone accused of a criminal or civil violation of immigration and nationality laws.

Takoma Park has gone further in its embrace of immigrants, allowing all residents of the city, documented or otherwise, to vote in city elections. Its school students, perhaps mindful, as I was, that a civic education does not occur only in the classroom, also successfully lowered the voting age for city elections from 18 to 16.

But that day, some of the students who walked out were nervous about the repercussions. Here, in our leftie sanctuary city, several of them told me school officials had warned them they would be suspended if they took part in the walkout. But they were willing to risk it, they said, because “this is more important.”

Others, fearful of punishment, turned back. “We’re gonna be in trouble,” one said. “We’re definitely off school property now.”

I asked one young girl carrying a sign in support of immigrant students whether anyone had been snatched from her school, as has happened elsewhere in the country, traumatising students and teachers.

“Not yet,” she said. But she was out there because she knew it could be coming. “We are here to protect our fellow students,” she said.

Their school is across the street from my house, so I decided to drop by and see if students had indeed been threatened with penalties for upholding the very values that the city itself espouses. But the wall of bureaucracy quickly went up.

Yes, it would have been a school official who warned students against participating, I was told, but no-one could talk to the press without authorisation from someone with the county school district.

Furthermore, as a reporter, I wasn’t even allowed on school property, they told me. I rather guiltily remembered all the early morning walks with my dog around school grounds. Apparently, I have been trespassing there for years.

The people at the county school district were friendly and polite. Messages were left and phone numbers exchanged. Perhaps someone will eventually call me back. But in the meantime I’m left to wonder, as I did during my university days when our rent strike was met with hostility by some of my professors: Who is doing the teaching here? The faculty or their students? Because the walkout was indeed, as those young teenagers told me, more important than anything else they could have been doing that afternoon.

It is not business as usual here in the US. Twelve-year-olds appear to know that. The sooner the Establishment— whether those in education or serving on Capitol Hill — wakes up to the dire emergency we are facing, and the necessity to resist and refuse this slow fascist coup on every front, the safer we will all be.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Her book, No to Nuclear: How Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, will be published by Pluto Press in March.