The impact of school experiences and relationships on high school students’ activism: Support, constraints and tensions

• This qualitative study explores how high schools shape youth activism. • Activist students received implicit and explicit support from school staff. • Supportive schools were rare and did not represent mainstream schooling. • Peer relations were crucial to students’ activist engagements. • Youth actively foster their political socialisation and citizenship education. This article responds to the global rise in activism led by high school-aged youth by asking: How do students perceive high schools as arenas for socialisation into political activism? Although non-religious Jewish state schools in Israel typically avoid encouraging political engagement, high school students were prominently involved in the 2023 Protest Movement against the government’s “judicial reform”, with some schools supporting and even initiating student protests. Drawing on interviews with high school activist students, the article investigates how and under what conditions schools facilitate political engagement. Our findings show that certain schools fostered students’ activism implicitly or explicitly — for example, through extra-curricular teaching about democracy, excusing protest-related absences, and other practices. Participants, however, described these schools as atypical. Indeed, these schools mostly serve higher socioeconomic communities closely identified with the protest milieu. Participants also pointed to clear limits of institutional support, such as barring criticism of politicians or the Occupation. Furthermore, while most research on political socialisation into activism and education for citizenship emphasises the role of adults, our findings highlight the importance of school peers. Activists engaged in meaningful political dialogue with classmates and encouraged their participation, yet these interactions also produced conflicts and strained relationships. This paper therefore draws attention to the informal, relational aspects of schooling that shape youth activism and calls on scholars, educators, and policymakers to recognise students’ political agency, their present stakes in society, and the ways political socialisation is facilitated by youth through their interactions with both school staff and peers.