By Feng Zengkun

THE school times, they are a'changin.

Ten - or even five - years ago, the model student sat down, kept quiet and took notes; these days, that student is more likely to be sitting down, keeping quiet and taking notes - for his eventual petition.

All this begs the question of how much say students should have in setting the terms of their own education.

Last month, local professor Thio Li Ann was invited to teach a human rights law course at New York University (NYU).

Some NYU students protested, pointing to her efforts to keep homosexual sex criminalised in Singapore. Dr Thio cancelled her visit two weeks ago, citing the protest as a reason.

Whether she could have been an effective professor despite her views, we will never know. But the tension between campus and administration was clear.

Implicit in the students' stand, after all, was their conviction that they know better than their administration how to run the university.

They're not alone. Locally, more than 2,000 Republic Polytechnic students petitioned their administration last month. They wanted the school to be shut down for a week in the wake of the H1N1 outbreak.

And two weeks ago, a student from Nanyang Technological University made use of his convocation speech to protest against his administration's censorship of his thesis project.

As with other social movements, the questions are how and why now.

The 'how' is easy: New technology has given students more platforms, not only to bypass administrations but also to find like-minded people.

Websites such as Rate My Professors have long made traditional faculty evaluation forms irrelevant by allowing students to score and preview teachers according to their own criteria.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have also made it easier for students to drum up the numbers.

In February, 10 Singaporean students wanted lower public transport fares for tertiary students. They created a Facebook group and an online petition.

Some 5,200 signatures later, they got what they wanted.

The 'why now' behind this activism, however, is harder to articulate.

A former teacher suggested that students are more vocal today because they can be, with the technological advances.

Whether she is right is a question for anthropologists. More important is how the local authorities and organisations will adapt to the idea of students as shareholders in their own education.

After all, Dr Thio's withdrawal, also spurred by the low enrolment for her classes, shows that students are more than capable of derailing an institution's plans.

What's needed is a new agreement, an adjustment to the changing times: where feedback mechanisms are updated to the Age of Twitter, and where discussion precedes petition, not the other way round.

This will require effort and open-mindedness on both sides.

But the alternative is much worse: a further souring of relations, and the impeding of what it's all about - education.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.