If teachers are pushing students to protest, they're just as bad as the peers of students who push them to break the law. And the public school textbooks used in American history classes are complicit in this as well. They glorify people who complained and protested and even broke the law to make the world a better place (as they see it). The main takeaway message: By standing up for yourself and challenging injustice/unfairness, you're a hero. The implied afterthought: If you ignore or accept unfairness/injustice, you're just a coward.
There are several big problems with this worldview. Injustice and unfairness are abstract/relative terms. A lot of things that many kids/teenagers see as unfair because they're unpleasant in the moment can really benefit them in the future. Secondly, the methods involved in standing up for yourself can range from complaining at best to murder/terrorism at worst. If you murder everyone who's unfair to you, you're not a hero, you're a monster. Also, when the people standing up for themselves resort to violence in doing so, innocent bystanders who played no part in the injustice/unfairness can be injured or even killed in the process.
A lot of people who define heroism as "standing up for yourself and not taking other people's abuse/mistreatment/unfairness" see Cinderella as a wimpy pushover because she never complained. Here's my response to that. If I was your friend and always gave you what you wanted without complaining, you wouldn't see me as cowardly or weak for that, would you? Of course not. You would only see me as weak or cowardly if I respected someone that you have no respect for. If one of your friends respects an individual or group you have no respect for, it doesn't necessarily mean they're cowardly or weak. It could mean that they're smart enough to know that complaining or retaliating will make things worse instead of better, or mature enough to see that what you call unfairness is actually for their own good. Finally, if they truly are scared of the person who you have no respect for, maybe that fear is justified. Fear is often ridiculed and vilified, but the truth is, fear often helps people make good choices (contrary to what the trolls in "Frozen" said). Our jail cells, hospital beds and cemeteries are filled with people who weren't afraid of things that they should have been afraid of.
