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T A B L E++T A L K

Do strollers, jumpers, baby gyms and all that other equipment really simplify your life? Lug your thoughts on baby gizmos into Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Sexual harassment law: Relax and try to enjoy it
By Laura Green
Despite its occasional excesses, sexual harassment law has improved the workplace
(03/03/98)

The silence is deafening
By By Jonathan Broder
Anne Northup asks why her Democratic sisters are letting President Clinton off the hook
(03/03/98)

Giving experts the Big Slammu
By Beth Levine
No rest for the expert weary
(03/02/98)

Slaves in the family
By Maryanne Vollers
A white man's odyssey into his clan's secret history is a searing look at the most shameful event in America's past
(02/27/98)

Wise women
By Jonathan Broder
Three women cross the Israeli-Palestinian divide
(02/26/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

I was reading radical educators like John Holt and A.S. Neill when I was still in high school. I'd had an unhappy school tenure from the primary grades -- gifted but sunk into boredom in class, underachieving but hungry to learn, the complex kind of student deemed "challenging" by some and "trouble" by others. By high school, I was almost always trouble and spent much of my two years of high school in the library, banned from classrooms as a disruption. At 16, I dropped out and entered college, where I was very happy.

So it is with real interest that I spend time in high schools now, as a visiting writer. I've just finished a three-week residency -- an experiment in teaching creative writing to science students. I felt each day the same familiar mix of excitement and frustration, pleasure and aggravation, that I felt so many years ago as a student, torn between the dream and the reality of school.

Much of the commentary on what's wrong with high school today is framed as what's wrong with high school students, who are blamed for drop-out rates, low attendance, declining test scores, crime, pregnancy and everything from litter to vandalism. The sad fact is that almost everything about high school fails to work -- yet the system itself, the very idea of high school, is rarely blamed.

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, is willing to make the charge. "The Replacement of the American High School," in Botstein's 1997 book, "Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture," is a lengthy essay, and I can only do partial justice to it in this space. He begins with the idea that American high school is "obsolete," in part due to earlier puberty. "The blunt fact is that the American high school was designed for 15-to-18-year-olds who were children only beginning their journey to adulthood ... Most Americans go through a system of education designed nearly a century ago for a small percentage of young people whose pattern of maturation was radically different." In consequence, he adds, the years of early adolescence now are "totally wasted years."

I believe he is right. I believe that high school as we conceive it now is fundamentally bad -- not a flawed system needing to be fixed, but a bureaucracy of the worst kind, directly counterproductive to education, made up of a million pieces of glue and tape, without a core. It can't simply be "fixed."

High school is chaos mixed with boredom -- much of it thoughtless, a matter of many tiny decisions made over time. It is, I think, the only world that can be made by people who have not known other worlds; it is made up of piecemeal solutions that present themselves to people who have seen only similar solutions. It is so big, entrenched and familiar that real change will always seem radically amiss to a lot of people inside it. Real change here will be met with alarm by people who are utterly convinced nothing else would work but have never tried any other way.

To teach my three-week course, I arrived at 8:05, sleepy, met with 37 sleepy juniors and seniors for about 45 minutes and then 32 more sleepy juniors and seniors for another 45 minutes. (There were six schedules, which changed from day to day.) The teacher whose classroom I was in shares the space with several other teachers, and it is always a mess, the desk a sty of books and papers. There was no place for me to hang my coat, keep my books, sit. The board was always covered with someone else's notes. Always, noise -- other voices, the phone, the bells. Students added and dropped the class every week, and came and went to and from assemblies and field trips almost every day.

This is only one school, of course -- but it is a big school and unusually diverse, both by race and by class. Few high schools are fundamentally different -- bells and schedules may come and go, but the basic structure remains the same. Like young people, schools are more the same than different.

Even in their early-morning doze, the students radiated the intensity of youth. This is the nature of teenagers, this intensity, expressed in all aspects of one's life -- intensity of opinion, dream, impulse, desire. Much of high school is designed specifically to disarm this intensity, which adults both envy and fear.

Here, says Botstein, "Young people learn how excruciatingly slow time passes." Many of them seem resigned to boredom, years of it, even in the midst of the continual change and fragmentation of their days. Almost all their natural strengths are weakened. The amazing ability of young people to become absorbed in a single task is undercut by the schedule of short periods. Their powerful idealism isn't valued in a system designed to teach them the values of another generation. Their sometimes startling moral rigidity isn't challenged by a system as rigid as they are. Their seemingly bottomless energy is crammed into uncomfortable chairs in ugly little rooms, listening to adults talking, hour after hour.

Yet they must move when the bell says move; do the tests, the reading, the papers assigned by teachers they rarely choose. We neither trust them nor excuse them, turning them from adults into children and back throughout the day. At a time when they are first emerging truly as mature individuals, they are expected to produce work of exacting conformity.

Teenagers are the most sensitive and insecure of creatures, and in high school they are humiliated and punished for mistakes. (What do people learn from this? They learn to humiliate and punish.) We frustrate their impulses and demand behavior of a standard higher, in many cases, than what adults hold for themselves and each other. As Botstein points out, high school students are subjected to a daily diet of criticism and the potential for public failure almost every adult would dread. At the same time, they are denied the simplest of responsibilities every time a teacher calls the roll. And when they graduate they are, at once, "adults."

N E X T+P A G E: Reinventing grades six through 10