Lesson Plan #8 - Article on High School

Note: We recommend that you print this article and distribute it to your students.

Alma Maters: Two Words Behind the Massacre
By PETER APPLEBOME May 2, 1999
Reprinted from New York Times Learning Network (http://www.nytimes.com/learning)

If much about the murderous assault by two students in Littleton, Colo., seemed so alien and bizarre as to be almost ungraspable, there was at least one part of the story that seemed as familiar as Big Macs and oldies radio. It was the world of jocks and nerds, preps and geeks, winners and losers that defined life at Columbine High School before the killing of a teacher and 14 students, including the suicides of the two gunmen. It was something that is burned like a tattoo into the memory bank of most adults. It was high school.

The incident and other school shootings in places like Pearl, Miss.; West Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ark., and Springfield, Ore., (Jonesboro was a middle school, the rest high schools) have been viewed through many prisms -- guns and violence in the media, values and parenting. Clearly, no single factor will ever explain any of the incidents. But the fact that these horrors keep playing out in the nation's high schools tracks closely longstanding and growing concerns about the kind of educational and social environments they provide.

Many students, of course, have wonderful high school experiences. And any view of high school life would do well to remember the ways it mimics the world outside. But the most comprehensive recent report on American high schools, "Breaking Ranks," by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, concluded in 1996 that "high schools continue to go about their business in ways that sometimes bear startling resemblance to the flawed practices of the past."

And, like the high school bloodletting in films like "Carrie" or "Heathers" or the savage Darwinian hierarchy portrayed in films like "Jawbreaker," "Varsity Blues" or "Cruel Intentions," the images our culture presents of high school life are so routinely destructive as to prompt warning flags that go beyond spasms of horrific violence like Littleton. Of course, strutting jocks and imperious prom queens lorded over high schools well before aggrieved teenagers turned corridors into killing fields.

Writing in the Internet magazine Salon, social critic Camille Paglia described clique formation in high schools as "a pitiless process that has remained amazingly consistent for the past 60 years." She then lamented the way high schools have become anachronisms that warehouse students in the sterile regimentation of a world of cubical classrooms and cramped rows of seats. And, though some elements of high school may seem eternal, increasingly questions are being asked about an educational model that has remained little changed since after World War I when high school -- rather than work -- became the norm for Americans in their mid-teens. The most familiar professional critique is that despite some attempts at smaller, more experimental programs, high schools are too big, too impersonal and too out of touch with the youngsters in them. That perhaps was tolerable in days of two-parent families and close ties to churches and social organizations. It is not now.

Peter Scales, a psychologist and senior fellow with the research organization Search Institute, said the group's studies of 100,000 students from 6th grade through 12th found that only one in four said they went to a school where adults and other students cared about them.

The "Breaking Ranks" report, for example, called for smaller high schools or bigger ones broken down into "houses" or "teams" of no more than 600 students to create more intimate environments, and an adult advocate responsible for each student. Others call for team teaching arrangements that enable groups of teachers to monitor individual students and teaching plans that allow teachers to follow students from year to year. Littleton was a 1,950-student school. Grades were not broken down into smaller groupings, and the school was organized along largely traditional lines.

The "Breaking Ranks" recommendations are more common in middle schools than high schools. "You hear the principal and the others talking about what a wonderful school Columbine is," said Frank Smith, a professor of educational administration at Teachers College of Columbia University. "But what it means is a wonderful traditional model and a very expensive physical facility. In many ways, it's a wonderful version of an outdated school."

Jon Katz, a writer on new technologies, whose Web site has attracted 4,000 posts in recent days from self-styled outsiders terrified that the main effect of Littleton will be an effort to further marginalize the marginalized, said what has most changed the social dynamic of high school is technology.

Yesterday's high school outcasts, he said, were truly powerless. But youngsters drawn to the Internet and to the electronic culture of violent games like Tribe, Doom and Quake find a life outside high school that is exciting, engaging and intellectually stimulating, where they have friends, community and power. Only in school are they back at the mercy of the old kings and queens and a world of teachers talking at them while they sit in cramped desks just as students did when the radio was high-tech. "Outside of school, these kids are empowered and stimulated," he said. "And school then becomes a nightmare, dull and claustrophobic and oppressive, where you have kids constantly dumping on them for being different. These are not violent kids. You look at the numbers, and it's absurd to say that. But what's happening is making them very alienated and very angry."

The solution, he says, is for schools to recognize and respect the world of the online subculture with, for example, a gaming club supported the way sports are, and more use of technology and less traditional and more interactive teaching styles. Others, most notably Bard College president Leon Botstein, say the solution is not to make high school better, but to get rid of it. In his "Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture" (Doubleday, 1997), he argued that children grow up physically and mentally so much faster now that high schools trap adolescents in an unreal, age-limited world of silly ritual and mediocre education.

"High schools are outdated, obsolete and devastatingly wrong-headed solutions to the education of adolescents," he said. "We trap them in a world of jock values and anti-intellectualism, like trying to cram a large person into a small childish uniform." Instead, he proposes that students graduate at the age of 15 or 16 and go to junior colleges, colleges, new institutions like science or vocational academies or work.

Of course, the issues are not limited to high school. Dr. James Comer, a Yale University psychiatrist, has been saying for years that schools only address the intellectual needs of children and not their psychological and developmental ones. The current wave of school reform, with its relentless reliance on standardized test results, only makes things worse, he said. And he added that it is hard to single out high schools for being status obsessed, hierarchical and savagely competitive when that describes the world outside as well.

"In the culture outside the school, we like winners and losers," he said. "Look at pro athletes. We even like it when the winners stick it in the face of the losers." In that sense high school may be so scarring because it is students' first intense dose of the world to come. But Botstein argues that at least in the world outside people can choose where to eat or what work to do. In high school, he said, they are all stuck in "an artificial exaggeration of the worst values of our society."

Of course, most students' reaction to Littleton was not to criticize the school, but to lament the destruction of a place they loved. It is clear, though, that for those at the bottom, the stresses and hurts are worse than ever.

On the electronic message board that the local school district put up on the Internet in the wake of the shooting, one 1997 Columbine graduate wrote of the taunting she faced in school and how much time her mother spent at Columbine "trying to find someone who cared about me."

She concluded: "I will be very disgusted if the administrators find that the solution to the problem is to hire more security guards. Hiring more security guards will only limit the means by which kids can harm each other."