early reactions to a big high school

[This was written as a preface to a major paper for my adolescent psychology class; that's why I finish it up by saying how very useful my adolescent psychology class has been. Take that with a smallish grain of salt].

Exactly ten years ago, I was going through culture shock at my parents’ home after a meandering eight-month trip around the world. I was all set to begin my chosen career as a teacher, and soon found a job as a teacher’s aide as a way of “getting my feet wet” in the field. Many aspects of that initial experience combined to deflect me off into other pursuits, but one of the most powerful was the shock of discovering that schools were not always the locus of care and support that I had (perhaps naïvely) hoped they would be.

Instead, I found ignorance, racism, controlling and passive-aggressive behavior, and lost children wandering rejected amid the gossip, backbiting, and political jockeying of the teacher’s lounge. I fled in horror, and it took me another six years to return to the field of education, after realizing that I simply would not be happy doing anything else. I braced myself for the distressing aspects of the job, but still find it very difficult to spend time in the dehumanizingly enormous, factory-like, industrial-style high school where I find myself three days a week.

This collection of musings from the past six weeks reflects my growing dismay as I began to perceive many different ways in which schools—particularly enormous secondary schools—are profoundly rejecting of all students’ individuality and identity, and especially so toward students of color. I have formulated the hypothesis that education is in such a state of confusion because schools are located in a sort of battleground. I refer not to a “liberal-conservative” battleground, but more profoundly, a place where humanity battles the dehumanizing forces of post-industrialized capitalist society.
Hence, on the one hand, people want schools to embody and inculcate our most human qualities and values—our love for our children, our compassion for others, and our desire for connection, cooperation and community. On the other hand, people want schools to prepare students to compete in a larger society that is often completely at odds with these values—a society that pushes consumption, competition, hierarchy and individualism to extremes. It is simply not possible for schools to do both. But the simultaneous demands that they should cannot but result in a kind of disjointed, confused jumble of school ideologies and policies.

Against this backdrop, of course, is the exciting and rejuvenating spectacle of adolescents insisting on living their lives and discovering themselves no matter what the obstacles they face. Thus the following pages also trace a growing delight in rediscovering connection and communication with young people, which I had greatly missed in the intervening years and which makes every other distress worthwhile. A part of the excitement of this experience is the process of learning, in a more formalized manner, new information about adolescent development, which has helped me gain new insights and understanding that will surely stand me in good stead for many years to come.