My Vision/My Voice Essay by Samuel Bellingham |
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My Vision/My Voice Essay
by Samuel Bellingham
If Delaware schools are going to prepare all students to be ready for college, work, and life in a global society they should look like a skate park. I do not mean that the campus should be relocated under an overpass, and that students should drop down a half-pipe to their home room. I mean that that the achievement-orientation and exacting expectations that are a part ofsome peer cultures of young people could become part of secondary education. That would compliment the schools' core mission and draw larger segments ofthe high school age group into the experience of educational success. Inthe most minimal terms, my idea is to expand the subject matter of educational "portfolio"· and extra-curricular achievements beyond activities that are coached, refereed, and scored by adults. In its most ambitious form, my idea is to linle high school more closely to the outside settings where young people organize their own transitions to adulthood with hard work and high standards that fit the educational system from which they are now largely excluded.
This idea comes from Blake Nelson, the "Young Adult" author ofthe novel on which the movie, Paranoid Park, is based. Interviewed on the National Public Radio program, "Fresh Air," Nelson was asked what he found so interesting about the skater subculture in which his novel was set.! He said it was the gratuitous perfectionism cultivated in the skating scene: "I like the fact that you spend a lot of time perfecting little tricks that are of no use to you in real life but which you talee great pride in." Such effort and pride in achievement, he argued, was actually very useful in adult life, even if skateboarding is not. Pleasure in achievement and in developing and maintaining group standards of excellence "stands people in good stead" in adult life, Nelson argued, all the more so because the work ethic and standards arise without adult direction or enforcement.
Skating is just one example. My own experience comes from playing in youth bands free of any adult influence. Many kids play briefly but those who persist have one thing in common: they organize rehearsals and practice, just like Nelson's skaters. Their incentives are also like those ofthe skaters: they get judged by peers against a group standard. I also play in an award-winning school jazz band which has its own satisfactions. At performances and competitions I notice that the jazz band players who also perform in youth bands are serious in their on-stage demeanor, never giggling, grinning and talking. Garage band musicians who are silly and indifferent in school would astonish their teachers if only they could see them.
Why shouldn't they see them? Why should some ofthe most achievementoriented work that teenagers do be kept outside the "educational" system? Or, perhaps more practically, why shouldn't community institutions that already support various forms of self-directed youth achievement, from theater to chess, contract as adjuncts to formal schooling? A pair of educational researchers, Marilyn Crawford and Eleanor Dougherty, made a similar point in their book Updraft/Downdraft: Secondary Schools in the Crosswinds of Reform. Many students work to high standards and expectations in settings that are marginal to the educational mainstream. They ask, "How many English teachers, for example, lrnow that down the street their students are giving public drama performances that they have spent weeks preparing for, or are taldng part in community poetry slams?" Crawford and Dougherty argue that the traditional "updraft" experience oflargely middle-class educational effort and success, and the "downdraft" experience of largely lower-class low effort and failure, have survived the shift to "standards-based" assessment. Their solution is to modify or eliminate the "comprehensive" graded high school in favor of schooling that is less differentiated from community institutions (the poetry slams and skate parks), colleges and community colleges, and workplaces.
A historian, John Modell, puts the rise and partial fall ofAmerican youth culture into a global perspective in his book, Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States. He looks at changes in the sequence and timing ofthe events -leaving school, entering work, marrying, sexual relations - that form the transition to adulthood. Before 1920, those events varied so much that there could be no separate youth culture. Through the twentieth century, youth came to seem a "tribe apart" because adults segregated them in educational institutions. However, at a certain point in the 1970s, the separated youth stage oflife started to weaken because schooling lasts too long to be associated with compulsory childishness. For example, some form oflabor force entry usually precedes the conclusion of education, often by many years. The events that malce up the transition to adulthood once again vary from a rigid schedule. Schooling that lasts so long that it can no longer be confined to a "youthful" stage oflife is a "global" effect oftechnological society. This global trend means that, outside of school, teenagers are partially reintegrated into more mature activities in the community and economy, and not just as consumers. Modell's global perspective suggests that multiple youth cultures develop as part of an extended, increasingly varied transition to adulthood, not out of delinquent resistance to that transition.
Why shouldn't post-secondary education build on that trend by, bringing it in or by partly merging with the outside settings where learning occurs? This is the opposite ofpolicies like uniforms that try to re-fix secondary students in childish roles. If Modell is right, such resistance will be ineffective. Nelson's insight into the skate scene suggests the opposite approach of embracing the maturing influence of some parts of youth culture that already exist apart from schools. One researcher, Murray Milner, Jr., wrote a book, Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools and the Culture of Consumption, where he suggested that high schools should "multiply the status hierarchies and activities" by bringing in and emphasizing a much broader range activities and interests. Young adults' achievement-oriented activities - even those of the fearsome skaters - go along with maturity often enough to be pulled into the schools, as Milner argues. On the other hand, the schools could be diffused into the network of community and post-secondary educational institutions that already support youth achievements, like the YMCA, various little theaters, music performance spaces, or sports "traveling teams," as Crawford and Dougherty argue.
I have only addressed a "pull" factor of educational preparation relating to student effort and interest. The "push" factors of educational reform, such as curriculum design, structuring internships and measuring achievement in new settings, are the business of school professionals who can learn nothing from me. My idea is that the kind of effort and seriousness ofpurpose those professionals should be trying to draw out already exists in settings that are marginal to and suspected by secondary education: at the Newport skate park, at garage band show at the Harmony Grange Hall, at the Y or Police gym, at the Superior Court lobby where after-school bike couriers bargain with filing clerks, and at scores of other settings where teenagers hold themselves to high standards and learn to achieve. A secondary school system that attended those achievements would look less like a high school and more like a college, workplace or other location of demanding, self-directed, achievement-oriented activity where young people often appear more mature than when they are in the classroom.
Bibliography
John Modell, Into One's Own: From Youth To Adulthood In The United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) p. 326.
Marilyn Crawford and Eleanor Dougherty, Updraft/Downdraft: Secondary Schools in the Crosswinds ofReform (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003), p. ix.
Murray Milner, Jr., Freaks, Geeks, And Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, And The Culture Of Consumption (New York: Routledge, 2004).
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