Friday, March 9, 2001
Parents and students try to grapple with the shootings that left two dead and 13 wounded at Santana High School in Santee on Monday March 5, 2001.
High School Hasn't Changed--Except for the Gun
The
grown-ups among us watch the events unfold in Santee and we shake our heads, if
not shocked, then baffled. We gasp at the level of hostility and acrimony on a
student Web page and quickly shut it down. Even more upsetting is the relatively
blase response of teens to these events. What has happened to schools? To kids?
To the world?
Nothing. We've just forgotten what it's like. High
school is not a safe place, because it has never been a safe place. The emotions
are too extreme, the stakes are too high, the pressure too great for safety. As
the media, the authorities, the nation struggle to make sense of the shooting in
Santee, we cannot overlook high school.
In a tragic way, 15-year-old Andy Williams is an
all-American boy. The one we all knew, the one many of us were. Most of us, of
course, would be unable to do what authorities say Williams did--reason,
decency, love of God or fear of reprisal stop most of us from carrying out vivid
revenge fantasies. But still he is hauntingly familiar. Small and slight,
Williams had just recently arrived from the other coast, the new kid who hadn't
had time to rally real friends before he was thrust into the petri dish of high
school. He was picked on, tormented, really, but he never fought back. Just as
so many parents caution their kids. Don't let it get to you, adults tell their
children. Don't let it get to you, Williams' friends in Maryland told him.
But of course it got to him. High school is all
about things getting to you. High school is all about love and hate and fear and
pride; it is society's boot camp, a Darwinian social order fueled by the
mind-altering alchemy of expectation, possibility and hormones.
Who does not remember the crush who made your
hands shake, your mouth go dry just by walking past your locker? The knot of
whispering girls or mocking boys who reduced you to tears with just a few nasty
words? The passionate friendships, the adored teacher who saved your life? That
guy who once threw a dodge ball so hard it broke a girl's leg? Who does not
remember feeling that endless howl of yearning, that breath-stopping joy, the
giggling intoxication of belonging, the fiery wash of utter shame?
Emotionally, adolescence is the most difficult
time of life, says Diane Di Barri, past president of the California Assn. of
School Psychologists and a psychologist at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara.
The brain and body are under siege by hormones, which, when coupled with the
increased demands of scholarship and impending adulthood, can make the world
seem impossible to bear. The first year, she says, is the hardest--kids feel
incredibly disenfranchised when they enter high school. Many of them don't even
know where to eat; they haven't found a support group. They are, she says, often
completely overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed. By the changes that confront them, by
their powerlessness over them. At no other time in our lives does so much change
happen so radically, so irrevocably. These are the years during which we realize
that adults, the guardians of our world, are often perilously flawed. In our
early teens, we are stricken with the biggest revelation a human can have--that
our family is not like other families, that there are other options. Yet we are
still too young to leave, too young to create our own different lives.
Even our bodies seem out of our control; they
shift and reshape themselves almost overnight, our moods fluctuating wildly. Why
do we feel such rage, despair, exaltation, lust? How can we explain what we're
feeling to anyone when we don't understand it ourselves?
As adults, such swings of emotions are rare,
usually nudged by specific events--we fall in love, we have a baby, we lose a
parent, discover a betrayal. When our moods threaten to undo us, many seek
professional help or medication, prescribed or not. Imagine trying to hold a
job, raise a family, while feeling the way you felt in high school.
But not all of the angst can be pinned on age or
chemistry. If you took a group of adults and put them in crowded classrooms for
six hours a day, says Reed Larson, a professor of human and community
development at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne, if you forced them
to sit in rows and only move when the bell rings, if they were required to ask
for passes to use the bathroom, or notes to explain absences, then they would
exhibit some pretty strange behavior as well.
In political conversations, it is assumed that
overcrowding is bad because it slows learning. Larson believes it also
exacerbates the problems of an institutional community.
"In overcrowded schools, kids aren't treated
as individuals," he says. "They are forced into a social control
system focused on the 10% of them who aren't able to provide self-control, which
communicates mistrust."
So a social order is formed, based on group
identity and peer acceptance, a caste system that soon takes on a life of its
own. "In a closed environment," Larson says, "people adopt
personas. They exaggerate their emotions, which in turns affects their real
feelings, makes them feel disconnected from their true selves."
As adults, we are free to choose our own homes,
our own friends, our own colleagues. If a neighborhood becomes threatening, we
move. If a work relationship goes sour, we quit. Or sue. If, when walking down
the street, someone hits us or threatens us or steals our money, we go to the
police. And avoid that street in the future. We have resources--the police, the
courts, the mores of civility, the security of income and independence, the
freedom of choice.
In high school, we have none of these. In high
school we are surrounded for years by the same people, not of our choosing,
seeking bonds and friendship, forging and reforging new allies, new cliques.
Best friends change and become enemies or suddenly vanish into the land of the
jocks or the stoners. The guidelines by which everyone is judged are altered,
and many are left clumsy and unaware. People decide someone's a loser and that's
that--he is fair game for teasing and assault. Day after day after day.
"I tell my kids they are simply not in a
power position," says Di Barra. "Until they are 18, they simply have
to find ways to cope."
Some kids are more resilient than others, she
says, and some schools more generous. Some schools, recognizing the pressures
facing many ninth-graders, have created a mentor program through which students
are paired with individual teachers who help show them the ropes for that first
crucial year. And at Wilcox, the ninth-grade classes have been made smaller.
"It's working," says Di Barra. "But it's expensive."
But in many schools, classes remain overcrowded,
teachers overworked. And complaining to adults, even parents, can feel like an
admission of failure to a teenager. Especially for boys, who are still expected
to be tough, to stand on their own, to act like men. But girls, too, are adamant
about their independence; to ask for help would seem childish. If we can't
handle ourselves in high school, we think, how will we be able to succeed in
life?
Not everyone has bad high school experiences. For
some, they are the glory years. But most of us merely survive. Safe in
adulthood, we write books, make movies that reflect our fear of that time--the
nightmare of having to return is a common adult anxiety dream. The rest of us
laugh about how much we hated it, how much we hated ourselves.
But at the time it wasn't funny at all.
Secret crimes take place in high school, laws are
broken, as are spirits. Things are taken and never returned, and there often
seems no recourse--to turn to outside authority is the ultimate transgression.
To fight requires strength or allies. And walking away only invites more abuse.
As Andy Williams discovered.
Being a 15-year-old boy is hard. In recent years,
a whole new genre of psychological literature, a whole new industry of social
thought, has been dedicated to the problems boys face in a time when gender
roles are morphing, when the workplace has become less physical, when the
definitions of manhood seem arbitrary.
In a way, Williams simply did what he had been
taught to do. What all-American heroes do. They smile and take it, try to be
reasonable; joking, they walk away rather than fight back. But when someone
crosses their line, whatever it might be, they come out guns blazing. Mel
Gibson, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne. I told you not to mess with
me, but you did. Bang, bang, bang.
But even in the movies, of course, 15-year-old
heroes don't have guns. And in real life, most boys, most people, no matter how
angry or frustrated, are able to control their behavior, if not their emotions.
In the end, the thing that made Andy Williams
different from millions of frustrated and vengeful students was the gun. Without
the gun, there would be no tragedy, no sorrow, no fear, no anger spreading like
a familiar stain across the country. Without the gun, he might have thrown some
rocks, spray-painted a wall, slashed a tire or even an arm. In high school, we
all have our moments of insanity. "Rebel Without a Cause," S.E.
Hinton's "The Outsiders," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" all
touch that nerve. In those years, we all want to be prettier, more popular,
faster, stronger, smarter, tougher, cooler, better. We want to be loved,
respected, admired. But if that doesn't seem to be happening, some will settle
for being feared.
The future is dangled before us like a carrot, but
many of us really don't believe we'll ever make it out of high school.
And now, two more of us won't.