Abolishing High School

This time, his name is Charles Andrew Williams, and he is 15 years old. He has a slender frame and a soft, sad-looking face, and in photographs he seems young and lost, and yes, even innocent. He isn't innocent, though. Not since Monday, March 5, when he took his father's gun to school and fired it 30 times at his teachers and classmates, wounding 13 people and killing two.

There were other, similar incidents last week, although they tended to blend into one another amid the general hand-wringing. In Twentynine Palms, California, two 17-year-old students were arrested after someone overheard them discussing their "hit list" of 16 classmates, while a student in Harlingen, Texas was expelled for having a "hit list" of his own. In Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a female student shot another girl in the shoulder during lunch period. In the Seattle area, a 16-year-old student pulled a gun on his classmates. Then there are the kids who were arrested for bringing guns to school (in Philadelphia and two Florida towns) and the kids who made bomb threats or threatened to kill their classmates (three in Arizona, one in New Jersey and one in Iowa). And that, mind you, was all in one week.

The "search for answers," as the media is wont to call it, has already begun--or rather, picked up where it left off after Columbine and Jonesboro and all the other dark, bloody incidents. The usual suspects are being hauled into the dock, from America's permissive gun laws and violent popular culture, to familial breakdown and the nihilistic ethos of adolescence. And everyone has a solution to offer, be it more gun control, more metal detectors, more psychiatrists, more teachers, or, in the insipid phrase of America's goo-goos, more "tolerance."

They're all wrong, though. What we really need to do is to get rid of high school.

Oh, I'm perfectly aware that we never will. The idea of high school is, alas, so deeply embedded in American life that it would take some sort of natural disaster to uproot it.

Still, it would nice if we recognized that there is something bizarrely ill-fashioned about the way we go about "educating" our adolescent population. The teenage years are a critical period of transition, when "children" are transformed into "adults," with all the privileges and responsibilities of age. Teenagers are dangerous--they have adult desires and passions, but without the experience necessary to handle their new-found inner turmoil. In a word, they need to be socialized.

Of course, this is exactly what high school sets out to do. But high school socializes adolescents by forcing them to spend all their time, not with adults who offer examples of maturity, but with other adolescents. The only adults in grades 9-12 are teachers, whose role as disciplinarians casts them as adversaries rather than as role models. Few high school students set out to emulate their instructors--instead, they set about emulating their peers.

The result, predictably, is the warped culture that holds sway in the halls of most American high schools. Adolescents are conformist, so the culture demands conformity. Adolescents are vicious, so the culture is cruel beyond belief. Adolescents are insecure and anti-intellectual, so the culture despises academic achievement. And, of course, adolescents (or their parents, more likely) adore athletics, and so the culture treats athletic stars and their paramours as its kings and queens.

When a student finally graduates out of this culture, he has undoubtedly gained a smattering of practical knowledge. But after four years in a shallow, conformist world, he is no closer to being an adult, really, than when he entered high school in the first place. Or if he has matured, than it has been in spite of his "socialization," not because of it.

But it's so important for kids to spend time with their peers, the objectors will bleat. Well, yes, time with one's peers is great--but must it be every day, from eight till five and beyond? Surely this is arrant nonsense. Adolescents are messed-up, confused, insecure human beings, each buckling under an individual, angst-ridden burden. Why on earth would it be good for them to spend all of their time with other angst-ridden, insecure, unhappy types?

In a saner world, they would be forced to live with, and as, adults for large chunks of time--making it more likely that they would actually become adults. Such a world would encourage home-schooling, for instance, by easing the economic burden for parents who choose to stay home and teach. It would offer a more flexible, decentralized system of education, balancing classroom time with, say, vocational training and programs allowing kids to work under and alongside adults in local workplaces. It would be a world where adolescents were integrated into society, not ghettoized in the local high school.

In the absence of such a world, everyone will continue to go through the high school zoo, and most people will manage to cope. I, for one, rather enjoyed the experience. But I knew plenty of people who didn't, people who couldn't accommodate themselves to the warped hierarchies of an adolescent culture. I don't doubt that in their darker moments, these unhappy high schoolers fantasized that they, like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, might "take a flame thrower to this place."

But they never did it, of course. It was unthinkable.

Now all that has changed. Not only is it thinkable, it's easily done. Just ask Charles Andrew Williams.

Ross G. Douthat '02 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.