“…Despite the
gradual erosion of the arts and physical education in America’s public schools,
the students of Stoneman Douglas have been the beneficiaries of the kind of
1950s-style public education that has all but vanished in America and that is
being dismantled with great deliberation as funding for things like the arts,
civics, and enrichment are zeroed out.
“In no small part
because the school
is more affluent than its counterparts across the country (fewer
than 23 percent of its students received free or reduced-price lunches
in 2015–16, compared to about 64 percent across
Broward County Public Schools) these kids have managed to score the kind of
extracurricular education we’ve been eviscerating for decades in the United
States. These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the
kind of education we no longer value.
“Part of the reason the Stoneman
Douglas students have become stars in recent weeks is in no small part due to
the fact that they are in a school system that boasts,
for example, of a ‘system-wide debate program that teaches extemporaneous
speaking from an early age.’ Every middle and high school in the district
has a forensics and public-speaking program. Coincidentally, some of the
students at Stoneman Douglas had been preparing for debates on the issue of gun
control this year, which explains in part why they could speak to the issues
from day one.
“The student leaders of the #NeverAgain
revolt were also, in large part, theater kids who had benefited from the
school’s exceptional
drama program.
Coincidentally, some of these students had been preparing to perform Spring
Awakening, a rock musical from 2006. As the New Yorker describes it in an
essay about the rise of the drama kids, that musical tackles the question of ‘what
happens when neglectful adults fail to make the world safe or comprehensible
for teen-agers, and the onus that neglect puts on kids to beat their own path
forward…’
“The student leaders at Stoneman
Douglas High School have also included, again, not by happenstance, young journalists, who’d worked
at the school paper, the Eagle Eye, with the supervision of talented staff. One of the extraordinary components
of the story was the revelation that David Hogg, student news director for the
school’s broadcast journalism program, WMSD-TV, was interviewing
his own classmates as they hid in a closet during the shooting, and that
these young people had the wherewithal to record and write about the events as
they unfolded. As Christy Ma, the paper’s staff editor, later explained, ‘We
tried to have as many pictures as possible to display the raw emotion that was
in the classroom. We were working really hard so that we could show the world
what was going on and why we need change.’
“Mary Beth Tinker
actually
visited the school in 2013 to talk to the students about her role in Tinker
v. Des Moines, the seminal Supreme Court case around student speech and
protest. As she described
it to me, the school’s commitment to student speech and journalism had been
long in evidence, even before these particular students were activated by this
month’s horrific events. Any school committed to bringing in a student activist
from the Vietnam era to talk about protest and freedom is a school more likely
than not to be educating activists and passionate students.
“To be sure, the story of the Marjory
Stoneman Douglas students is a story about the benefits of being a relatively
wealthy school district at a moment in which public education is being
vivisected without remorse or mercy. But
unless you’re drinking the strongest form of Kool-Aid, there is simply no way
to construct a conspiracy theory around the fact that students who were being
painstakingly taught about drama, media, free speech, political activism, and
forensics became the epicenter of the school-violence crisis and handled it
creditably. The more likely explanation is that extracurricular education—one
that focuses on skills beyond standardized testing and rankings—creates
passionate citizens who are spring-loaded for citizenship.
“Perhaps instead of putting more money into putting
more guns into our classrooms, we should think about putting more money
into the programs that foster political engagement and skills. In Sen. Rubio’s parlance, Marjory Stoneman Douglas
was fostering arrogance. To the rest of the world, it was building adults.”
The Case for Teaching Humanities (Redux):
ReplyDelete“…Rain does not follow the plow. Political freedom, whatever the market evangelists may tell us, is not an automatic by-product of a growing economy; democratic institutions do not spring up, like flowers at the feet of the magi, in the tire tracks of commerce. They just don’t. They’re a different species. They require a different kind of tending.
“The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult—to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization—not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their ‘product’ not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their ‘success’ something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion.
“They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms.
“The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of. This, I would submit, is value— and cheap at the price. This is utility of a higher order. Considering where the rising arcs of our ignorance and our deference lead, what could represent a better investment? Given our fondness for slogans, our childlike susceptibility to bullying and rant, our impatience with both evidence and ambiguity, what could earn us, over time, a better rate of return?...” (Mark Slouka, “Dehumanized” 2009).