Brandi Hall thinks the controversial rap group 2 Live Crew should be censored.
Carly DeCicco says abortion is wrong.
Dan Creighton is worried about the high divorce rate.
Mark Wawryniuk says drugs are a big problem in society.
Roberto Caban is troubled by rising real estate prices.
Corb Felgenhour and his friends are ”glad we`re over there in Iraq” and don`t think the ”situation is anything like Viet Nam” but rather parallels
”Germany before World War II.”
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The above opinions might sound like the musing of middle-age Rotary Club members but they actually belong to students in three very different high schools: Wells High in Chicago`s inner-city; Rich East High in middle-class suburban Park Forest and Woodstock High in the rural town of Woodstock.
Times certainly are a`changing.
Anti-anti antics
Wasn`t it just a couple of decades ago when students were the rabble rousers who upset their parents, teachers and administrators with all their anti-authority, anti-establishment rebel antics?
But now the tables are turned. Not only are students embracing the established system but teachers, such as John Headley of Woodstock High School, are noticing that they are more liberal than their students.
”High school students are much more conservative than they were 15 years ago when I graduated,” says Headley. ”In my sociology class, they have to take a position on certain issues and they are overwhelmingly conservative. For instance, they consistently oppose abortion and I`d say a good 80 percent support capital punishment.”
Bill Larke, the librarian at Rich East High School, has been teaching for 20 years and has come to the same conclusion but uses a different barometer.
”Fifteen, twenty years ago if we didn`t have two or three copies of
`Malcom X` in the library to check out there would be hell to pay from the kids. Now if there`s not a copy available they just say, `Well, OK` and go away.”
Or worse yet, they don`t even know who the slain black-power activist was.
Or seem to care.
C`est moi, c`est moi
The whole idea of working for a social cause just for the benefit of society is a foreign concept to this new crop of young, say teachers, administrators and the students who readily describe themselves as ”more self-interested.”
”Students today won`t just do something to do it or for some bigger cause,” says Rich East junior David Ames.
Ames is particularly irked with this situation because he has spent a good portion of the day wandering the school`s halls looking for volunteers to participate in a school-sponsored video.
”They all ask, `What`s in it for me?` ” he says frustrated. ”If there`s not a payoff financially, they won`t do it.”
The students rush past Ames, some literally sprinting down the halls.
”Look at that,” nods Tony Moriarty, Rich East assistant principal.
”Students today literally run to class so they won`t be late. They didn`t do that a few years ago.”
”Everyone just has really tight schedules,” says Ames. ”They`re busy most of the time. There are just more things for students to do today.”
Too many choices?
Maybe there are too many choices, says Wells High School English and drama teacher Marsha Brody, who began teaching in 1966.
Brody remembers the days when female students and teachers actively protested to be allowed to wear slacks to school.
”There were a lot more restrictions back then so students had something to protest against,” she says. ”We broke down a lot of barriers and I never thought I would be saying this-but I think we may have gone too far. Now kids have a lot of freedoms they take for granted. And besides having no restrictions on them, there`s no restrictions on anything else like the media which is filled with violence and sex and profanities.
”I think the young serve as a mirror for the rest of society and I think the whole society is feeling overwhelmed with too much of everything. There`s no limits on anything. Nothing solid for anyone to hang onto. There`s no balance anymore.”
And so, Brody concludes, that perhaps today`s student`s newly found conservativism is a reaction against this too-open-to-anything society.
”Maybe they are being rebels by being anti-rebels,” she says.
Life imitates art
That`s a theory, dubbed the ”Family Ties syndrome” which has been put forth by a variety of teachers. They`re referring to the television sitcom, the reruns of which are now shown in syndication, that starred Michael J. Fox as Alex Keaton, a student whose ultra-conservative, materialistic values were in extreme contrast to his parents` `60`s-born liberalism.
”In the past couple of years, `Family Ties` has become too true to be funny,” says Woodstock English teacher Chris Strong. ”In the `60s, students were rushing out to save the world. Now all I see is self-interest.”
Strong`s colleagues, gathered around the midday lunch table, nod and offer their various theories on why this is so:
”Just a pendulum swing to the right,” says one who notes ”Everything works in cycles.”
”Indoctrination by the arch-conservative Reagan administration,” offers another.
”Harder economic times,” says yet a third teacher who adds that ”it`s just a more competitive world today. It`s harder to get into college and even if you do that doesn`t guarantee a job.”
Jobs come first
”But that`s what really disappoints me,” says Strong. ”If you ask any of these kids why they`re going to college, they`ll say `to get a job.` They won`t tell you it`s to be a well-rounded person, or for knowledge or culture.”
”So what`s wrong with going to college to get a job?” someone asks Strong.
”We`re not just working machines,” says Strong, clearly exasperated.
”We`re human beings first. It`s a cliche, but it`s true people should not be living to work. They should be working to live. But everyone seems to be forgetting that.”
”There are only a few teachers who will talk like that,” says Woodstock senior Dave Mogdans, who is clad in a football jersey and is sitting in the library study period with a group of friends. ”The other teachers, our parents and especially the counselors, just drill it in us: `You gotta go to college. . . . You gotta go to college. You gotta go to college so you can get a good job.` ”
”And if you don`t they tell you you are making a big, big mistake,”
says one of Mogdans` companions, senior Corb Felgenhour. ”I signed up for the Marines and the counselors all tried to talk me out of it and told me to go to college instead.”
”I signed up for the Marines, too,” says Woodstock senior Kevin Belden. ”Mainly to pay for college. If things (new construction sites) were not going up so fast then we wouldn`t have to go to college. It used to be that if you lived in Woodstock you went to high school and then you started farming. But now they`re building up everything around here and there`s no more open space.”
”Like the three-story Super-8 Motel they just built a month ago,”
snorts Mogdan. ”What do they need a three-story motel in Woodstock for? Who`s going to stay there?”
A matter of survival
Just as the students in the farming community of Woodstock feel hemmed in by encroaching developments, students at the inner-city Wells High School also feel squeezed by their environment: Drugs. Gangs. Violence.
Those three concerns are repeated by virtually every student questioned about their top daily worries.
”I just worry about staying alive,” says Omar Estrada. ”I worry I`m going to get shot walking home.”
”A lot of the students here have to spend so much time worrying about how to survive on a daily basis in their neighborhoods that they don`t have time or energy for anything else,” says Wells teacher Irv Zucker.
Frustration, hopelessness
Students at Rich East High in Park Forest say they don`t worry about violence or shrinking farmland, but they too, reveal a sense of frustration and hopelessness about their environment.
”I think young people are so nonchalant about things today because they don`t think there`s much time left for the world,” says Rich East senior Brandi Hall. ”There`s not much hope with wars, drugs and diseases.”
”Attitudes such as that are called `learned helplessness,` ” says Norris Haynes, assistant Yale professor and director of research for Yale`s Child Study Center. ”They feel that whatever they do they still can`t change the situation.”
Haynes says learned helplessness may indeed account for some of today`s student`s less-than radical behavior, but he has a few other theories as well. ”Today, the issues are things like the enviornment and AIDS and there`s a coming together of the old and the young,” he says. ”There`s not as great of disparity as there was a couple of decades ago when it was primarily the young who were protesting the Viet Nam war.”
Haynes also believes that there is not the ”same groundswell of support to be radical, different or outside of the system as there was 20 years ago.” Conformity counts
Fitting in seems to be the major concern of students everywhere from Wells, Park Forest and Woodstock high schools in Illinois to Bennington, a small New York state liberal arts college renowed for its liberal policies, unorthodox professors and offbeat students.
”In the `60s and `70s, it was good to be different because that was an era of change,” says Woodstock student Julie Collen, recently crowned Miss Woodstock. ”Now, everyone tries to be the same and fit in.”
That`s also the conclusion in a recent Rolling Stone magazine article about Bennington which ended in a quote by a student who said: ”It`s 1990-everyone`s worried about drugs, about sex, about behavior in general. Of course things are more conservative because everyone is scared.”
Helen Denham, a recent history/philosophy graduate of the University of Chicago says, sure, a lot of students are indeed scared but they are doing something about it.
Denham is an organizer of Catalyst, a recent nationwide convention of student environmentalists held at the University of Illinois/Champaign. She says today`s student activists don`t seem as radical because they are trying to ”work within the system and take different tacks.”
A quieter approach
”I call it the new activism of the `90s,” she says. ”It`s a much more thoughtful, quieter approach. Instead of staging media events, students now are sitting down and doing research and submitting proposals. They really are thinking out how to change society. I think that kind of thoughtfulness is going to lead to long-term solutions.”
Just as students are less radical in their approach ”administrators are more receptive to them and the idea of the concept of education as a tool for social change,” says Rich East assistant principal Moriarty. ”For instance, we now have substance abuse intervention programs, child-care programs for students with children and some schools even offer birth control and family planning which is a significant change from education`s role in society 20 years ago.”
”And so,” he says, ”kids have less substantive issues to complain about than previous generations-both politically and in the ways schools are run. As a result, the concerns expressed are relatively minor and can be easily dealt with. Twenty years ago, students were dealing with things such as the draft, input in curriculum and first amendment rights-really serious things.”
An informal survey of students at Rich East found their top school complaints were higher lunch prices, the kind of music played during the passing period and more restrictions being placed on their after-school study halls.
Protest . . . with politeness
A few Rich East students got radical enough to plan a walkout to protest the new study hall restrictions.
”The whole thing fizzled though,” says Rich East English teacher Charles Claudon. ”They ended up coming to my classroom and said, `Oh, are we disturbing you? We`re so sorry.` And then they left. To them it was OK to stage a protest or walkout as long as it didn`t disturb anyone.”
Claudon, clearly amused at the irony, smiles.
A symbol of something more?
But others find this timidity downright frustrating.
”We`re losing ground on so many things that we fought hard for,” says Woodstock teacher Strong. ”Like racism. Not too long ago, it looked like we had it pretty well licked and now it`s coming back stronger than ever and no one`s doing anything about it. All the kids seem to care about today is materialism. They don`t know or care about the rest of the world. They can`t even get the symbols straight.”
Strong grabs a napkin and draws two upside down forks in two separate circles. One fork has two prongs, the other has three.
”This,” he says pointing to the three-pronged fork, ”is the peace symbol.”
”This,” he says pointing to the two-pronged one, ”is the Mercedes car logo.
”Now, a little while back in Kansas they had a hippie day as part of the homecoming festivities at a high school. The students there thought they were drawing the peace symbol on their clothes and everything. But what they were really drawing was the Mercedes logo.
”To me that says it all.” –
