Apathy and Anonymity
Those who criticize the American high school would do well to consider just how difficult is has become to be a teenager. Young people on the brink of adulthood must contend with a whirlwind of destabilizing forces that undermine their scholastic potential and leave them wondering what society expects of them. And so it is that "Breaking Ranks," the new report on the restructuring of high schools from the National Association of Secondary School Principals in partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, concerns itself as much with young people as with the institution that makes claims on so many of their waking hours. (See Education Week, Feb. 28, 1996.)
While many of the document's recommendations necessarily revolve around changing the structure and reforming the bureaucracy of high schools, the report operates simultaneously on another, more human, level. In this regard, "Breaking Ranks" seeks to combat two of the main im-pediments to the academic development of post-adolescents--anonymity and apathy.
Many high school students feel, by and large, that few people, not even their teachers, really know them as they would like to be known. They get the sense, rightly or wrongly, of acting as human fungibles as they march from class to class, encountering different teachers every 50 minutes and sitting with an entirely different set of classmates each time. Their academic aspirations and their scholastic problems remain bottled within them, tapped infrequently by the harried counselor who must also deal with 499 other confounded youngsters. Given these circumstances, some students drift into boredom or misconduct, not sufficiently engaged by their educational experiences to involve themselves in substantial academic learning or in the communal aspects of high school. The embers of their dissatisfaction are stoked by a larger society teeming with cynicism over authority, government, and almost all of life's institutional dimensions. This is a society that, despite what it tells the young, shows in ever so many ways that it does not value matters of the mind and that responsibility to community is for chumps. News and analysis count to Americans mostly for their entertainment value, and the culture of complaint makes quaint relics of selflessness and altruism. Nonetheless, the high school struggles to persuade teenagers of the merits of learning and to inculcate within them an...
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