Revolt in the High Schools (1969)
REVOLT IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS (1969)
THE WAY IT’S GOING TO BE
By DIANE DIVOKY
THE words of the school board were unimpeachable: It is the aim of our high school to encourage students to freely express themselves, in writing or otherwise, as part of their educational program, What they meant, in fact, was that the school board in suburban Long Beach, New York, would not allow students to distribute on school premises their fledgling independent newspaper, Frox. The thirteen staff members, supported by their parents, had made a formal written ,request to the school’s principal. Their concessions were clear: no obscenity, a promise to publish views in opposition to our own, and a willingness to accept a faculty adviser who is not a censor, Backed by a new school board resolution that managed to come out squarely for both freedom of expression and full school control, the principal responded rapidly: I feel compelled to refuse you the right to distribute Frox as you request and must advise you that any violation will lead to disciplinary procedures.
Bewildered by their inability to help the teen-agers come to a reasonable, democratic compromise with the traditionally liberal school administration, the parents have turned to lawyers. At the same time, the students find themselves in a drastically changed role. Youngsters who get good grades and lead school activities, they are suddenly rebels con· fronting the adults who control their education. They have become members of a growing minority of high school students who are coming into focus as the new problem in the nation’s schoolhouse.
– The revolt testifies that the students have been learning more than the schools have taught.
YET the mood that is nurturing a network of nearly 500 underground high school papers, a national student-run press service to feed them, and the proliferation of independent high school unions and chapters of· Students for a Democratic Society is being set by a kind of student the school finds difficult to label. This new problem student is most often n6ta classroom failure; frequently, he is black and from a poor family but not disadvantaged. Sometimes, when his behavior approaches its most disruptive, he resembles a juvenile delinquent, and sometimes. too. he is simply a follower, pressured by the values and styles of the dominant peer group into acting without thinking. These students, six-year-olds when John F. Kennedy became President, were the youngest witnesses to the high hopes for a more open society that came in the early Sixties-with its battles for civil rights and against poverty. In their short span of history, they have seen on television the assassinations and funerals of three national leaders who embodied these hopes. The war in Vietnam, beginning for them as nothing much more than another TV shoot-’em-up, has become a frightening reality as they approach draft age. Still vitally young themselves, they have watched the nation’s shift from a youthful sense of unlimited expectations to the middle-aged habit of assessing and conserving old strengths and former gains.
FED by the mass media, urged by parents and teachers to inquire, the students are sensitive to the larger world and their limited role in it-as no generation before. For them, the student council that fulfills itself by planning dances, academic work that leads only to high College Board scores, and school newspapers that highlight class elections and football games are not only artificial, but inappropriate.
The underground press is, at first, an escape from the carefully delineated boundaries of school activity and opinion. Not surprisingly, therefore, the newest papers tend to be the most ambitious in scope, boldly taking on the great issues in the national arena. The first mimeographed issue of Alternative in Eugene, Oregon, was almost completely devoted to opposition to the Vietnam war. The Strobe, an amateurish sheet published in Baltimore’s liberated zone, attacks war, poverty, George Wallace, and the pigs of Chicago. The Appleton (Wisconsin) Post-Mortem, edited by Fox Valley High School students to challenge the myths and realities of their town and society, gets a bit closer to home by focusing on local police tactics.
In their open horror and bewilderment over the happenings in the society, the articles in these papers tend to emotional or moralistic generalizations, very serious but simple truths. They convey the teen-ragers’ sense of the outrages happening out there in the world, but also their inability and lack of equipment to come to grips with problems that are so vast, So complex, so distant from their own lives.
Society seems unable to let the young stay naive. The underground newspaper, dismissed as a potential educational tool by school administrators in spite of the student initiative and social concern it displays, teaches in another way. As they seek to express their opinions, the students discover that unlike their parents, their college counterparts, the man on the radio or the street corner, they have no right to express an opinion at all.
Last year, John Freeburg, a senior at South Kitsap High School outside of Seattle, Washington, began to edit and publish a mimeographed newspaper for students that reflected his own opposition to the Vietnam war, as well as to the adult Establishment’s reaction to long hair. John himself was clean-cut in every sense of the word. The son of a commercial airlines pilot, a boy who spent summers working with diabetic children, he was a principal’s dream: a consistent high honor student, one of three chosen by the faculty as outstanding students, a student council representative, and ironically, regional winner of the Veterans of Foreign Wars What Democracy Means to Me contest. Even in getting out his paper, he operated true to form, submitting articles to the school administration for approval before each issue.
In spite of this, three months before graduation John was suspended, and his parents’ efforts to have him reinstated by the school board proved fruitless. The state Civil Liberties Union stepped in and obtained a court order for his reinstatement. An ACLU suit on his behalf for damages brought against the school board is still pending in the U.S. District Court. It claims that John’s civil rights were violated; the district’s counterclaim uses the traditionally unassailable argument that his activities were disruptive to school operation.
But even if his case should succeed setting a precedent for the rights of high school students – John Freeburg has gone from idealism to skepticism about the system that found his exercise of freedom of the press an embarrassment to be eliminated in the face of pressures born right wing groups in the small community. His school said he was old enough to praise democracy publicly, but not to speak about its seamier aspects. Rather than practicing the ideals of freedom and tolerance it preached, the school used its power to suppress ideas. Something was terribly wrong, John decided, not just across the world in Vietnam, but in the institution that was supposed to educate him.
The staff of Frox is undergoing the same experience. Their crudely printed paper has worked almost painfully to link the relevant national issues to their own suburban community, to bring the big labels – racism, imperialism, poverty – home to Long Beach. Then they found their careful arrangements for distribution were canceled out by the refusal of the principal and the ambiguous educational rhetoric of the school board. Their own school has shown that, as Ira Glasser, associate director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, has stated: In the classroom we teach freedom, but the organization is totalitarian. The kids learn that when the values of freedom and order conflict, freedom recedes. With what they’re learning, the Long Beach students won’t have to rely on cliches about freedom and repression. They now have their own gut-level issue, with all its complexities and subtleties. Unwittingly, the school system has given injustice the relevance the students themselves could not.
Once students begin to see the school as a bankrupt, manipulative bureaucracy – and themselves as its most vulnerable victims – the stage is set for the real student movement. The underground paper takes on a double role: to contradict the system that says students have no uncensored voice, and to talk with the authority of the insider about the follies of the institution and the ways it might be undermined or openly confronted. In the second issue of Ann Arbor (Michigan) High School’s Us, the students explained what they learned from the furor produced by their first issue:
The suppression we encountered was frightening. The savage in Huxley’s Brave New World comments on our situation, saying to the Controller, You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ’tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. . . . But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy. We fear the brave new world, we fear . . . lobotomized education, especially in this tremendous school. The issue which was created with this publication was not one of censorship of the Optimist. The school paper is possibly the best in the nation. Outside of administrative demands on space and content, we do not question its excellence. The existence of antidistribution laws for student literature is the major objection. This is a violation of our constitutional rights. If this journalistic endeavor is a failure, it can easily be forgotten. But, if you or they force us to stop, we are all failures. Then, this school, city, and country, and the principles they supposedly represent are lies.
The more seasoned underground papers operate confidently on the understanding that change in the schools is their first order of business, and that national issues-the cry for law and order, teacher militancy-do affect their lives as students. At first glance, these papers are fun. They call themselves The Pearl before the swine, The Finger, Napalm, The Roach, The South Dakota Seditionist Monthly, Big Momma, The Philistine, The Bleeding Rose, Dormat Dwellers, even The New York Herald Tribune. They are fresh, crazy, biased, irreverent in their view of the world, and often unexpectedly inventive in the way they present it. Albert Shanker, United Federation of Teachers president, becomes a great vulture, perched over the bodies of children. Samson Jones gets kicked out of Gaza Central High School for his long hair-and in a rage pulls the school down.
The more stylish ones are almost a new pop art form. Print runs around, over, and under stark drawings, viciously pointed cartoons, poignant photographs. Sometimes the word itself becomes the design. Dreamy poems are transposed on psychedelic drawings. Surrealistic obscene headlines fly out from the page. And often a picture stands by itself, telling the story rather than illustrating it. This is the work of McLuhan’s generation.
THE national focus for the underground is HIPS, the High School Independent Press Service (160 Claremont Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10027), which offers a weekly packet of news and illustrations of high school uprisings, busts, dress codes, discipline, and politics. Some sixty papers and 400 fans subscribe, at an often uncollected fee of $4 a month. HIPS is very much in the revolutionary bag, a staffer admits. I suppose we’re just as bad as the Times in being biased. But underground papers are more interesting to read than the Times. They don’t start with the usual ‘who, where, when. what, why.’ HIPS gets people to think. Gets them radicalized before they get into college. If that happens, chances are a fourth of them will never get to college.
One of the slickest papers HIPS Services is the New York High School Free Press, which publishes 10,000 copies every three weeks (5 cents for students, 15 cents for teachers). It introduced itself last fall with a full-cover photo of a naked Negro baby girl holding the black flag of anarchy: Ursula, seven months and already foxy as hell, the editors explained. A coupon form invites the reader to subscribe or, if he prefers, to curse and threaten the hippie-commie-yippie-queer-pinkos who print it. Another reader service is a directory of pertinent phone numbers: for prayers, demonstrations, birth control and abortion information, draft counseling, the FBI, and nighttime companions – the Girl Scouts.
Yet silliness serves more serious purposes. The Free Press, with first-hand reports on national and school crises and interviews with prominent figures, is a sober attempt to reach radical and politically oriented students throughout the city. Its mix of selious radicalism and youthful gags reflects its staff, a closely knit group of intense, quick-witted students, most of whom attend New York’s highly selective Bronx High School of Science. In the living room of one of their homes, the students-a balance of whites and blacks – can go with breathtaking speed from typical teen-age roughhousing to political debate.
Reggie Lucas, the paper’s fifteen-year-old music critic, talks about breaking down the traditional teacher-student relationship in the schools, so that by interchanging roles, the teacher, as well as the student, could learn. Everything the adult Establishment does, he explains politely, is not just undesirable, but repugnant to us. The real hero today is the person who can mess up the society and pervert the youth.
Leader of the group is Howie Swerdloff, at seventeen a good-natured veteran of the underground press and radical student movement, who wrote last fall:
The main thing that’s taught us in school is how to be good niggers, obey the rules, dress in our uniforms, play the game, and NO DON’T BE UPPITY! Oh, we’re trained for participating in the democratic process -we have our student governments-they can legislate about basketball games and other such meaningful topics. Don’t mention the curriculum – THEY’LL tell us what to learn. Oh, we can express our complaints in the school newspaper – but the principal says what gets printed and don’t embarrass the school’s reputation.
Howie’s immediate fight is with the school establishment; his long-range goal is to destroy the government he finds hopelessly oppressive through a worldwide people’s revolution. His mother views his position with pride tempered by concern. When he was only fifteen, she recalls, she was first called into school about his activities. Finding Howie distributing antiwar leaflets across the street from the school, she began to apologize to the irate principal. Howie stopped her: My lawyer said it’s OK, Mother. The Swerdloffs, liberals of another generation, are hopeful about the contributions their son and his friends will make to change the society, yet are appalled by the often violent reaction of the society to the youthful protests. You wonder, Mrs. Swerdloff said, recalling the violence in Chicago during the Democratic convention. You teach them such good values, and then when they go ahead and act on them, all this happens. The underground high school press represents attitudes that have generated a variety of organizations bent on changing the school and the society. Their tactics range from polite dialogue to picketing to direct confrontation with the authorities. It is, nonetheless, difficult to categorize these groups, since their degree of militancy and their deviance from accepted student behavior depend a great deal on the response of school and community officials, the particular issues involved, and on the students themselves.
There is no one approach among the black separatist groups, New York City’s High School Coalition, affiliated with the Black Panther party, spews vitriolic rhetoric in its newsletter and operates on a single dogma: the necessity of black liberation by any means possible. In contrast, the Modern Strivers, a group of young Negroes at Eastern High School in Washington, D.C., talks black power, but in the traditional American terms of self-help, hard work, and foundation funding.
THE degree of flexibility within a community helps to determine the degree to which a group is regarded as a problem.
In Berkeley, California, the liberal, interracial Youth Council, which has a poster of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in its office in city hall, received the support of city fathers even after its president was arrested for selling drugs. In Milwaukee, however, the beginnings of a student alliance, a rather apolitical group hoping for school reform, brought shocked cries from administrators, city officials, and the state’s principals’ association, who were ready to accuse subversive outside influences of stirring up the unrest.
The students are conscious of the variety within their ranks. The New York High School Student Union, an integrated, citywide group with semiautonomous locals in 108 public and private schools, operates so flexibly that members at one school can be requesting more school dances while those at another can be out protesting the war. Its leaders tend to be disdainful of the doctrinaire approach of Students for a Democratic Society, and prefer to let their members do their own thing.
Many groups, however, influenced by nearby college activity, have become SDS affiliates. Last year, eleven high schools in Seattle formed SDS chapters. In St. Louis, the citywide SDS group became large enough to be broken up into individual high school chapters. The Akron-based Ohio Union of High School Students, though not affiliated with SDS, has an adviser from the organization. National SDS headquarters has been overwhelmed by the flood of requests for literature from high school groups, and estimates an increase of about 800 per cent over last year. To meet the demand, the SDS national council decided in October to hire a full-time secondary school coordinator.
THE schoolmen, caught offguard by the new attitude, are now rushing to diagnose the problem and find solutions. The National Association of Secondary School Principals reports the findings of a national survey of student unrest in large and small school systems at its annual convention this month. A new NASSP handbook suggests ways to make the student council more meaningful. The organization’s September 1968 bulletin was devoted to student unrest and included articles about its link with college militancy, possible reasons and solutions for the coming revolt, and even one on what to do either before-or when-the legal showdown comes. (The handwriting is on the wall; public school students will be protected in their constitutional rights, it said.)
Reaction to the new activism by schoolmen has been as varied as the kinds of students involved, their forms of dissent, and the responses of communities. A few school administrators regard the militancy as a potentially beneficial force, an often responsible if sometimes shrill demand for a more active role in school affairs. Just as the mass media and current events have taught the students something, so too they may have learned, really learned, what the schools’ rhetoric says they should-to inquire critically.
Dr. Eugene Smoley, a high school principal in Montgomery County, Maryland, puts it this way: The activists represent a real challenge educationally by questioning the foundations of the society. They’re looking for ways to be helpful, pushing for a way for their actions to have some influence, pressing for more meaningful lives. The movement is a very positive thing, because it can only be compared with the apathy of an earlier time.
Many other schoolmen, however, dismiss the activism as a fad, claim that the high school students are only imitating their older brothers and sisters in college, or maintain that because students have always complained, all grievances are on the order of gripes about the cafeteria food.
The school administrator is, indeed, the man in the middle, caught between the community he serves and a whole new set of realities. Traditionally, the community-and the society-expect him to run a well ordered, efficient institution founded on a number of assumptions: Students are children, in both the legal and educational sense. They are pretty much alike-naive and awkward as they grow. When they learn, they learn in school. The principal is legally responsible for the wellbeing of school children, and educationally responsible for what goes into their heads.
Although the legal fiction that students are children to be protected remains, much else has changed. Norman Solomon, honors senior and reporter for the county newspaper, who addresses the Montgomery County school board on the system’s inputs and outputs and the serious gap that presently exists between rhetoric and reality, cannot be dismissed as a charming child. The two Berkeley high school seniors who sit as full voting members on city committees know more about the operation of bureaucracy than any textbook could teach them. After his week in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Howie Swerdloff can tell his teachers a good deal about violence and police brutality in this nation.
To what extent can sophisticated adolescents be considered adults when they are still legally children? If the school is to educate, can it afford not to capitalize on the increasing awareness and concern of the students? Can the school be a public forum while maintaining its tight authoritarian patterns? If the school grants more freedom to students, is it opening itself up to irresponsible-as well as responsible-adolescent judgments? Can it find a place for its dissatisfied minority without threatening its more accepting, complacent majority?
The revolt itself testifies that students have been learning more than the schools have taught: from parents who are as well or better educated than teachers; from the mass media with which the school finds itself in competition; from actual participation in the politics and culture of the society. To accept this knowledge and experience means facing up to a set of complicated problems. To deny it is to deny the students themselves.
Source: Saturday Review
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