Liberation in the Classroom

These things happen daily at schools everywhere: Boys inappropriately touching girls in the hallway. Often it’s bumping or brushing up against unexpecting and unwilling recipients, but sometimes it’s more overt. In class, a student who gets frustrated by another, might angrily blurt out “you’re a fag!”. Other students might exclaim “don’t be gay!” Any conversation about gender or biology at any point is greeted by nervous laughter and dismissive “jokes.”

On any given day, this is all before lunch.

Welcome to middle school, where being called gay is one of the worst things that can happen and where human biology is something to be ridiculed for and embarrassed by. Much of the rest of the day may be spent figuring out what consequences are appropriate for any of these situations and, of course, trying to figure out what else is going on in these volatile lives to prompt these behaviors and keep them out of further downward spiral.

How do students (at any school) learn in this environment? How do gay and lesbian students concentrate on anything except their own safety in this environment? How does anyone in schools concentrate on content with all this going on in the background? How does anybody survive adolescence?

Monday we all returned from April break. There was lots of energy in the halls in the morning before classes begin as people saw each other for the first time. There was also the return of the adolescent drama, those power struggles as young people search for a sense of self in the social hierarchy. I heard a boy asking about the new kid and whose advisory he’s in because he is concerned that he won’t be the tallest in his advisory any more. Lots of gossip and trying to corroborate and validate stories heard over vacation filters down the halls….

Middle school students want to be heard and recognized. This, I am convinced, is part of the human condition. Looking for a sense of self by trying out new looks, friends, or mannerisms is often part of this game. Unfortunately, so is putting down others to make yourself feel better, more important, higher up in the social strata.

These are the behaviors that are unhealthy and which, if left unchecked, may evolve into more complex patterns of controlling others. The bullies in middle school may grow to be the abusive partners in adulthood. They may grow to be racist. They may grow to be homophobic. They may grow to be any number of things that stifle the voice and liberty of others, all in the name of making themselves feel better, feel more whole, feel something.

As educators, these are behaviors we must challenge whenever we can. These are patterns we must interrupt and try to replace with empathy. Sure the classroom content is important, but creating healthy human beings is the core of what we do.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” This he said to a New York Times reporter in 2006 while discussing how little the rich pay in taxes relative to their incomes. He had noticed that he paid a lower tax rate than anyone else in his office, mostly, but not all, secretaries and clerks.

These class discrepancies are not limited to what people pay in taxes, however. Our school system reinforces these income hierarchies by providing good educations to those who can afford it, and withholding it from others, meaning that these socioeconomic disparities remain in place. (And it should perhaps go without saying that I am not talking about individual schools or individual teachers or individual students here, but rather the big picture: schools in poor neighborhoods and town are not as good, are not stocked as well, do not provide as many opportunities as schools in wealthy neighborhoods.)

But how do we talk about changing this since those in power, both politically and educationally are only representing the wealthy? The University of California system just hired a new President. They pilfered him from the University of Texas and lured him in by paying him — are you sitting down? — $828,084 per year. Yes, that’s almost $4 from every single student in the entire system. This was, apparently, approved “by Governor Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders,” but they, too, are largely of the owning class themselves.

I’m not sure what to suggest here, but it’s clear that equalizing our educational system is a pretty big and entrenched issue.

Jean Twenge was recently interviewed on Fair Game with Faith Salie. Twenge is a professor at San Diego State University where she studies differences in generations. She has also written a book called Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before, which title is fairly self-explanatory, as far as these things go.

One of the things she was talking about was the rise in narcissism in the generation born since about 1980. In many ways this is how older generations talk about younger generations: they’re all out for themselves, they don’t care, they are lazy, etc. etc. etc. I was born in 1970, the heart of Generation X, and they certainly said all of those things about us in the 80s and 90s, and I wonder if we hear less about Generation X now mostly because there’s a new generation (often called the Millennials) to complain about.

Or is there something to this narcissism? She points out that the corollary to a rise in narcissism is a drop in empathy and that has been coming up recently for me in the world of liberation activism and theology.

One of the problems with people and groups who oppress others, either directly (say, hitting someone) or indirectly (say, not speaking up when a racist joke is said), is that they seem to lack a certain level of empathy. They may not even realize that they are missing it, as when students in my class make comments that they don’t even understand are hurtful because they’ve never really parsed the language.

So how do we teach empathy? How do we better get students to analyze their language and be better aware of how certain words affect others? I feel like this needs to get done in every class all the time, on top of what we’re already teaching, but certainly lots of teachers already feel like they have too much to do and don’t want to take on yet another thing….

[Also, I’m not sure my use of ‘directly’ and ‘indirectly’ oppressing others is a good distinction, but it seems useful in that usage.]

Oh I’m just kidding! He knows I’m just kidding, he says, turning to the boy, right?

It almost doesn’t matter what just came out of this boy’s mouth, this is generally the first line of defense: I’m just kidding, as if all is made well, the classroom soothed, the world set right as long as those words are uttered.

The 7th and 8th graders that I teach are, developmentally, beginning to explore the world on their own for the first time as young adults, and are looking for what power they have or can take. They often push the teachers to see what they can get away with, and more often, they push each other around as they barter in personal power and reassess the social hierarchies.

If not checked at 13 and 14, unfortunately, these power struggles become ingrained and will need to be fed in increasingly unhealthy ways. For some of these middle schoolers, I am already wary of their eventual partners, fearful for the treatment they may receive in the search for power over others.

Middle School is at least as much about teaching social skills and healthy ways of interacting with the world as it is about any specific content students walk away with.