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recent bookmarks from robertogreco[Easy Chair] | Abolish High School, by Rebecca Solnit | Harper's Magazine2018-06-10T19:18:41+00:00
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/04/abolish-high-school/
robertogrecoWhen I went to a dance competition I saw a girl there who was wearing a T-shirt she made. It read: matt 1, daisy 0. Matt’s family was very powerful in the state of Missouri and he was also a very popular football player in my town, but I still couldn’t believe it when I was told the charges were dropped. Everyone had told us how strong the case was — including a cell phone video of the rape which showed me incoherent. All records have been sealed in the case, and I was told the video wasn’t found. My brother told me it was passed around school.
I wonder what pieces we’d have to pull away to demolish the system that worked so hard to destroy Coleman.
But abolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies. Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost. What happens to people who are taught to believe in a teenage greatness that is based on achievements unlikely to matter in later life?
Abolishing high school could mean many things. It could mean compressing the time teenagers have to sort out their hierarchies and pillory outsiders, by turning schools into minimalist places in which people only study and learn. All the elaborate rites of dances and games could take place under other auspices. (Many Europeans and Asians I’ve spoken to went to classes each day and then left school to do other things with other people, forgoing the elaborate excess of extracurricular activities that is found at American schools.) It could mean schools in which age segregation is not so strict, where a twelve-year-old might mentor a seven-year-old and be mentored by a seventeen-year-old; schools in which internships, apprenticeships, and other programs would let older students transition into the adult world before senior year. (Again, there are plenty of precedents from around the world.)
Or it could mean something yet unimagined. I’ve learned from doctors that you don’t have to have a cure before you make a diagnosis. Talk of abolishing high school is just my way of wondering whether so many teenagers have to suffer so much. How much of that suffering is built into a system that is, however ubiquitous, not inevitable? “Every time I drive past a high school, I can feel the oppression. I can feel all those trapped souls who just want to be outside,” a woman recalling her own experience wrote to me recently. “I always say aloud, ‘You poor souls.’ ”"]]>rebeccasolnit 2015 highschool education schools schooling adolescence unschooling deschooling oppression teens youth hierarchy agesegregation internships apprenticeships mentoring mentors popularity jockocracies sports rapeculture us society peers hatecrime conformity values helenanorberg-hodge lcproject openstudioproject cooperation competition segregation bullying bullies splc persecution gender sexuality heteronormativity homophobia angst cruelty suicide dances prom misfits friendship learning howwelearn srg glvo edghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a901461abee5/Outstanding Video About Modern Knowledge Construction2012-09-24T05:07:56+00:00
http://constructingmodernknowledge.com/cmk08/?p=1656
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