I listen to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly podcast each week. It’s a 15-ish minute talk show about education policy and education news, from the serious to the not-so-serious. I recommend it.
This last week’s podcast [April 03, 2008] brought a discussion of a high school student making news [via the NY Times] about his refusal to go to school dances. Why? Because he’ll be required to take a breathalyzer test. The student feels that it intrudes on his off-campus rights.
Obviously, the student’s stance is illogical and shows a misunderstanding of rights – co-host Dr. Rick Hess points that out clearly. He goes on to say that there’s a broader culture of entitlement that causes kids to engage in such useless protest. Hess asks:
“What kind of country is it where a 16 year old feels good about going to the New York Times and complaining that he’s not able to walk into a school dance drunk?”
Point taken, but it would’ve been more valuable [and interesting] to recall William Arrowsmith’s explanation of this phenomenon. It’s in The Future of Teaching: The Molding of Men, a seminal document published first in The Journal of Higher Education [Vol. 38, No. 3, March 1967, pp. 131-143]. Though Arrowsmith was writing about higher education, it applies well to contemporary cases we’re seeing more frequently – whether it’s the school dance protest, the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case or whatever will be touted tomorrow.
Arrowsmith explained in his conclusion that colleges and professors – and I would expand that now to high schools and their teachers – lack an ecumenical function, a heroism of sorts, that guides students.
He wrote:
“By so doing, it is forcing the student – who may want to be more than merely a professor – into the streets and out of the culture. The student becomes marginal simply out of opposition to the elite which has expelled him. Alternatively, he responds by violent and often unintelligent assertion of those very values, especially freedom, which the university seems to have abandoned. His attempts at heroism thus become merely anarchic; he loses the skills of educated heroism, even while claiming to assert them.”
With apologies to Rick Hess – though I suppose his candid outrage was entertaining – we got a solid answer to the question 41 years ago. I’d have liked to have heard a discussion about Arrowsmith’s explanation, though.
And while your mind’s on education podcasting, take a listen to The DC Education Blog’s podcasting debut. As I wrote in the comments, it’s very well-produced and I look forward to the next one.
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