Culture of high school marginalizes those who don't conform
Seven years after Columbine, school shootings are still occurring with frightening regularity. Much has been made of the influences that culturally sanctioned violence, neglectful parents and video games may have had on the actions of disaffected young men, and I have no doubt that these are powerful influences indeed.
However, I have yet to see any analysis of the way the culture of public high schools may be linked to the tragedies.
American public high schools have a culture that deifies the physically attractive, the athletically gifted and those who find conformity easy.
This adulation not only gives the "chosen ones" an enormous amount of social power, it also marginalizes students who are not members of the elite.
Not everyone gets to be a beauty, an athlete or a member of a well-adjusted family. There are many students who cannot or will not conform to the accepted norms, and their voices are silenced through abuse, ostracism and simply being allowed to slip through the cracks.
The fact that school administrators the target of the most recent incident in Cazenovia apparently ignore the abuses of the popular and powerful represents appalling indifference to the difficulties the outsiders face.
Bullying is dismissed as something kids just do, and victims are too often told to buck up and ignore it, or that they bring it on themselves by being weird in other words, that simply being who they are gives bullies license to hurt.
I remember all too clearly, all too painfully, my own experiences as a bullying victim in Madison's public schools, and although I cannot condone violence, a part of me understands the motivations of school shooters.
When you are silenced, marginalized, treated as if you don't matter, and abused every day by the people around you, you become desperate. Desperate enough to kill just to make yourself heard.
The culture at large may be the driving force behind the culture of high school. Professional athletes and stereotypically beautiful entertainers are paid sums of money vastly disproportionate to the significance of their occupations. They are held to different standards of behavior, as though they were royalty.
It does not matter whether these individuals have any personal integrity, intelligence or imagination so long as they can throw a touchdown pass or look a certain way. They are held up as role models nonetheless, warping young minds into believing that this is what one should must aspire to.
What does this leave for the uncoordinated young man with acne who writes poetry, or the overweight bespectacled young woman with intellectual curiosity?
Why is it so threatening to the mainstream when a young person chooses to dress outrageously, or falls in love with someone of the same sex?
As members of the same species, we are more alike than we are different, whatever our ethnicity, home environment, appearance or sexual orientation. It is shameful that a culture as rich as ours offers such a narrow spectrum of expression.
I don't know how to change any of this, but the culture of high school needs a serious overhaul. Without it, we can look forward to new generations of desperate young people who feel they have no choice but to lash out with violence.
FOR YEARS, Margaret Nelson had been thinking about writing the story of her family and the tragedy that happened in Tomah in 1969.
Nelson, a Minneapolis-based journalist, finally started to write the story last week. "I wrote a few pages on Thursday," Nelson was saying this week.
Then, the next day, Friday, she heard the terrible news out of Cazenovia, the 15-year-old with a shotgun, a principal dead.
"It really did take me right back to that time and what happened to us," Nelson said.
How could it not?
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