High School Hasn’t Changed--Except for the Gun

The grown-ups among us watch the events unfold in Santee and we shake our heads, if not shocked, then baffled. We gasp at the level of hostility and acrimony on a student Web page and quickly shut it down. Even more upsetting is the relatively blase response of teens to these events. What has happened to schools? To kids? To the world?

Nothing. We’ve just forgotten what it’s like. High school is not a safe place, because it has never been a safe place. The emotions are too extreme, the stakes are too high, the pressure too great for safety. As the media, the authorities, the nation struggle to make sense of the shooting in Santee, we cannot overlook high school.

In a tragic way, 15-year-old Andy Williams is an all-American boy. The one we all knew, the one many of us were. Most of us, of course, would be unable to do what authorities say Williams did--reason, decency, love of God or fear of reprisal stop most of us from carrying out vivid revenge fantasies. But still he is hauntingly familiar. Small and slight, Williams had just recently arrived from the other coast, the new kid who hadn’t had time to rally real friends before he was thrust into the petri dish of high school. He was picked on, tormented, really, but he never fought back. Just as so many parents caution their kids. Don’t let it get to you, adults tell their children. Don’t let it get to you, Williams’ friends in Maryland told him.

But of course it got to him. High school is all about things getting to you. High school is all about love and hate and fear and pride; it is society’s boot camp, a Darwinian social order fueled by the mind-altering alchemy of expectation, possibility and hormones.

Who does not remember the crush who made your hands shake, your mouth go dry just by walking past your locker? The knot of whispering girls or mocking boys who reduced you to tears with just a few nasty words? The passionate friendships, the adored teacher who saved your life? That guy who once threw a dodge ball so hard it broke a girl’s leg? Who does not remember feeling that endless howl of yearning, that breath-stopping joy, the giggling intoxication of belonging, the fiery wash of utter shame?

Emotionally, adolescence is the most difficult time of life, says Diane Di Barri, past president of the California Assn. of School Psychologists and a psychologist at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara. The brain and body are under siege by hormones, which, when coupled with the increased demands of scholarship and impending adulthood, can make the world seem impossible to bear. The first year, she says, is the hardest--kids feel incredibly disenfranchised when they enter high school. Many of them don’t even know where to eat; they haven’t found a support group. They are, she says, often completely overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed. By the changes that confront them, by their powerlessness over them. At no other time in our lives does so much change happen so radically, so irrevocably. These are the years during which we realize that adults, the guardians of our world, are often perilously flawed. In our early teens, we are stricken with the biggest revelation a human can have--that our family is not like other families, that there are other options. Yet we are still too young to leave, too young to create our own different lives.

Even our bodies seem out of our control; they shift and reshape themselves almost overnight, our moods fluctuating wildly. Why do we feel such rage, despair, exaltation, lust? How can we explain what we’re feeling to anyone when we don’t understand it ourselves?

As adults, such swings of emotions are rare, usually nudged by specific events--we fall in love, we have a baby, we lose a parent, discover a betrayal. When our moods threaten to undo us, many seek professional help or medication, prescribed or not. Imagine trying to hold a job, raise a family, while feeling the way you felt in high school.

But not all of the angst can be pinned on age or chemistry. If you took a group of adults and put them in crowded classrooms for six hours a day, says Reed Larson, a professor of human and community development at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne, if you forced them to sit in rows and only move when the bell rings, if they were required to ask for passes to use the bathroom, or notes to explain absences, then they would exhibit some pretty strange behavior as well.

In political conversations, it is assumed that overcrowding is bad because it slows learning. Larson believes it also exacerbates the problems of an institutional community.

“In overcrowded schools, kids aren’t treated as individuals,” he says. “They are forced into a social control system focused on the 10% of them who aren’t able to provide self-control, which communicates mistrust.”

So a social order is formed, based on group identity and peer acceptance, a caste system that soon takes on a life of its own. “In a closed environment,” Larson says, “people adopt personas. They exaggerate their emotions, which in turns affects their real feelings, makes them feel disconnected from their true selves.”

As adults, we are free to choose our own homes, our own friends, our own colleagues. If a neighborhood becomes threatening, we move. If a work relationship goes sour, we quit. Or sue. If, when walking down the street, someone hits us or threatens us or steals our money, we go to the police. And avoid that street in the future. We have resources--the police, the courts, the mores of civility, the security of income and independence, the freedom of choice.

In high school, we have none of these. In high school we are surrounded for years by the same people, not of our choosing, seeking bonds and friendship, forging and reforging new allies, new cliques. Best friends change and become enemies or suddenly vanish into the land of the jocks or the stoners. The guidelines by which everyone is judged are altered, and many are left clumsy and unaware. People decide someone’s a loser and that’s that--he is fair game for teasing and assault. Day after day after day.

“I tell my kids they are simply not in a power position,” says Di Barra. “Until they are 18, they simply have to find ways to cope.”

Some kids are more resilient than others, she says, and some schools more generous. Some schools, recognizing the pressures facing many ninth-graders, have created a mentor program through which students are paired with individual teachers who help show them the ropes for that first crucial year. And at Wilcox, the ninth-grade classes have been made smaller. “It’s working,” says Di Barra. “But it’s expensive.”

But in many schools, classes remain overcrowded, teachers overworked. And complaining to adults, even parents, can feel like an admission of failure to a teenager. Especially for boys, who are still expected to be tough, to stand on their own, to act like men. But girls, too, are adamant about their independence; to ask for help would seem childish. If we can’t handle ourselves in high school, we think, how will we be able to succeed in life?

Not everyone has bad high school experiences. For some, they are the glory years. But most of us merely survive. Safe in adulthood, we write books, make movies that reflect our fear of that time--the nightmare of having to return is a common adult anxiety dream. The rest of us laugh about how much we hated it, how much we hated ourselves.

But at the time it wasn’t funny at all.

Secret crimes take place in high school, laws are broken, as are spirits. Things are taken and never returned, and there often seems no recourse--to turn to outside authority is the ultimate transgression. To fight requires strength or allies. And walking away only invites more abuse. As Andy Williams discovered.

Being a 15-year-old boy is hard. In recent years, a whole new genre of psychological literature, a whole new industry of social thought, has been dedicated to the problems boys face in a time when gender roles are morphing, when the workplace has become less physical, when the definitions of manhood seem arbitrary.

In a way, Williams simply did what he had been taught to do. What all-American heroes do. They smile and take it, try to be reasonable; joking, they walk away rather than fight back. But when someone crosses their line, whatever it might be, they come out guns blazing. Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne. I told you not to mess with me, but you did. Bang, bang, bang.

But even in the movies, of course, 15-year-old heroes don’t have guns. And in real life, most boys, most people, no matter how angry or frustrated, are able to control their behavior, if not their emotions.

In the end, the thing that made Andy Williams different from millions of frustrated and vengeful students was the gun. Without the gun, there would be no tragedy, no sorrow, no fear, no anger spreading like a familiar stain across the country. Without the gun, he might have thrown some rocks, spray-painted a wall, slashed a tire or even an arm. In high school, we all have our moments of insanity. “Rebel Without a Cause,” S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” all touch that nerve. In those years, we all want to be prettier, more popular, faster, stronger, smarter, tougher, cooler, better. We want to be loved, respected, admired. But if that doesn’t seem to be happening, some will settle for being feared.

The future is dangled before us like a carrot, but many of us really don’t believe we’ll ever make it out of high school.

And now, two more of us won’t.