We
learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.”—Bruce
Springsteen, “No Surrender,” from his Born in the USA LP (1984)
Thirty-five
years ago today, as I received my high school diploma, I felt much the same
sense of relief and release that Springsteen expresses. It wasn’t that I was
done with educational institutions—in fact, many of my waking hours would be
given over to attending classes, writing papers and cramming for tests, for
most of the next 19 years, for undergraduate and graduate degrees, even for
adult and continuing ed.
But
from this point on, I felt more like a free agent: able to attend a school of
my choosing, take majors and additional courses I wanted, manage my work pace,
even win friends (or not) among people with no preconceptions about me based on
my family or background.
Over
the next few weeks, millions of American kids will experience the same sense of
wonder and exhilaration that my classmates and I felt in 1978, and that
Springsteen—recognized as a fellow member of our tribe of working-class Jersey
kids—felt before us.
Part
of it is that we struggled to achieve, but we also struggled to endure. For the
sad fact of the matter is that the early leaders of the American republic, in
an attempt to create a well-informed electorate—voters worthy of rendering “the
consent of the governed”—gave birth to a regimented system deeply harmful to
young minds. For all the millions this nation has spent, thousands still
languish in our vast educational system, loathing (even despairing of) every
minute of it.
High
school has to be the most artificial, injurious institution ever devised to
(mis)shape young people—from the administrators and teachers who, out of the best
intentions, devise a web of rules that the young seem bound to challenge, to
fellow students who, often out of their own fear of being friendliness, use peer pressure. It is all designed to squeeze out
individuality. The pain that adolescents feel during this time—the pain that
many don’t even forget years later—stems from that daily struggle.
It
just hasn’t seemed to change, from one generation to the next: We are so intent
on protecting who we are that we don’t know how to break through to others.
As for subject matter: I
can’t say, all these years later, that I can tell you much about cosines or
paramecium. It is enough that I recall some details—and, most of all, that I absorbed
habits of self-discipline that I’ve been able to apply since then. (It was a geometry teacher who always kept telling me and my classmates, "Always think with a pencil in your hand"--advice that I've applied, oddly enough, in a realm he probably never intended: writing.)
I
would need these habits, as the coming fall I was about to leave the cocoon of a high-school
graduating class of only about 80—many of whom I had known for 12 years of
parochial elementary and secondary school—to go to a secular, Ivy League
institution far larger in size.
I
certainly didn’t know all that would await me at Columbia, but I already sensed
that I would find a community bursting with urban edginess, contention,
intellectual energy, ambition and maybe even a few egos. It might not have the
close atmosphere of my high school, St. Cecilia, a place where you knew not
only everyone in your class but very likely your classmates' other family members. But the
university also might nurture a society of achievers in which my drive would
not look so exotic, where ideas might excite me in ways I never had known
before. It might move me much closer to the person I could become.
Springsteen and others have shown that learning doesn't end with the schoolhouse door, that students are individuals who need to be reached for the impulse that makes them tick. “In
the city of myself, upon the continent of my soul, I shall find the forgotten
language, the lost world, a door where I may enter,” young Eugene Gant vows in
Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel, Look
Homeward, Angel.
As
I left high school, I was filled with more anxiety about my future than I could
really let on. I was also filled with deep affection and love for the people
along the way that had helped me seek that “door where I may enter.” Decades later, I couldn’t forget them if I
tried. I hope those who graduate this month will be as lucky to have the kind of friends and teachers I had back then.
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