The (high school) gods must be crazy

Sometime in the late eighties or early nineties (those years of my childhood blur together in a colorful array of puffy paint and spandex) some righteous (undoubtedly) white filmmaker produced a movie depicting the absurdity/hilarity/irony created by the encroachment of Western "culture" on what I can only remember as rural/tribal Africa. The opening scene depicts an unassuming "African" male walking through the wide expanses of his unadulterated homeland. The young boy is unexpectedly hit on the head by a coca-cola bottle which seems to fall out of the sky without explanation. Aside from my post-critical consciousness assessment of the essentialized imagery that shaped both the setting and the comedy of "The Gods Must be Crazy", I've recently appreciated the way the film conveys the phenomenon of alien cultures colliding without the language or framework to communicate with eachother, and how many images, words and ideas go untranslated when two groups occupy the same physical space but are unique and distinctive in so many other ways.

Such has been my experience over the last three months. In August, I went back to high school. To work, that is. Technically speaking, I'm an interventionist, which basically translates into more crises with less pay than the traditional guidance counselor on campus. They call me the "front line" of the counseling department. As the title suggests, my position at the forefront of the crisis response system situates me up close and personal with a wide array of teenage angst and issues. On any given day I might encounter sexual assault or domestic violence, failing grades or excessive tardies as well as the entire spectrum of adolescent relationship conflicts and dilemmas. It's almost as if I went to college to escape the things I hated most about high school, only to become qualified enough to confront them in my professional, adult life. What a cruel joke.

"The Gods Must be Crazy" first resonated with me when I had to google search a "recreational drug" a couple of kids at the high school had been caught using. I couldn't believe that within the same decade of my high school graduation, kids had already popularized an entirely new substance with which to get high. I felt the proverbial coke bottle crack against my skull. After several pop quiz phone calls to a number of my friends in their twenties (none of whom could correctly identify the drug I questioned them about), multiple minutes of lamenting my rapidly advancing age, and a quick survey of other adults on campus, I got to thinking: How can a population of professionals serve the young people they work with when they are socially and culturally isolated from them? Certainly, if I can't even understand the unique challenges, specific language, rituals and habits of high school students, few other adults are capable of connecting with teens who live and breathe by these normative systems every day.

The resurrection of my adolescent insecurities as an outsider in a world defined by who and what makes up the inside, aside, I wonder about the deeper issue of from whom and where kids are getting the information and insight that directs their daily lives. Most importantly, how are they interpreting the world around them, and what are the consequences of this interpretation? Simply put, in the absence of an adult support system who can communicate with and understand them, kids are making a whole lot of decisions based on what they hear from their friends and what they see in the media. And why wouldn't they? Even as adults, we tend to adhere to philosophies and wisdom that are the most relevant, the most familiar to us. High School kids speak and understand the language of myspace, text messaging and MTV entertainment. While adults may be aware that these social realms exist, they are more frequently trying to repress or monitor them, rather than experience and utitlize their communicative power.

I work in a high school with predominantly middle to upper-middle class white students(coincidentally, I also came from a high school with a similar social composition). Most of the students I see represent a demographic characterized by inherited privilege, automatic academic success, over-indulgence and an abundance of parent involvement in their academic, social and extra-curricular experience. These kids have parents who regularly call their teachers and school counselors. Parents who know who their kids friends are, what they do after school and on the weekends. And still, their parents are unaware of just how severe the cultural disconnect between themselves and their kids has become. These kids are assertive and intelligent. They are insightful and empowered. And as a result, they trade inaccurate information back and forth, pass on rumors and myths as fact, and validate eachothers destructive decision making and uninformed ideologies. They've learned everything they know from Youtube, Wikipedia and the blurred fact/fiction world of reality tv. As many of us in hyper-mediated America do, these kids take what they see and hear at face value. Since they aren't taught to be critical of the world around them, they learn to accept it, to co-opt it to fit their needs, desires and lifestyles. They use eachother as mirrors of normalcy. And since their parents don't understand this distorted universe they occupy, there is no intervention, no alternatives, no space for dialogue or discussion.

The number one complaint I hear from students about their parents is, "They say they understand, but they don't." "Good morning parents of teenagers: This is your son or daughter speaking. I want to inform you that high school is NOTHING like it was when you were a kid." Maybe this will shed some perspective: I am biologically too young to possibly have given birth to a high school student and still, high school is vastly different than it was when I barely survived it.

Now, to be clear, I am the last person to adopt an attitude that holds parents exclusively (or even mostly) responsible for the choices their children make and what type of adult incarnation their youthful development results in. Instead, I use parents as an example to represent the fact that practically every adult who has the potential opportunity to influence the process of teenage decision making and education is limited by their own social location. A location that is as far removed from the place where their teenagers exist as the Atlanta, GA-based coca-cola bottling headquarters is from the plains of Africa. Moreover, I am aware of the unique and specific challenges that face each individual teenager in each different social/economic context. The example of the high school where I work serves to highlight the idea that even the most well-served adolescents are, in many cases, suffering from alienation from the people and resources they need to make informed choices, create edified personal identities, and grow their self-esteem and self-assurance towards a productive future.

So what is the solution?
Let's be honest, if I knew the answer to that one, I would have my own segment on Oprah instead of a tiny little space on the internet to write a blog that only my mom and her boyfriend ever read.
What I can see, is that we're trapped in an old system that is serving old needs and providing (questionably effective) solutions to old problems. Adults are either paralyzed by the fear of what they might encounter if they explore the world that teenagers live in, or are living by ancient standards of family functionality (like having dinner around the table and "talking to your kids about drugs"). From what I can estimate from my experience, neither position is, on its own, productive. Perhaps parents would be better served to learn about what it's really like in high school these days, and instead of trying to protect their kids, engage them.

Let's take the example of sex. And yes, I assure you, teenagers are having it. Younger than ever, more often than ever. Whether you make them keep the door to their room open or restrict their access to the opposite gender or not. They're having it. Or they're going to have it. Or their friends are having it and passing on their experiential "wisdom" about it in the aftermath. If you frame this issue with kids as a "bad", "dirty" and/or "dangerous" practice, they're probably not going to be open about their degree of participation in it. Instead, if you ask them what they know about it, what they think about it, if they've tried it? You just might be able to help them become more equipped to deal with it in a safe and healthy way. Aren't we all better off in a world where people are the most prepared/educated as they can possibly be about anything?

I think, as with any systemic social problem, it is important to start with literacy and open communication. Learning the languages that young people speak can not only help us understand them, but help them realize that we intend to serve and support them, not judge or direct them. We are dealing with a generation of young people who know more, experience more and feel entitled to more of the world than any generation before them. If they don't know something they find out about it (for better or for worse, true or false), if they haven't done something they hear about, they try it. If they believe something to be true, they spread it around.

Inviting young people to join us at the table of dialogue may be a first step in identifying solutions to each piece of the adolescent/adult communication divide. The truth is, if young people trust and respect the adults in their lives, they actually want to listen to them. They want to be witnessed and heard. In my own experience, the end-product of creating open spaces of communication where young people can address questions, concerns and confusion has been overwhelmingly positive. It gives them the opportunity to navigate their lives with the help of someone who can, at best, provide answers and information, and at worst, have the presence of mind to direct them towards accurate sources of insight and resources to further explore their interests.

In a conversation with my mom (aged 58) this morning, I was lamenting "being a complete moron" between the ages of 16 and 20. She kindly rolled her eyes and said, "don't worry... we all were." So, if high school is completely different than it used to be, but teenagers are no more adept at handling their own lives than they ever have been, isn't it fair to propose a departure from the status-quo in favor of a consolidated, albeit revolutionary, effort towards a partnership of young and old(er).

Paulo Freire, an educational hero of mine, believed in dismantling pedagogical hierarchies and creating horizontal relationships. Freire fostered an education of empowerment, where both teacher and student participated in both the teaching and the learning. Most importantly, Freire taught within a framework that included systems, languages and ideas that were already relevant to his students. It didn't matter where he, as a teacher, was coming from. It mattered where his students needed to go. A Freirian perspective would suggest that no one knows better than teenagers, what it means to be them. Their education begins in that place and journeys in whatever direction they need to take it to serve their own educational cause. We are there, merely as facilitators of high quality (no mtv-generated pseudo-reality) work in the process.

Just imagine, for all of the things you wished you hadn't done or would've known then... wouldn't it be remarkable to give young people the tools to be prevention agents in their own lives, and perhaps, choose better and live better, as a result?