In Praise of High School Students

by David Safier

I spend a lot of pixels criticizing School Boards and Superintendents and the Arizona Legislature. (Have you ever thought how many pixels had to die, how many ones and zeros were cut down in their prime, to create this post? It’s horrifying!) But I can’t remember bad mouthing any students in my writing, because I am not one of those who complains about “these rotten kids who have no respect for their elders, have no morals and spend the whole day with their Ipods stuck in their ears.”

Why, back in my day . . . Oh wait, my generation’s motto was “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll.” Never mind.

Today I want to join the NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in singing the praises of some students — many students — who reach out well beyond their comfort zones to make the world a little better.

In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, I should be wringing my hands about adolescents these days, so lazy and degenerate compared with my own upstanding generation. But when I see high school students working energetically to save the lives of people half a world away, before they are even allowed to buy a beer, I’m reduced to mumbling admiration. These kids are truly inspiring.

Kristof writes about students whose efforts built an elementary school in Cambodia, raised nearly half a million dollars for Darfur, helped buy mosquito netting to prevent malaria in Africa, and on and on.

He recognizes that many of these students are bulking up their resumes to get into college. True enough in many cases. But my feeling is, once they’ve been part of one of these efforts, it resides forever in their socially-responsible DNA, possibly lying dormant for years, but ready to be pressed back into action at some point in their lives. And I know efforts like these happen in schools where the students aren’t thinking about college. It may be at a more local level, like neighborhood cleanups, helping at a senior citizen home or something like that, but it’s the same thing. It does somebody good in the world beyond the students’ immediate circle of friends and family, and at the same time, it stimulates that altruism gene, which helps it grow stronger.

I was never good at this stuff as a teacher, but another teacher at my high school was a marvel. He got a Key Club group going that developed a national and even worldwide reputation in the organization. One summer the students built a playground in a park. They also planned and created a series of raised planting beds in a senior citizen home where the residents, who wouldn’t have been able to work the soil at the ground level, could sit in chairs and spend many enjoyable and purposeful hours planting and tending gardens. Both projects involved a great deal of interaction with the local business communities, and they involved a phenomenal amount of research (What’s the best soil to use, how do we create an irrigation system that is efficient and good for the environment?) The guy taught math, so most of this was new to him as well as his students. He had to count on the club members for research and information. Students often turned their research into projects in their science classes.

I sat in on the Key Club meetings a few times. They were held 45 minutes before school began (many of these kids were too busy to meet any other time), in the school’s Little Theater. The room was packed. The students conducted the meetings. The teacher occasionally offered comments from the sidelines, but just as often, he stood with his arms folded and watched.

Because this was a middle to upper-middle class high school, most of these kids were college bound, and some of them probably got into the colleges of their choice in part because of their Key Club involvement. But lots of them were going to Community College or the University of Oregon, where either a high school diploma or a reasonable GPA was all they needed to get in. They had no resumes that needed building. They were there because that was the place to be.

Activities like these get an occasional spotlight in the paper, but more often they don’t. We hear about the drug busts and fights and dropouts and, in today’s Star, students who fail their classes and still get promoted. Yes, that’s part of the picture. But it’s only part of the picture. With today’s youth, as with youth in every generation all over the world, we can find much worthy of praise.

Note: I don’t have to tell this to the regular commenters, but anyone who has a positive story about students to share (if you have a negative story, please save it for another time), the Comment lines are always open. Just click on “Comments” at the end of this post, put in a name (you can make up a handle if you want to remain anonymous) and an email address (it will not appear on your comment — no one will know how to contact you) and type away. Write five words or a few hundred words. Press Preview to see what you’ve written. When you’re satisfied, press Post. That’s all there is to it.