Friends Forever: From "Prison" Through a Lifetime

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Friends Forever: From "Prison" Through a Lifetime

6/7/2006

By Terry Calhoun

It’s often said, and I agree, that most high schools look as much like prisons as they do anything else. The fact that many high school students feel like they’re in prison is ironic.

My youngest daughter is graduating today from a high school that d'esn’t look like a prison, and d'esn’t (most of the time, for most students) feel like one, either. The other two high schools in town are quite large and do look like prisons. But my daughter’s school is a small, 425-student “alternative” high school where the students call teachers by their first names and there are no such silly rules as “you can’t wear a hat inside the school,” or “you can’t leave the property at lunch,” or “no electronic devices in school at any time.”

The latter “rule,” is so moronic. Not just because cell phones, PDAs, laptops, iPods, etc. are essential to students nowadays, but because it is so generic a fiat. After all, whatever the students are using for timekeeping is also probably an “electronic device.”

It’s typical high school administrative control; make a rule so loose and vague, and make it dependent on any adult-in-authority’s snap judgment, and you render invalid upon inception any student dispute. How prison-like. This helps to explain why there is a “lottery” to get into the small school each year, with many times as many applicants as there are spots.

Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) are not leading edge in the use of technology. I won’t go into detail, but given that AAPS surrounds the University of Michigan, the paucity of information technology tool use in instruction, administration, and communication is an embarrassment. Long after other school districts began sharing information on well-designed Web sites, AAPS’s site had little information on it and was designed and maintained by a volunteer parent. It still refuses to use e-mail for mass communication with parents. (They might get responses and have to cope with that.)

Ah, but away from my anarchistic tendencies and on to graduation.

Most high school students in Ann Arbor spend huge amounts of their home and social life interfaced with cell phones, PDAs, computer, digital cameras, and iPods. They are well-connected to each other in the virtual world. Mostly, that gets stripped away when they go to school. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe if it weren’t, it would be too easy to direct comparisons with what the students brought in with them, and what there is – or, mostly is not – already there in the prison. I mean school.

When I graduated from high school in 1965, the only ways we had to communicate outside of face-to-face once my friends and I scattered to college campuses all over the place and later to Vietnam, were (expensive) long-distance phone calls, snail-mail, and Western Union.