No More Fast Times At Ridgemont High

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2001 by Michael Schaffer

In other words, it's nothing you'd recognize if you learned about America from an Archie comic or a teen movie. In the John Hughes universe, in fact, the school might seem downright un-American. And that--considering that America's schools regularly fail kids like the ones at Cesar Chavez--is just the way it's intended to be.

High School Consequential

Hollywood thrives on shared experience. Long after World War II had offered up seemingly every last possible movie script, Hollywood kept making movies about the war. The reason was simple. In the '40s and '50s, military service was something most theatergoers, or at least someone they were close to, had experienced. The end of the draft, then, marked a significant cultural shift independent of its military meaning.

Sometime after Star Wars hit theaters, movie studios realized that teenagers were a path to box-office gold. If the movie was good enough, they might watch it five times each. Hence the horror flicks and high school romances of the '80s, and their more recent successors.

But shared experience--and the ways mass culture interprets it--is a little more complicated than making everyone cheer when the Nazi sub sinks for the 78th time, or when the football captain once again asks out the shy-but-pretty girl we're all pulling for. Whatever the education experts say about its academic merits (or lack thereof), the pop culture American high school of jocks and nerds, of big proms and bigger parking lots, has met its share of cultural criticism, especially from the Left.

To the academic Left, high school is part of capitalisms indoctrination machine. Its football teams, they say, glorify violent masculinity. Its prom queens lock into place retrograde gender roles. Its very size exists to prepare kids to be cogs in corporate America. And on and on. Outside the academy, the criticism tends to be more personal, though no more friendly. "High school was terrifying, and it was the casual cruelty of the popular kids--the jocks and the princesses--that made it hell," wrote the columnist Dan Savage in the wake of the Columbine High School shooting. "Like most students, I lived in fear of the small slights and public humiliations used to reinforce the rigid high school caste system: Poor girls were sluts, soft boys were fags"

Politically, though, the Left hasn't quite joined in the fight to place kids in schools like Cesar Chavez and destroy the old-fashioned petri dishes of oppression. The reasons are understandable. Sticking it to the bureaucracy, in contemporary America, sounds to leftists like a secret plan to gut teacher salaries, unions, and other things liberals are supposed to support. In fact, the most vocal supporter of charter schools in Washington is Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.), who chairs one of the conservative House subcommittees that oversees the District. Istook delights in blasting the bureaucrats or teachers' unions types who drag their feet on converting public schools into charters.

But a movement to stick it to tax-sucking school administrators can have a lot of surprising consequences. The kind of schools that charter proponents are building represent a break from all sorts of American norms. Could a family-values right-winger like istook really be against such great American traditions as fielding an 80-member cheerleading squad or beating the piss out of the sissies behind the oversized gym? Not quite. "A lot of that has changed already, of course," he says of the Hollywood view of adolescents and the schools that educate them, or at least provide them a backdrop for big-screen romances. "It's not exactly American Graffiti or the malt shop anymore, anyway. It's evolved from that experience," he says.