Worse than we thought: a reporter spent a year at a midwestern high school to find out firsthand what's happening in America's classrooms. She found `a malaise, a low-lying depression all the time.'

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 10, 2001 | by Julia Duin

What is wrong with America's public schools? This question was bandied about two years ago, after two Littleton, Colo., teen-agers opened fire on their fellow Columbine High School students, killing 13 people and arousing the grief and indignation of the country. But even the most knowledgeable adults have confessed to bewilderment over the state of the nation's teens.

Then Elinor Burkett, a former Miami Herald reporter and college professor, went to work. Choosing Prior Lake High in suburban Minneapolis, she spent the 1999-2000 school year "in the halls and malls where America's Dylan Klebolds and Eric Harrises spend their days," a reference to the two Columbine killers. "I got the kids' eye view," says Burkett.

These are children who watch the movie The Scarlett Letter instead of reading the book. For contemporary fiction, they study John Grisham instead of the more ponderous Joseph Conrad. "Grisham is faster paced and sexier for them, I guess," she says.

Her findings, reported in her new book, Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School (HarperCollins, $26, 366 pp) outline a scenario of frustrated teachers, rebellious students and parents who ignore their offspring's obnoxious conduct. What's more, she writes, high schools operate under a straightjacket of enforced diversity and official niceness that casts a pall on student spontaneity.

"There is a malaise, a low-lying depression all the time," she says. "What passes for rebellion is a kind of nagging, unpleasant passive-aggressiveness. There's no life, there's no energy, there's no spark of excitement or interest.... They're told exactly what to feel about everything and they have to be happy all the time."

Teen-agers are bored with their vapid existence, she writes, and numb to banners festooning the walls with sayings like "You Are Unique" and "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste." "I don't think I had begun to glimpse how incredibly deep the problems were in terms of PC" she continues, using shorthand for political correctness. "There are cheerful little signs posted about diversity, but there was no diversity. The school has only white people, other than one or two black kids and some Koreans. There were no Jews in this community. The message the kids get are that adults are hypocrites."

In short, argues Burkett, American education is mindless compared with the tough academic standards in Kyrgyzstan, where she is spending the year teaching college journalism on a Fulbright scholarship. "The students in Kyrgyzstan are very poor. They barely have blackboards. But they know stuff: geography, geopolitics and basic European history, even though they don't live in Europe."

Burkett is blunt about the American approach to education: "We're treating these kids like idiots.... How do you learn to analyze if you have nothing to analyze -- if there is no information?"