Volunteering for a high school for the past half decade has given me a sense of great respect for the small acts of rebellion practiced every day by students. Whether the students are conscious of them or not, I believe these acts are the seeds of a potential realization that the state school is the very antithesis of liberty. And, the more state schools use their preferred tools of coercion on their victims, the more I see students awakening to the violence and rejecting the tactics and reacting against it with displays of individuality.
My own awakening took place running high school cross-country. For the first two years, our coach never showed up for Friday practice, even though we were all supposed to do so. Our first reaction to this was a reactionary, rebellious "Great! We don't have to run today, so let's just go home. Screw it." This quickly gave way to the irrelevance of the coach as we decided to run practices ourselves – running was as individual as any sport could be, and we saw no need for an appointed teacher when we could challenge ourselves.
The absence of government created a free market where we came together and created solutions with no input from the state. In the process, our group became friends and the best-performing team in school history. Not surprisingly, that teacher/coach became one of our great friends, because we had this opportunity and we all treated each other as equals. More often than not, teachers just need to get out of the way if they want students to get an education.
We did it as teenagers with little school interference, and seriously considered quitting the team to run local races as individuals. The state beat us there, though, as a number of us were too young to be allowed voluntarily to provide work in exchange for money.
But after realizing that we were not high on the priority list of the coach, we quickly found out that we were not high on the priority list of the school itself. Not a single teacher came to watch us run, even at home meets, for an entire year, and we were left out of speeches where the principal extolled the virtues of the hard-working fall sports players, while leaving us out completely.
Our one attempt at school spirit, creating our own team shirts, was quickly declared "racist" by the principal and the shirts were banned. No explanation, just a royal decree and threat of suspension. Of course, that didn't prevent us from disobeying the order, since we already had the shirts. "If no one came to watch us anyway," we argued, "why should we care what the school thinks about what we wear?"
Yet we were expected to attend official gatherings, like sports banquets and awards nights, and make a show of being a happy part of the larger institution. Deciding not to show support for having been shown no support, all school events were boycotted by our group. Remarkably, the school could not force us to go to events outside of regular hours, but it certainly could ostracize us in class after class for not attending events we were not wanted at anyway.
This undeclared battle was pivotal in creating some of the first serious doubts of the state school as anything but an enormous bureaucracy more interested in its own continuance and creating an appearance of treating and educating all students equally well. I learned early on that school is nothing but a fourteen-year-long FEMA press conference.
The acts of rebellion I see around me when I volunteer now are not on the epic scale of the personal crusade for respect that I ventured upon and ultimately failed at. But the underlying message has stayed the same: "Leave me alone, let me challenge myself, and I will break the emotional and intellectual dependency your institution is attempting to instill in me."
I see it in the weight room where the music is so loud that the walls shake and one has to step outside in order to speak or think. No top-down program can be controlled with a dozen students wandering around and authority figures unable to issue commands over the pounding bass.
I see it when the head coach is not at practice and I give the runners the responsibility of deciding what to run. I find myself continually impressed with their creativity and ability to work with one another in the absence of an authoritarian figure telling them exactly what to do and how quickly to do it. The highest quality education is in learning for oneself how to interact with other individuals without the state interpreter.
I see it when runners decide not to come to practice so that they can go see a musical, vacation in Mexico, or visit family in New York. How can I deny them these important life experiences and ask them to sacrifice for the sake of a school they have bonds with beyond the coercion to attend? Of course I can't, but this is the typical reaction of the system to such acts of students having an experience not controlled by the bureaucracy.
There's little question the quality of education has continued to decline with more government involvement at higher levels. We don't need to see this demonstrated through videos of people outside Wal-Mart unable to locate the United States on a map of the world; schools were never about education to begin with, and memorizing disconnected facts in order to pass a test is nothing more than a behavioral exercise.
Students are not educated; rather they are schooled into emotional and intellectual dependency, designed to result in a mass-produced, confused, bored society, willing to trust in big government for protection and the mainstream media for approved pre-thought thoughts.
Encouragingly, though, the state school seems to be losing more and more of its influence in the age of the internet. Without students going from teacher at school presenting pre-thought thoughts to teacher on television reporting pre-thought thoughts, the conditioning begins to break down. In the short years I have been out of school, I have witnessed the growing disillusionment with the system in my friends, one consequence being their near-unanimous enthusiasm for Ron Paul and the fact that they have discovered and agreed with the principles of liberty on their own.
Every act of rebellion I see from students, whether they understand it themselves or not, gives me hope that one day more of them will have their own awakening to the inherent violence of government. These small acts against the coercive, intimidating system may one day result in a rejection of the state and its tactics; and I see more of these acts every day than students are given credit.
December 22, 2007
