Michael Swickard
Recently I was talking with a high school senior who told me his high school was real bad, a prison where no one learned anything. He announced he was escaping next May. I smiled indulgently and asked his plans. He was going to college.
“So,” I asked, “You were able to learn some things?”
“Not really,” he answered, and then launched into a critique of school lunches.
Thinking back to my senior year I thought Alamogordo High School was awful in 1968, a prison. No one learned anything. The cafeteria food was inedible and there was not enough of it.
In the years since graduation I have come to realize that the evaluation of the school hinges on what the students in the class of 1968 were able to do with their lives. I have a Ph.D. with those public school tools. The newspapers of that era said Alamogordo High School was broken. It was not.
There was one high spot in the year, sort of. In the spring of 1968 I arrived at school one morning to find most of the students out on the front lawn in protest. I asked someone, “What is happening?”
“We are protesting the terrible textbooks we are forced to use.”
“Really?” I asked. Then remembering that I had not done my homework for second period I sat down with the protesters. The leaders spoke about the antiquated textbooks. My textbook did look bad, perhaps because I used it regularly as a puck in hallway hockey but otherwise, not at all.
The principal came out, his face a map of concern. He told us to go back to class right this instant or we seniors would not graduate. The student leaders immediately countered that the school could not flunk all of us, so we sat where we were.
A bit of time passed and then the assistant principal said the administration heard us and wanted our student leaders to talk to the superintendent. So they left to walk over to the superintendent’s office. Quickly teachers came out and told us to go to class. Several students said, “Not until our leaders come back.”
I stood and passed on the statement to several people because the protest needed to last longer than second period. At that point, while I was standing up and speaking a teacher asked, “Michael, are you one of the leaders?”
“Yes,” I said on the spur of the moment. “Everyone, stay right where you are.”
Another five people moved up with me to lead the protest. What happened was that the actual student leaders never came back that day because they were locked in the superintendent’s office. He did not show up and the staff padlocked the doors shut from the outside. Today those students would own the school system, but back then when they were released they just went home.
So that morning when the local newspaper reporters showed up and were looking for leaders to interview I parroted what I had heard the real leaders say. Next the radio station wanted three students for a program on the protest. That is how I happened to spend the rest of the day talking to the media about textbooks and the importance of education in our society.
I was on the front page of the evening newspaper that night. When I got home my parents were upset. “The very idea,” my mother said, “Protesting textbooks with your grade point.”
I must admit that the teachers had a new respect for me the rest of my senior year. Evidently I parroted the textbook position quite well, as if I had some understanding of it, to the point they assumed I cared about my education. So I started regularly doing my homework and considered college. The organizers of the protest were real cranky about us usurpers getting all the press while they were locked in the superintendent’s office. But there was nothing they could do, the protest was over.
I still have the clippings of the protest and laugh at those stern protester faces, one of whom was mostly concerned with making it past second period because he had not done his homework.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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