Of Academics and Airhorns

The choir of a dozen or so students is just finishing up the first verse of a heartfelt, if slightly tremulous rendition of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." The sound system is still working well, and the weather has been unusually cooperative with the graduation 2011 agenda.  A few hundred students sit facing the stage, flanked by educators, families and friend in the football stands to the rear.  Smooth sailing. 

Enter the beach balls.  One of the graduates near the back smuggled one in her/his robes, inflates it, and begins passing it around.  A teacher sitting behind me murmurs, "and here we go!"  A few giggles escape the stands as a palpable tension descends over the proceedings.

All eyes are on Ms. Habermas, the quasi-autocratic building administrator whose policies and practices have regimented the school, agitating some in the process.  She glowers, hawk-like, weighing a course of action.  Only a few seconds go by before she acts: she shoots out of her seat, strides a good 15-20 steps off the stage, toward the center of the graduates, and grabs the beach ball, returning to stage.  She tosses the ball lightly into the air and smacks it, with the decisiveness of an experienced volleyball player, over the curtains to the rear of the stage and out of sight.

Boos erupt from across the audience - noisy, extended boos of the sort usually reserved for vaudeville evildoers.  Things settle down for the time, and the ceremony continues.

The action of removing the ball, and the reaction it provoked represent a clashing of (at least) two cultures that collide every day at Frankfurt High School. 

On the one hand, Ms. Habermas stands in for the culture of academia: a centuries old, Euro-centric tradition with the best of intentions.  As both an educator and a product of years of schooling, I likewise identify with this side of the collision.  I was and still am upset at the students who thought that their stunt was a good idea.  Graduation is a ritual, complete with prescribed clothing, actions, words, and signs.  It's purpose is to end one stage of life and start another.  Taken in this light, graduation is an initiation ritual, a symbol that, in the context of our world, should be given major importance.

But not everyone inhabits the same symbolic space in our pluralistic post industrial community.  Things that carry great weight for me and my colleagues seem trivial to others of different cultures.  This is not a rant against multiculturalism - just a way of explaining what I think was happening beneath the surface of this event. 

Who or what culture the beach ball and the protests represent still eludes me - I am weighing several possibilities:

• Students in general
• Parents frustrated with our school
• An ethnic minority that finds our classrooms especially oppressive
• Disenfranchised working class families fearing the coming obsolescence of public education

Since the event, I've been jokingly referring to this cultural other as the "NASCAR culture."  This is snooty and condescending on my part, but the presence of those beach balls (yes, several more appeared after the aforementioned incident) turned what was intended to be a reflective and ponderous moment into one that seemed better suited for beer mugs and giant foam hands.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but in my mind those symbols belong in a different context.  Maybe their sudden presence during the ceremony was a lighthearted attempt of the students to claim the moment for themselves, and to define its meaning (at least on a subconscious level), rather than to sit by and let the gatekeepers define it for them. 

Regardless of my own biases and tentative interpretations, I think that this incident serves as a solid example of conflict theory: a theory that permeates many social sciences that sees different social groups as being antagonistic to each other because of imbalances of power.  Schools definitely represent places of power in any community, and although the nature and strength of that power is up for debate, a moment such as the one I have described here reminds us that it still matters to the people who wield and are controlled by it.