By John Louis Meeks, Jr.
Educator
A bag of candy has proven to be mightier than any act of violence for me this week.
I was encouraged to see some students at my school wearing hoodies and carrying Skittles around my school on an otherwise uneventful Friday.
They were silently protesting what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice in the Trayvon Martin incident that happened inSanford. They were silently taking action in a way that evoked the spirit of those brave students who wore black armbands to express their concerns about the Vietnam War.
In the Tinker v. Des Moines case, the Supreme Court agreed with student expression as long is it did not disrupt the learning process. Indeed, students’ voices are part of the learning process as they learn to peacefully form opinions about the issues that affect them the most.
Tinker v. Des Moines, in my opinion, has no meaning if students are only engaged in navel gazing. The stereotype of self-centered and apathetic youth permeate our culture as we have young people who can easily identify the New Jerseyites who live dilettante lives on MTV but could not be bothered to identify the people in power who really make a difference in our lives.
The rage that many young people feel today, however, runs counter to our superficial perceptions of them. We owe these protestors great respect also because they have done their work in a peaceful manner that avoided the traps of participating in violentacts that are reminiscent of the jarring riots that rocked our urban areas in the mid to late 1960s.
I dare say that our young people have the potential to find a voice not because their peers are being drafted to fight in a far away land to defeat communism but because they are taking the mantle of fighting a battle that is closer to home – a fight for the kind of justice that our founders bravely sacrificed for us to defend.
As an educator, my greatest frustration was with thefactories that standardized testing have turned our schools into. We failed, in our effort to bury our studentsin Scantron sheets, to truly inspire our young people to prepare to become thecitizens who inherit the mantle of future leadership.
Do we really think that Rutledge Pearson would be teaching in our schools today in a time where the lowest common denominator of ‘basic skills’ trumps our ability to inspire students to not just know something but to do something with that they know? I do not believe that the generation of Rodney Hurst would have accomplished the great things that they did for our city and for our nation if they were shackled by the limits of simply answering multiple choice questions with their number two pencils at the ready.
I am not at liberty to agree or disagree with the stance that these contemporary protestors are taking but I will gladly defend to thed eath their right to do so. It is my job as an educator to give them the tools with which they can view their world witha critical eye. Although I avoid indoctrinating students, they sometimes have the effect of actually shaping my perspective of the issues that shape our society.
It is a point of pride for me to point to those students who are taking a stand for something that is greater than themselves. This, in my opinion, represents the birth of ideals that they will embrace for much longer than benchmarks, standards, strands or essential questions.
Please do not get me wrong here. This is not as much a jeremiad against the educational system that exists today as it is a presentation of evidence that we can do great things when we make the connection between learning and living. The relevance of their lessons to what they experience are what help them to make a path for a better life for themselves and others.
While it is unfortunate that it took the death of a young man to spur us into action, it is potentially a chance for us to create a teachable moment to ensure that Trayvon Martin’s death is not relegated to a footnote in our nation’s collective narrative on racial issues. The more we discuss and debate these problems with an eye for objectivity and civility, the more that we can heal together.
As the grandson of a Michigan man who rushed home from vacation to find his beloved Detroit a flame in 1967, I know of his story about what can happen when racial tensions are inflamed. The young people who rioted expressed themselves in ways that spoke volumes about their pain but ultimately obscured their cry for help. Today’s children are continuing the work of previous generations but doing so in a way that allows their hearts and not violence to do the talking.
Granted, our nation lacks the same sense of urgency and lacks the same turbulent mood that existed back in the 1960s, but many of us grapple with the same issues that tore us apart when Watts, Newark and Detroit lived in dread of yet another summer of strife. The difference lies in how we take action in response to the perceived in justices around us.
Wherever the truth exists in the Sanford story, Americans of all ages are at a loss for what to do about the death of a 17-year-old boy in a Rashomon-like intrigue of race, class and guns. We all have our viewpoints and opinions and this is yet a healthy thing for our society. We have already had a civil war and we already have had people lose their lives because of even more grave divisions. We have already had a Reconstruction that ended up not really building much as it left many unresolved concerns for our fellow Americans. Today is our opportunity to come full circle and to make sure that we make something better from what we have been given.
Truth be told, if I was in junior high school again, I do not know if I would have been as brave as to do what my hoodie-wearing students have done. For this, I am the student and they are the teachers.
“Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
John Louis Meeks, Jr. has been an educator since 2002.
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