And Now the High Schools

In Washington, D.C., an assistant high school principal tried to stop three teen-agers from robbing the school bank; they shot him dead. In New York City, a high school chemistry teacher stepped into the hall to investigate a disturbance; three youths squirted lighter fluid on his clothing and set him aflame. In San Francisco, helmeted police dispersed teen-agers from the grounds of Mission High School after violence had flared between black and Spanish-speaking students for six successive days. In Hamden, Conn., seven students were arrested for participating in a racial brawl in the high school cafeteria.

"Disorders and fears of new and frightening dimensions stalk the corridors of many of our schools," declared the High School Principals Association of New York City in a recent urgent appeal to Mayor Lindsay and the board of education for help in controlling student unrest. Help is needed; the troubles that have been plaguing college campuses for the past few years are now beginning to infect high schools. Much of the strife seems to be a spontaneous eruption of purely racial antagonism, pitting black students against white students and white teachers, but more and more of it is being deliberately generated by organizations newly formed to press student demands.

On Target. Black students at Evanston Township High School in Illinois, for example, have formed an organization sardonically called BOY and presented the school superintendent with a list of ten demands that is a virtual carbon copy of what blacks are agitating for on college campuses. The superintendent and the board of education are considering all the demands, and have agreed to one: they have added a course on Afro-American culture that will begin this week and be taught by a black instructor.

At Boston high schools, black students have demonstrated in the streets for the right to form an Afro club and wear Afro clothes, and had their demands granted. In Cambridge, they have sought to be photographed for the yearbook with fists raised proudly in the Black Power salute; they were turned down by the white principal, on the ground that "yearbook pictures are supposed to be static and not show subjects in motion."

Isolated and Denied. Blacks in big urban high schools are not the only students agitating for change. Teen-agers who attend private secondary schools are also restless, though their dissent is far more decorous. Thus, at a student-power conference held last week on the campus of the Northfield and Mount Hermon Schools in Massachusetts, 150 students from 40 private schools politely complained about empty rules and outmoded customs to a panel of four psychiatrists and psychologists from the Harvard University health services. In essence, the students said that they were isolated from real life and denied a big enough voice in curriculum planning and school discipline. Teachers and headmasters, they said, made a point of minimizing racial and cultural differences; and in the process they squander one of the greatest advantages that independent schools can offer. Removed from the tensions of the city, white student and black, Jew and gentile, could learn to live together while respecting and learning from each other's heritage. At Mount Hermon, for example, where 50% of the students receive some financial aid, minority groups of all sorts are unusually well represented. "The trouble is," said one black student, "we're all one big happy group. No one is black or white; we're all Mount Hermon boys."

Such complaints are not easy to deal with, and often they tend to overshadow more mundane concerns that may be even more important to students. A coed lunch hour? A new cafeteria menu? Trunks for boys too modest to swim naked in the pool? Students at Bushwick High School in Brooklyn--a ghetto school suffering from all the usual sociological ills--demanded such reforms recently and got them, as the New York Times reported last week. In fact, Dr. Leonard Gelber, the principal, credits much of the present calm at Bushwick to a "human relations" committee of students, teachers and administrators that he established last spring as a sounding board for student demands. The very fact that those demands were given serious consideration, let alone granted, seems to have kept Bushwick cool. For the present, at least, it has escaped the angry confrontation for confrontation's sake that has become familiar across the country.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.