Parker on the Pathway to Mediocrity
Spring '92
Recently, I began thinking about my own behavior, and that of my peers, and the attitude the school took towards us. In many of my conversations with people associated with the school, a common theme is "Parker is going downhill" or, more directly, "Parker is a sinking ship" (get off while you can). I think these ideas have come about because of a deterioration in the student body.This was originally published in the Parker Weekly spring of my Junior year there.
Unedited High School Moralizing:
The words that come to mind when I think of what could have inspired this are: ignorance, affluence and apathy. These best characterize the attitude of a growing vocal part of the students.
For a school with people in it thinking they are educated, Parker students seem ignorant to a surprising degree. This runs contrary to what many people would say of the school. People who speak of the school acknowledge the school's reputation as certainly one of the finest schools in the city and even in America. Just a few weeks ago in a letter to The New York Times Magazine, Ernst R. Jaffe, graduate of the class of '42 wrote, "Parker, a very progressive school for the times, nurtured all forms of artistic and intellectual expression and gave all of us a unique and invaluable start in life..." I have an increasingly harder time connecting the Parker school mentioned in that letter and the school I attend each day.
These disturbing tendencies toward mediocrity manifest themselves in many facets of the school - in the halls, in and out of the classrooms. Parker students act as representatives to the rude, the lazy, and the spoiled of the world.
Morning Exercise [ed: all school assembly] lends itself to some of the most extreme displays of this deterioration. Students are constantly achieving new plateaus of rudeness. While you hope to find faculty or staff to maintain the schools standards for conduct, some set bad examples by opting out of Morning Exercise on a regular basis. At least three times this year during Morning Exercises, I saw some students sitting in the first few rows draping their feet over the row in front of them and launching into a full recline while there was a person on stage trying to talk to us. Once this year a young man was singing a song for us, the song he had been singing when he was shot during a protest in his country, and all the while there was a young woman in the front row opening and closing her notebook, shuffling papers. I spoke to her, and so did several other students afterwards, but it took several harsh whispers across the aisle to get her to realise she was doing something impolite. If Parker would continue to draw a high calibre of guests and would maintain the reputation it has for being a quality institution, then it cannot bear its ugliest face to guests each time they would speak to us.
Parker students cannot have fun unless they spend an incredible amount of money and use their free time in an extravagent manner. |
I also wonder about the value of encouraging school team participants to purchase new shoes as part of the participation on a team. That students should feel at all coerced by either other teammates or their coach to buy a new pair of shoes is repugnant to me on the most basic level. The idea that the few students who have the luxury of demanding new shoes from their parents at their leisure should demand that other students partake in their sickening addiction to commercial Americana leaves a taste most bitter in my mouth. This also runs along the lines of the $190 ski trip proposals that the Student Outing Club commitittes have proposed in the last few years. These types of things embody the idea that Parker students cannot have fun unless they spend an incredible amount of money and use their free time in an extravagent manner. |
The students seem to think that it is their function to create work for the clean up crew and the maintenance department. There are even organized examples of this in the school. In the tenth grade, there is a tradition that the students and their families paint the windows during the holidays. This is the type of wonderful activity that brings joy your heart around the holiday season. However, the maintenance men always end up having to clean up all of the windows during vacation. Events like these teach the students that they can have a good time and do something fun, but then they don't have to clean up after themselves. |
The students seem to think that it is their function to create work for the clean up crew and the maintenance department. |
The physical decay of the halls of the school can be seen as representing the decay of the respect the students have for the school itself. When students begin graffiting and leaving garbage with the regularity that they now do, it becomes obvious that the school inspires little or no respect.Just within the last days before we left for Christmas break, several students took it upon themselves to informally decorate the High School hallway, just as they have been doing in the bathroom. What is the value of graffiti? Students who scrawl their names across the walls without thinking about who will have to clean up the mess, are just too immersed in their own deep self-love to realize that their actions have real consequences. One can only imagine the expression on the face of the principal of a school that charges its students upwards of $9,000 when he discovers that the students are so bored and lost that they are writing on the walls. I can remember the days when graffiti and vandalism were a big deal and they would be all over the cover of the Weekly whenever they appeared in the school. Now I notice most students and teachers merely giving it a cursory glance. I am told that tagging the bathrooms has even been taken up by middle school students, so one can only imagine what they will be doing by the time that they reach high school. The Parker community could almost be viewed as a place that, by doing little or nothing about that sort of behavior, encourages the development of little hoodlums.
An especially gruesome example of the school's physical decline is the state of student bathrooms. During school renovation, the faculty and administration built their own nice private bathroom for themselves and guests to the school. I would propose that guests to the school, especially those considering enrolling their kids here, should see that some Parker students see fit to defecate in the urinal. The fact that the faculty and staff no longer have to use the same toilets as the students means that they are missing out on their chance to really stay in touch with the new nadir in personal hygiene set each year by the students in the student bathrooms. What does it say about the students that the administration has deemed us unfit to handle the responsibility of sharing a bathrrom with them? (My experience is almost exclusively with those bathrooms lending themselves to the males of our school. While this is only half the picture of the state of our toilets, the boys bathrooms are bad enough for both sexes.) |
that the faculty and staff no longer have to use the same toilets as the students means that they are missing out on their chance to stay in touch with the new nadir in personal hygiene set by the students in the student bathrooms. |
we passed by a woman playing the accordion and one of the young men in my group pulled out a handful of change out of his pocket and flung it at her from fifteen feet away. |
Parker student's contact with people in the outside world can be just as sickening as that with people inside. Whether out to lunch or even being considerate of those less fortunate than them, Parker students display a considerable lack of regard for the needs of others, superceeding them with their own selfish, mindless concerns. I remember I was with a group of students one time when we passed by a woman playing the accordion outside of Water Tower Place and one of the young men in my group pulled out a handful of change out of his pocket and flung it at her from fifteen feet away. I was ashamed to ever have been seen with him. That kind of behavior reflects the type of consistent, casual nonchalance Parker students affect while dealing with people outside the school and the lack of remorse they feel while disrupting the normal patterns of other people's lives and businesses with their own steady stream of narcissistic indulgences. |
Going out to lunch with a Parker high schooler can be an embarrassing experience. They often manage to molest every sort of condiment on the table, pull apart flowers, pour sugar and cream all over and throw french fries in the water and the ashtray, leaving their mark wherever they eat. This seems to be a deliberate effort on the part of students to again create work for maintenance type people, with busboys having to follow them around and scrape the tables clean while they leave them pennies for a tip.Parker students disregard their obligation to the community at large. For a place where you would hope that the students have an enlightened understanding of the world and would understand their obligation to the larger community, Parker students are depressingly narcissistic and completely and totally lost in their own pursuits, and I am saddened by fact that the school itself seems to be doing very little to force them to realize their selfish ways.
I realize though, that one cannot entirely blame the students for their disregard for other types of humanity. Their behavior can be seen as just a reflection of the behavior of many of the people in the Parker community and the behavior of the rest of the rich and the privileged in this country. To appease these elements, I am amazed that the school does not acquiesce and turn Parker into a small intimate college factory for the children of alumni. Parker should create a guarantee that any child attending at least four years of school here will be guaranteed entry into one or more of the country's prestigious colleges. The board of trustees can then raise tuition and weed out those kids that might be from different backgrounds than the standard Lincoln Park stock, and then finally Parker can begin to teach kids how to be members of the leisure class. Until this is done, my heart will go out to those poor suffering parents who pay all that money for their kids to attend Parker and still their kids end up maladjusted and unhappy.
Parker is not unto itself, a protected shell under the three now-cliched phrases of Colonel Parker, formed by students for the purpose of pursuing social interests and to be used as a stepping stone to higher education at prestigious liberal arts colleges. The students at Parker spend far too much time immersed in their own world of social role playing to realize that they are more and more resembling crass, young, urban professionals.
And no one is innocent. While surrounded by ignorant nincompoops, it becomes easier and easier to give in and drop wrappers on the floor and treat the school with no respect. By not actively resisting these types of behavior, each member of the students, faculty and administration are helping to foster an atmosphere where it becomes easier to be more and more mediocre. |
By not actively resisting these types of behavior, each member of the students, faculty and administration are helping to foster an atmosphere where it becomes easier to be more and more mediocre. |
Parker |
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