You have a couple good points, but some very weak arguments.

Let me begin by saying, however, that your latest post shows much maturity and improvement. I personally commend you for your willingness to check yourself and to soften some of the article’s unnecessary severity. But I still think that there are some ideas here worth debating even at this point.
The US education system is in need of repair. Yes. We are quickly being overtaken by, as you put it, “the rest of the civilized world.” Absolutely. But I would contend that this is not because of things like gender studies, not only because of my own firm belief that these are fields worth pursuing, but also because the facts simply do not point to them as the culprit. Oxford, McGill, Uppsala and Edinburgh all have some kind of gender studies department in some form or another (I assume these count as part of “the rest of the civilized world”). If you can point to new fields like gender studies as the cause of our education crisis, I can point to the role religion plays in our country. We’d both be merely speculating. One very concrete reason for Europe’s success in training professionals is that the education system over there is far more concerned with preparing its graduates for a very specific career from a very early age. This brings me to my next point.
At the risk of sounding wishy-washy, I have to tell you that your idea of success is rather cynical. First of all, the attacks on students that found the Wall cathartic were as misguided as they were insulting. Acceptance into every college of choice does not display intelligence, prudence, or success. It displays cowardice – an unwillingness to take a risk and apply to a college at which the odds appear unfavorable. I would be surprised to learn that you yourself were accepted into every school to which you applied (and if you were, I think you should look back to your high school days and ask yourself if there was a college you had considered but dropped due to selectivity – what if you had applied… and succeeded?). More importantly (and this is where my bleeding heart may begin to show), acceptance does not make a prestigious career, and a prestigious career most certainly does not make success. Depression and unhappiness hit doctors, lawyers, and CEOs just as hard as they hit nurses, paralegals, and secretaries, and a janitor can accomplish more in his lifetime than the Defense Secretary. Success is extremely subjective and devilishly intangible, and it’s impossible and unwise to boil it down to a game of numbers and names. The problem is that a lot of kids (most of which end up attending fine institutions) do boil it down to an unhealthy degree and view themselves as failures simply because they have been rejected from the colleges that are almost universally viewed as statistical impossibilities for just about everyone. We can’t all be übermenschen – but that doesn’t make us failures. Perhaps I can’t completely reverse your perspective, but I hope I have at least illuminated the Wall’s place in a success-obsessed community such as ours.
Finally, I’d like to bring up, as many of my peers already have, your use of bad grammar as evidence of stupidity. Simply put, you are wrong. The examples you cited were technicalities, especially given that these kids were speaking aloud. When people ask me how I am and I respond, “well,” they usually ask me, “well, what?” Kids and (educated) adults alike. I don’t have perfect grammar every time I open my mouth; I’m sure you don’t either – nobody is that articulate. Your own essay contained multiple errors, which I would only have noticed and which only would have mattered to me had I wanted to be hypersensitive about it, as you were with the students. That you even brought the grammar up was a low blow and a distracter from the students’ very real and respectable points, as well as a testament to your lack of actual evidence to back up your heavy-handed allegations against a perfectly harmless and functional ritual in my high school.
I look forward to hearing a response.

Respectfully,
Carlos Lorant, Newton South High School Class of 2008

Certainly, I have no particular interest in tearing down (or building up, for that matter) Newton. I had no desire to claim it a “bad” school. In fact, I am sure that it is one of the better ones in the area. So, there is no spite against Newton in particular on my part. On the contrary, I only used Newton as a launching pad to excoriate our entire fetid systems of education in the whole country.

Now, I do realize that there is but a finite number of slots for kids to get into those good colleges out there. It is also a given that the kids at Newton who do not get a billet at the college of their choice aren’t necessarily “failures” per se. Your getting in one place an not another is not necessarily a “failure” in and of itself. So, to that I can say that I was definitely too flip where it concerns college admissions. Since the admissions wasn’t my main point I gave it short shrift, unfortunately.

But, here is what I wrote to one of your fellow Newton grads:

Our schools from top to bottom and east to west are garbage. If the “best” produces dunces of the highest status, they are STILL dunces. I have no respect whatever for our schools. They are execrable and we are fast becoming the laughing stock of the civilized world because of it. In fact, I am not so sure that getting a billet in our top universities even makes any sort of statement of intelligence. While there kids will be subjected to the worst sorts of unthinking garbage such as “women’s studies,” or “gay studies,” they are hailed as “educated.” Unfortunately, they are no such thing. When they leave college they are no better educated than a good 10th grader from 50 years ago. Often times less so.

You did summarize my main point about the fecklessness of our society and you were correct to note that this was my main theme.

So, mea culpa in certain ways are due from me.

I contemplated writing a long, point by point refutation of your article, Mr. Warner Todd Huston, but it’s not really worth the time. I have better things to do, and besides, Cliff wrote a nice response that you should take a look at.

Regardless, there are some things that should be addressed. First of all, I can assure that there is, as Cliff has already said, nothing wrong with the education at Newton South. I’m a senior, and I’d like to think that I’ve gotten a pretty good education at South–and you know what, Mr. Warner Todd Huston, my college decisions reflect the excellence of the teaching at South. I haven’t posted any rejection letters on the Wall, not because I am too busy wallowing in my shame or being punished for besmirching my family’s honor, but because I don’t have any rejection letters to staple to the wall. I think it’s fair to say that whatever Newton South has done, at least in my case, they’ve done it right.

Secondly, you wrote that posting their letters “won’t make those sought after colleges change their minads and it won’t pave the way to a better future, either.” You’re right when you say that posting these letters won’t make any of these colleges change their minds, but that was never the point of posting the rejection letters in the first place. Despite your claims to the contrary, our “half sentient” students understand what rejection means; they know they can’t change their decisions by putting a letter on a wall. However, the latter half of your point is simply not true. In posting their letters, students learn to deal and cope with disappointment; each of them learns how to get over a defeat and move on. This knowledge will help students; it will pave the way to a better future and more successful future–or at least, a better future than if they had been, as you suggest, denounced by their school, or if they had attempted to hide their so-called failures.

To the students that have been rejected from some of their top choices, you write “you should be ashamed, not “defiant” – except where that defiance might spur you on to greater effort. Of course, that shame shouldn’t stop you from harder work and it shouldn’t be a cause for depression. But it is something that shouldn’t be brushed off as insignificant.” I can assure you that none of these students are brushing off their rejections as insignificant, and regardless, what would being ashamed do for any of these students. It is completely illogical to assume that being ashamed and having your school “excoriate” you will be motivational in any way. Rather, such a harsh (and unnecessary response) would simply make kids more afraid of failure and thus more afraid to try.

Lastly, you made a rather obvious point of criticizing every student’s grammar. It’s ridiculous to, as you have done, make assumptions about the intelligence of our entire nation’s high school population based on the grammar of several teenager’s casual conversation–not to mention petty and juvenille. It is not the easiest thing to speak with perfect grammar all the time, while making sure to exude family values and piety. You may say, of course, that these students should police their speech more carefully, that their grammatical errors reflect their troubling lack of education. In that case, Mr. Warner Todd Huston, I ask you to look at YOUR writing. I will display some samples:

“Its a scary walk, but the whistling does make one feel better despite the gravity of the situation.”
Do you mean “It’s a scary walk…” perhaps?

“It won’t make those sought after colleges change their minds and it won’t pave the way to a better future, either.”
This is, unfortunately, a run-on sentence. Two independent clauses must be joined by a comma and a conjunction.

Perhaps you might have taken the time to make sure you spelled Kellen Mandehr’s name properly when you wrote, “Yes, Mr. Mandher got a “good feeling” but he still has no college acceptance letter.”

I could go on, but frankly, it’s not worth the time.

Before I end this comment, I’d like to make one thing clear. These students are already high achieving students at one of the best public high schools in the state. They are not idiots, and they are not “belched out of Newton South.” There are students at our school with perfect SAT scores and national recognition for everything from creative writing to classical music to journalism; many of these students, despite all of their accomplishments, have been rejected. The class of 2008 is the largest graduating class ever, and the kids who place their letters on the Wall of Shame recognize that a game of statistics and chance does not reflect on who they are or what they have accomplished.

Reading this article makes me wonder what sort of sheltered life you have led. I don’t know what kind of reference group you used to prove your evidence against the students and faculty at Newton South, but I think it is foolhardy to claim that these students are unintelligent for applying to (and possibly getting rejected from) colleges. Take a step back and think about how many kids nationwide do not even think about applying to college—there, you will find, lies the real tragedy. It is despicable to reprimand a group of students who are fortunate enough to attend a school that urges them to apply to college at all. The vast majority of students leaving high school will terminate their education there.

The Wall of Shame at Newton South should be renamed the Wall of Acceptance by Rejection, but as you can see, that is too wordy. Those rejected from colleges are not ashamed to let other people know that they did not get exactly what they wanted. It is anything but a dismissal of failure—it is acknowledgement. It shows that they are okay with it, and refuse to stew in self-pity because of it. This is one way for students to have their moment of “shame” and move on.

You state in your opening paragraph, “We don’t want them to know or understand so much as we want them to ‘feel good’ about themselves.” Have you ever heard of emotional intelligence? Not only is it healthy to be aware of and pay attention to one’s emotions, it is intelligent to do so. To say that students should ignore their emotions is dehumanizing. People are not unfeeling robots; the spectrum of human emotion is incredibly complicated. It is certainly not something a healthy person can shove off to the side so he or she can get back to work.

If anything, the colleges that rejected Newton South’s intelligent, hard working, driven students are the ones who should feel ashamed. You, also, should feel ashamed for attacking high school students through the safety-net of the web in what you seem to believe is a well-executed, insightful article.

Cliff Bargar, Newton South Class of 2008