高校なんかいらない

今年のアカデミー賞で話題になったスピーチにStay Weird, Stay Differentがあります。学生生活になじめない人、学校カーストの底辺にいる人の苦しさを代弁してくれた素晴らしいものでした。

このような問題に対してRebecca Solnitさんは高校を廃止してしまおうと自身が高校に行かなかった体験を踏まえてエッセイを書いています。

EASY CHAIR — From the April 2015 issue
Abolish High School
By Rebecca Solnit
I didn’t go to high school. This I think of as one of my proudest accomplishments and one of my greatest escapes, because everyone who grows up in the United States goes to high school. It’s such an inevitable experience that people often mishear me and think I dropped out.

（中略）

I was ravenous to learn. I’d waited for years for a proper chance at it, and the high school in my town didn’t seem like a place where I was going to get it. I passed the G.E.D. test at fifteen, started community college the following fall, and transferred after two semesters to a four-year college, where I began, at last, to get an education commensurate with my appetite.

What was it, I sometimes wonder, that I was supposed to have learned in the years of high school that I avoided? High school is often considered a definitive American experience, in two senses: an experience that nearly everyone shares, and one that can define who you are, for better or worse, for the rest of your life. I’m grateful I escaped the particular definition that high school would have imposed on me, and I wish everyone else who suffered could have escaped it, too.

学校になじむことのできない１０代の若者の自殺が多い問題をまず指摘しています。変わった人はいじめの対象になりやすいですからね。

Suicide is the third leading cause of death for teens, responsible for some 4,600 deaths per year. Federal studies report that for every suicide there are at least a hundred attempts — nearly half a million a year. Eight percent of high school students have attempted to kill themselves, and 16 percent have considered trying. That’s a lot of people crying out for something to change.

We tend to think that adolescence is inherently ridden with angst, but much of the misery comes from the cruelty of one’s peers. Twenty-eight percent of public school students and 21 percent of private school students report being bullied, and though inner-city kids are routinely portrayed in the press as menaces, the highest levels of bullying are reported among white kids and in nonurban areas. Victims of bullying are, according to a Yale study, somewhere between two and nine times more likely to attempt suicide. Why should children be confined to institutions in which these experiences are so common?

同じ年代でグループ化するとSuch units automatically create the conditions for competition, pressuring children to be as good as their peersが生じて、助け合いの精神がなかなか生まれなくなると指摘しています。またヘイトクライムやレイプなどの遠因となっているのではとも推測します。

（オックスフォード）
Peer pressure
pressure from people of your age or social group to behave like them in order to be liked or accepted
Teenagers are highly influenced by peer pressure.

Since the 1970s, Norberg-Hodge has been visiting the northern Indian region of Ladakh. When she first arrived such age segregation was unknown there. “Now children are split into different age groups at school,” Norberg-Hodge has written. “This sort of leveling has a very destructive effect. By artificially creating social units in which everyone is the same age, the ability of children to help and to learn from each other is greatly reduced.” Such units automatically create the conditions for competition, pressuring children to be as good as their peers. “In a group of ten children of quite different ages,” Norberg-Hodge argues, “there will naturally be much more cooperation than in a group of ten twelve-year-olds.”

When you are a teenager, your peers judge you by exacting and narrow criteria. But those going through the same life experiences at the same time often have little to teach one another about life. Most of us are safer in our youth in mixed-age groups, and the more time we spend outside our age cohort, the broader our sense of self. It’s not just that adults and children are good for adolescents. The reverse is also true. The freshness, inquisitiveness, and fierce idealism of a wide-awake teenager can be exhilarating, just as the stony apathy of a shut-down teenager can be dismal.

A teenager can act very differently outside his or her peer group than inside it. A large majority of hate crimes and gang rapes are committed by groups of boys and young men, and studies suggest that the perpetrators are more concerned with impressing one another and conforming to their group’s codes than with actual hatred toward outsiders. Attempts to address this issue usually focus on changing the social values to which such groups adhere, but dispersing or diluting these groups seems worth consideration, too.

学校カーストの最底辺の生徒を救うだけでなく、トップにいる人たちも学校生活での成功が社会での成功を保障するものではないので、変な勘違いを起こさせないことも大切ではないかとも述べています。確かに、アラフォーになると、学校でかっこよくてスポーツもできた男の子が普通のおじさんになっていたりという例は事欠きませんね。人生のピークを学校時代にしてしまうのはその人の損出だというのはもっともです。

But abolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies. Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost. What happens to people who are taught to believe in a teenage greatness that is based on achievements unlikely to matter in later life?

TOEIC学習者の内部でも、TOEICカーストができてしまっていますよね。TEX加藤さんの神社へのお参りも９９０レベルの人がこれでもかと書き込んでいます。お互い英語中級者なんだから、変に張り合うと視野を狭めるだけだと思うのは外野の余計な御世話なのかもしれませんが。。

ジュノ・ディアス × 円城塔 × 都甲幸治 「未来と文学」

これに関連して、上記のイベントでMITという世界最高の知的機関で創作を教えているジュノ・ディアスが語っていたことを思い出しました。世界トップレベルの知性の学生たちですが、不安でいっぱいで、失敗することを恐れ、成功しなければいけない、成功しなければ社会的存在感がゼロではないかというすごいプレッッシャーを感じてしまっている。読書そのものも楽しむ読書というのをあまり知らないでいると語っていました。

今回のは極論ではありますが、そもそもこの時代、画一的な教育を施す必要があるのか、という気がします。英語教師や予備校教師の英語教育改革はまず学校ありきが前提ですが、なんでわざわざ学校に行かなくてはいけないのか、根本的に考えてみるのもいいかもしれません。それに、大学についてもこんなにいらないじゃんともどうしても思ってしまいます。