The school walkout—or to speak correctly, the Enough! National School Walkout—took place on March 14. The point of the event was to call attention to the need for gun-control legislation. Students were to walk out of their classrooms at 10:00 a.m. for 17 minutes to remember the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Thousands of students took part in the nationwide event, which was duly pronounced a success by the enthusiastic news media. The Enough! walkout was planned by the organizers of the 2017 Women’s March, and like that event it was hard to know what the aim was or what constituted success. The spectacle of kids standing around in school parking lots instead of sitting in classrooms seems unlikely to pressure state and federal lawmakers to alter their views on gun legislation.
The most passionate among the protester-students—my teenaged daughter holds this view even more firmly than I do—feel strongly about the issue of gun-control precisely because they know hardly anything about it. Which is why, as anybody with a touch of common sense might have predicted, a huge proportion of the walkout participants had no interest in addressing gun violence and mainly enjoyed the chance to get out of class and crack jokes with friends and, for a few, smoke a furtive cigarette or two.
The whole thing, rife as it was with ignorance and emotionalism, put me in mind of a walkout at my own public high school more than 30 years ago. The school’s principal had fired the coach of one of the school’s sports teams. The coach was a charming guy, well liked by the kids who knew him, and his team consistently won championships.
A few students demanded to know why he was sacked, but the administration wouldn’t say. So those few students (I never knew who they were) planned a walkout on a certain day.
The buildup was intense. How many would walk out? How would the administration respond? About half the student body—a thousand people or so, as I remember—walked out onto the school’s front lawn and refused to return for about an hour. In the end, the school decreed that the “break period” between classes had been extended for an hour that day, and students who returned after that hour wouldn’t be penalized. It worked out nicely for everybody—the students got to feel courageous, and the administrators didn’t have to suspend half the school.
I made many poor decisions in high school, but that day I chose not to walk out for the excellent reasons that (a) my father would have verbally thrashed me and (b) I had never known the first thing about the coach and didn’t care about his sport. I had several friends who did walk out, however—despite the fact that they had no more interest in the coach and his team than I did. It wasn’t about redressing an injustice or demanding transparency. It was about the frisson of pretending to resist authority. And skipping class.
Thirty years later my memory is hazy, so I found the number of the school principal and called her. She was very polite. She still wouldn’t reveal the reason for the coach’s dismissal, but I assume there was a perfectly legitimate reason for it, and for keeping that reason quiet.
I was a little disappointed, though, that the principal spoke so respectfully of the kids who walked out. “They wanted to express their concerns,” she said, reverting to the desiccated language of a public information officer, “and in the end I think students and administrators were able to better understand the situation.” No, I wanted to say, the students never understood a thing and didn’t want to. But I politely agreed.
On March 14, our cultural elites radiated that same determined, irrational optimism. All day social media were abuzz with hats-off testimonials from journalists and politicians to the principled resolve of these young idealists; the evening news hailed them for reinvigorating the gun debate with “fresh passion”; and at least 311 public and private colleges vowed not to penalize future applicants for participating in these peaceful protests.
But a walkout is supposed to be an act of rebellion, of resistance. It involves risk. Like a strike at a factory—if you participate, you might get what you want or you might lose your job. The Enough! walkout was a safe gesture, honored by our governmental and cultural authorities. The national news media—consider the lavish coverage in the New York Times—practically begged the kids to go through with it and heaped praise on them when they did.
A more conformist rebellion would be difficult to imagine. These woke revolutionaries simply did what they were told, when they were told, by faraway professional agitators. Most school districts managed the whole affair into orderly compliance. Our district superintendent, for instance, sent out an email announcing the walkout as if it were part of the curriculum.
Schools “will be recommending age-appropriate resources relative to social studies and English language arts,” she explained. “The walkout can be a learning experience around civic engagement and social responsibility.” A colleague with middle school students in another district received a similar email explaining that students would be allowed to walk out if their parents or guardians notified the school and filled out the requisite form.
Perhaps we should be grateful that the walkouts didn’t induce some lunatic attention-seeker to perpetrate yet another act of carnage. That was always the danger—and so it nearly came to pass. After the protest, the principal of my daughter’s high school informed parents in an email that a pair of students were arrested for carrying a gun. News reports the following day confirmed her message. The gun was a Smith & Wesson .380.
Modern American high schools are places of intense conformity. Fear of exclusion cripples and terrorizes its young victims; often you can see it on their faces. They do and think what they’re told. They even protest as they’re told. Some rebellion.
