Geeks (17 page)

Of the thousands of e-mail messages I got this week (4,000 between Friday and Wednesday is my best guess), not one advocated violence or supported assault, murder or revenge.

Although many expressed sympathy for the killers as well as the victims in Littleton (unlike, say
Time
magazine, which accompanied cover photos of the killers with the headline
THE MONSTERS NEXT DOOR),
no one threatened violence, supported it, or approved of it.

But the stories of physical, verbal, emotional, and administrative abuse that came pouring in were stunning, a scandal for an educational system that makes much noise about wholesomeness and safety, but has turned a blind eye for years to the persecution of individualistic and vulnerable students.

The Voices from the Hellmouth series on Slashdot this week demonstrated the power of interactivity and connectivity. Kids passed it around to one another, to parents, friends, teachers and guidance counselors.

“My seventeen-year-old son handed me a printout of your Littleton article,” wrote Bagatti. “No one seems to think that peer abuse is real or damaging. I would like to see any adult report for work and be taunted, humiliated, harassed, and degraded every single day without going stark, raving mad. Human beings are not wired for abuse.”

One of the clear messages was that it’s time for geeks and nerds and the assorted “others” of the world to assert themselves, to begin defining their long-withheld rights, perhaps using the communicative possibilities of the Net. And to begin the work of restructuring American schools—barely changed in generations despite the ongoing Information Revolution—and their frequently warped structures, procedures, and value systems.

At the very top of the agenda: Freedom from abuse, humiliation, and cruelty. Geeks, nerds, and oddballs have the right to attend school in safety. Teachers and administrators have an obligation to make dignity for everybody—not just the popular and the conventional—an urgent educational concern, in the same way they’ve taken on racism and other forms of bigotry.

Geeks who are harassed and humiliated should report the assaults and, perhaps using the possibilities of the Net, take their complaints farther if they are ignored or further victimized.

Each generation has the right to determine its own culture. Culture isn’t just symphony orchestras, movies about dead British royalty, and hard-bound books. For some, culture is now also gaming, websites, chat and messaging systems, TV shows, music, and movies.

No generation has the right to dictate to another what its culture ought to be, or to degrade its choices as stupid and offensive. Yet geek and nerd culture is continuously denounced as isolating, addictive, and, now, even murderous.

Games like Tribe, Unreal, Quake, even the Legend of Zelda and, yes, Doom, can be astoundingly creative, challenging, and imaginative. They are often played in communal and interactive ways. Some people may be uncomfortable with some of their imagery.

But youth culture has frequently been offensive to adults—that’s often the point—and culture has always evolved. Adults seem to have no memories of their own youthful lives. Early rock and roll was likened to medieval plagues by the clueless journalists and nervous educators of the time. Now, next to some extreme forms of hip-hop, Chuck Berry seems as dangerous as Beethoven.

Adolescence is a surreal world: Kids who don helmets and practice banging into one another for hours each week are deemed healthy and wholesome, even heroic. Geeks are branded strange and antisocial for building and participating in one of the world’s truly revolutionary new cultures—the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Or for being isolated or lacking school spirit. Or for listening to industrial music or wearing odd clothes. But perhaps geek kids are isolated partly because schools don’t provide them with any means of connecting.

Inhabitants of a new world with a new culture, geeks often find that the old symbols don’t work for them—pep rallies, assemblies, etc. In fact, scholars like Janet Murray of MIT (“Hamlet on the Holodeck”) are beginning to explore the ways in which interactivity and representational writing and thinking are changing the very neural systems of the young.

Instead of banning Doom and Quake, schools should be forming Doom and Quake clubs, presided over by teachers who actually know something about the online world (my e-mail indicates that there’s at least one frustrated geek on the faculty of most schools). Any school with a football team ought to have a computer gaming, web design, or programming team as well. Geeks ought to see their interests represented in educational settings, to not simply feel pushed to the margins. When these new interests and values are recognized and institutionalized, geek kids may have more status and feel less like aliens in their own schools.

Schools need to provide choices. Educators love to talk empowerment, but few seem to grasp what it means. Geek kids are not, in general, docile and obedient; their subculture is argumentative and outspoken. Online, each person makes his or her own rules, goes where he or she wants to go. Increasingly, it’s a difficult transition between freewheeling cyberspace and the oppressive, rule-bound Old Fartism that dominates American education.

“School sucks,” e-mailed Jane from Florida. “It’s run like a police state, and it’s boring and clueless.”

Kids raised in interactive environments—with zappers, Nintendos, computers, sophisticated games—often struggle in environments where adults stand for hours droning at them. Their digital world is much more vital, colorful, and engaging than their educational one.

It’s the responsibility of schools to create more challenging and interactive environments for its students—a benefit for all younger people who need to learn how to analyze, how to question, how to reach decisions, not just how to take notes and then check the right boxes on the midterm.

And: freedom. Why does the First Amendment end at the school door, when many kids, especially geeks, have spent much of their lives in the freest part of American culture—the Internet? Online, people can speak about anything: dump on God, talk about sex, flame pundits, express themselves politically and rebelliously. In school, no one can.

Geeks, perhaps more accustomed to free expression than their non-wired peers, increasingly and disturbingly refer to schools as “fascistic” environments in which they are censored and oppressed. All kids can’t have absolute freedom all the time but many kids, especially older ones raised in the Digital Age, need more than they’re getting. Without it, they will become increasingly alienated.

A gaming website like PlanetQuake gets more than 70,000 visitors a day. GameSpy, which helps gamers connect to local games, draws between 60,000 and 80,000. Estimates of online gamers in the United States alone run as high as 15 to 20 million people. The half-baked notion that this activity sparks kids to grab lethal weapons and murder their peers sends a particular kind of message—that the people responsible for educating and protecting kids (politicians, therapists, journalists, educators) have no idea what they are talking about and are posturing in the most ignorant and self-serving ways. It’s hard to imagine a more alienating lesson for the young than that.

Finally: Access to popular culture and to the Internet isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. For many kids, the Net isn’t alienation, but its alternative; it’s their intellectual, social, cultural, and political wellspring. They need it to learn, to feel safe and connected, and to function economically, socially, and politically in the next century.

Obviously, no right comes without responsibilities—and those should be spelled out both in schools and in families. But access to the Net and to other facets of one’s culture ought not be a toy that parents and teachers are willing to dispense to “good” and “normal” boys and girls. For many kids, it’s their lifeblood, and it shouldn’t be restricted, withdrawn, or used manipulatively except under the most serious circumstances.

It already seems clear from the stories coming out of Colorado that the two young killers were severely disturbed, victims of mental illness about which we know, to date, very little.

But Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, along with the completely innocent people that they slaughtered, are also victims deserving of compassion. Their illnesses may or may not have been exacerbated by social cruelty and alienation, they may or may not have been affected by access to violent imagery and/or lethal weaponry. We may never be able to answer the
why
s their act provoked. Human minds, for all we’re learning about them, sometimes remain mysterious, human acts inexplicable.

Meanwhile, reading all these messages from the Hellmouth this week, I’ve been overwhelmed by the outpouring of suffering generated by the experience of going to school, and by the brutal price people have paid and are paying for being different. Few people commit violence in schools, but way too many have fantasized about it.

These messages were, in different ways, all saying the same thing. A humane society truly concerned about its children would worry less about oddballs, computer games, and clothing, and more about creating the kind of schools kids would never dream of blowing up.

11

DON’T EXPECT MIRACLES

From:
Jon Katz

To:
Jesse Dailey

Don’t know quite how to interpret this time lag. . . . I have to believe they will get back to you, one way or the other. They don’t owe you admittance, but they do owe you an answer. . . .

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

I think I’ve been pushed to the bottom of the priority totem. I think we just need to make sure they don’t forget, but don’t expect miracles either. . . .

>    >    >

BOTH STUBBORN
people, Jesse and I had each called the university a half dozen times, but gotten no response. My initial instincts, conjured up by my visit, seemed to have been correct: Dean O’Neill had graciously made time for me and heard me out, and then common sense had prevailed.

The application was too late. Jesse had not been able to amass a convincing amount of paperwork to show what had to have been a skeptical admissions committee that the university should make room for a geek kid from Idaho with an undistinguished academic record. What were they supposed to tell the record numbers of applicants who had been rejected—the ones with straight As, enthusiastic recommendations, polished essays, and long lists of activities?

The
Rolling Stone
piece had gotten Jesse in the door, no small feat, but not a particularly significant one either. And I had not been persuasive enough on his behalf.

Screw these people, I fumed to my daughter. They sit in their ivy-covered buildings studying dead philosophers while a kid like Jesse gets stuck working for unimaginative shitheads like an indentured servant.

“Easy,” she said. “Jesse is great, but he did apply four months late, and a lot of kids have worked hard to get into schools like that.” She knew whereof she spoke. Still, I could feel all my old class resentments boiling up.

They could at least have called Jesse back, I groused. He’d killed himself scrambling to fill out all their forms. He’d taken a day off from work to go see Ted O’Neill. He’d been holding his whole life in abeyance pending a decision, and they owed him an answer, at least.

Jesse sounded discouraged, too. More than a month had gone by since his meeting, and he hadn’t heard a thing about his status. “I was holding up on looking for another job,” he said. “But now, maybe I should start looking around.” He sounded fatalistic, talking less and less about college, more about his under-construction new website called Providence.

From my own brief teaching stint, I knew that colleges cleared out by June. Nothing happened; hardly anybody was around to make things happen.

Gradually, we both stopped calling the admissions office.

“I’ve got to prepare him for it,” I told my wife. “It’s not going to happen.”

From:
Jon Katz

To:
Jesse Dailey

I can’t tell what’s going on. I think if there were no chance, he’d just tell you. My guess is that they’re just considering it, and it’s a bureaucracy that lives by its own rules. If not this place, then another. You’re going to college.

Are you discouraged?

From:
Jesse Dailey

To:
Jon Katz

Slightly . . . yes

We headed into the summer, with the University of Chicago Class of 2003 having gotten their acceptance letters and awaiting news about roommates and registration. There were no more recommendations to collect, essays to write, or people to meet. We were done.

I called one last time to see if I couldn’t at least get Ted O’Neill to send Jesse a polite rejection.

“I’m sorry,” said the woman who answered the phone. “He’s going to be away for a week. I’ll be happy to take a message.”

Uncharacteristically, I didn’t have one to leave.

THE LETTER

The University of Chicago

Office of College Admissions

June 11, 1999    

Dear Jesse,

I am pleased to inform you that you have been admitted to the University of Chicago, Class of 2003. Congratulations! You should be proud of the accomplishments and promise that led to your selection.

We feel a particularly strong responsibility to admit students who are not only qualified but who are ready to continue the crucial business of educating themselves. You have been selected by our faculty and admissions counselors because you recognize the pleasure—the absolute joy—to be found in the kind of creative labor for which this community of learners and teachers is famous. Our decision was not based on numbers but on your actions and words, a difficult determination to make but one that gives proper honor to the university and to you.

You have the chance to be part of a school with a glorious history and an exciting present. We look to you to help us grow, to grow with us, and to be part of a tradition that elevates us all.

Yours truly,              

Theodore O’Neill    

Dean of Admissions