No Place For Dreamers

By David Ruenzel

In Thomas French's extraordinarily evocative book South of Heaven, which documents a year the author spent at Largo High School near St. Petersburg, Fla., the students evidence a hollowness, a spooky lack of emotion. With no knowledge of the past and little hope for the future, these teenagers act, if they act at all, on the impulse of the moment. The most alienated exchange Adolph Hitler salutes, talk offhandedly of their impending deaths, and pass hours in a kind of semiconscious daze. The more "normal'' kids--those who supposedly occupy the mainstream--drink to stupefaction and vomit after meals. High school, French writes, "has become a place where an alarming number of students resist taking part in any assignment that requires them to pay attention for longer than the length of the latest video from Paula Abdul or the Hammer.''

It is perhaps customary for each generation to reprove the subsequent one, but this current crop of teenagers--the youngest members of what the media has loosely labeled "Generation X''--has received more than its share of hard knocks. They are, many educators and media observers say, particularly resistant to education, characterized by apathy and willful ignorance. In cartoons such as Doonesbury, these students are lampooned for their inability to locate, say, France on a world map.

Was this, I wondered after reading French's book, an accurate representation of today's students--even those students who attend supposedly good public schools? Or was this in truth a misperception on the part of educators who tend to believe that we're always living in the worst...